Bread

Spelt flour loaves -my first two loaves

A little over a month ago I made a sourdough starter following the instructions given on a you tube video. From that I have made bread each weekend and am enjoying the early stages of being a bread maker. It has been a lot of fun. After the initial week of building a starter from wholemeal spelt flour and water I have been able to make 2 loaves of bread each weekend with varying levels of success. Obviously, providing you care enough to try to get better, you will improve over time at least to some level of accomplishment.

One of the interesting things for me about bread making is the small number of ingredients that are used to make bread by this traditional method. In it's simplest form bread has only 3 ingredients, Flour, Water and salt. That is it. Four if you count time or naturally occurring yeast. I have a challenge for you. Go and pick up the loaf of bread you bought from the supermarket, or if you don't have one, grab one off the shelf next time you are shopping. Count the ingredients in the bread. I picked up a wholemeal loaf at work and had a look. It had 17 ingredients. I saw on a show on netflix the other week that the wonder bread that is sold in the USA has an amazing 25 ingredients. The commentator on the show made the statement that he thought that perhaps many of the people in our society with gluten intolerance are perhaps allergic to some of the 22 other ingredients in bread and not actually suffering from the gluten itself. This does not include the 1% of the population who are allergic to gluten. Whether or not this is true I have no idea and as little more than a bloke who cooks food for a living I can't say, but it does make you think.

A white loaf and a Multigrain loaf  

Kneading bread is such a homely old world thing to do. Bread is believed to have been made as far back as 14,600 years ago. So, when you make bread you are part of an ancient tradition, at least in your own way. 

So, what is my process? How do I manage my sourdough starter? It is quite simple really. In the first week of making the starter I added equal parts flour and water, day 1 50 grams flour and 50 grams of water. The starter was left out on the kitchen bench over night to begin it's activation. Day 2, another 50 grams of water and flour. The mixture stays at room temperature for all of this first week of the process. Day 3 the fun begins. Discard 100 grams of the starter and then add 100 grams flour and water each. Day 4 discard 150 grams of starter and top up with 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water. Around day 3 or 4 you will start to see and smell the fermentation taking place in your starter. What causes this reaction? The naturally occurring yeast in the air. Day 5 discard 200 grams and top up with 150 grams of flour and water (300 grams in total). Day 6 discard 250 grams and top up with 200 and 200 again. Day 7, I have good news, we are ready to bake. I got this information from the I love cooking Ireland you tube page on their video on how to make sourdough. Make sure you check it out.

Sourdough starter

How do I look after the starter when I only bake once a week? As long as you don't use all of your starter you will not have to go through the starter making process ever again. Currently thinking of who I can trust to look after it when I go on holidays. So basically what I do is after I have used some of the starter to make bread, approximately 2/3 of the starter, I then stir together 200 grams of flour and 200 grams of water and mix this with the leftover starter. I rinse the jar that I use clean it out and then pour or spoon the starter back into the jar with the lid left loose to allow air to escape. An airtight jar may explode when the ferment is taking place. This mixture goes into the fridge until the night before baking, so in my case that is Friday afternoon when I finish work. I take it out, put it on the bench and it is ready to go Saturday morning.

Sourdough pizza , the recipe made 6 dinner plate sized pizzas

Over the last month I have made a basic white loaf, spelt loaf, a multi grain loaf, pizza bases and as I type this I am about to pop a rye bread loaf into the oven. I have taken a little time to get the oven temperatures correct, sometimes the loaves have ended up with a little too much sunshine. Having Said that all the breads have been edible and most cases well above edible. In fact I would say that they were yum. Even the loaves that were a little darker on the outside were great to eat.
If you like the idea of making your own real bread at home so that you can control what goes in your food then I highly recommend taking that week, probably only five minutes a day to get the starter going, jump on board and go for glory.

Sourdough Nutella pizza

multigrain loaves

Just start typing and see what comes

I heard the other day about a prolific author who was asked how he was able to produce so many books whilst others really struggle. His response was just write 200 words a day and the rest will follow. So that is what I am attempting to do here. Start and see what comes. When it comes to blogging starting is my, I want to say greatest challenge, but really, it is actually just the first challenge. Now that I have overcome that I can see what other challenges arise. Providing interesting content might well prove a greater hurdle.

So what should I write about. How about food. I am a chef. I cook food for a living. I work Monday to Friday, 6.30am to 2.30pm. At least those are the hours I am paid to work. The challenge, I think I may be over using that word is time management. I want to claim more of my life for me. That is not to say that I don't give my all to my food and care about what I put up for my customers each day. I am one chef cooking  baine marie held food for about 100 to 120 people a day. I work for a company which leases the premises of another company (our client) to provide a staff cafe for their employees. We have a manager who is a Catering Assistant, a barista and another Catering Assistant or CA for short.

So, what do we provide. The Barista provides what you would expect i.e. coffee. The CA's set up a sandwich bar and provide mostly made to order sandwiches and wraps. They also serve the hot baine. I provide 3 different meals a day, two containing meat and a vegetarian meal to serve aproximately 20. As well as this I make a salad for about another 20 visitors. The menu changes daily and it is my job to write a new menu each week. On top of this I also cook breakfast. The usual suspects are provided at breakfast, bacon, fried eggs, sausages, hash browns and grilled tomato or at least it would be if we had a grill. It is actually baked tomato. On top of that there is a weekly cycle of breakfast, not so special, specials. Monday French toast, Tuesday sausage roll, Wednesday eggs Benedict, Thursday ham, tomato and cheese melt, and Friday scrambled eggs on toast.

I think I am past those 200 words I spoke about at the start of this piece, now I have to find some interesting content.

What do I cook? Let me grab a typical menu. Thursday is roast day, roast beef one week, roast chicken the next, then lamb and finally pork with crackling. I roll through and after four weeks it is back to the beginning again. These days it is about 18 to 20 kilograms of meat. Many chefs would cook the meat the day before and slice and reheat on the day of service. Personally I like to cook and slice on the day. Hot meat is easier to slice and there is less of a food safety issue if you do it all on the same day. Food doesn't spend as long in the danger zone where harmful bacteria can do it's thing. What temperature makes up the danger zone? 5 to 60 degrees Celsius. The objective is to keep food out of that zone for as much of it's life as possible. That's the brief of it.

Friday is fish day. Hoki caught in New Zealand waters. What is Hoki? Hoki is a white fleshed fish found in the waters around New Zealand, southern Australia and off the coasts of South America. Why do we use it? Because it is both cheap and sustainable. By the time it gets to us in a frozen packet of I think, about 5 kilograms, it is also boneless. The fish rotation is smaller than the roast rotation. Battered fish one week, crumbed the next and a simple seafood basket in week three. If the client invests in a grill there will be a fourth item to the rotation being grilled fish, but that is yet to occur. They are not exactly in a hurry to spend money on us, which I do understand in that we are probably see as nothing more that an expense, but a little bit of cash thrown our way would be nice. Fish is the most popular item of the week, which is why the rotation isn't too big. We sell about 65 fish on a Friday against the normal allowance of about 40 of a regular meat dish.

Somewhere in the menu is a curry, usually on a Monday containing chicken as that allows me to get my meat order in on a Monday to ensure freshness for the remainder of the week. I get chicken on a Friday for Monday's menu and then as required for the rest of the week. What sort of dishes do I cook, Thai red and green chicken curries, various Indian curries although the norm is one curry a week. There is a pasta dish somewhere in the mix. I have tried to keep them a little lighter over the last year but do still like the occasional creamy bacon and mushroom boscaiola. A burger each week of some type. Good old fashioned beef burger is always a winner, as well as pulled pork rolls, chicken fillet burgers, I favour the thigh fillet sometimes marinated in Tandoori paste or a satay chicken burger can be good too.

My company like us to run a selection of healthy dishes, at least one each day which are recipes created by the head office food gurus to provide a push in the direction of healthy living. They are mainly based around, in my opinion, the idea of less meat and carbohydrates and more vegetables.  This of course is what current ideas of health food entail but customers often feel a little ripped off if they don't get as much meat in their fish as they usually get in a typical meal. I have found that if I run the healthy meat dish up against the fish then the lessoning of sales doesn't hurt the menu's balance.

Beef stroganoff, pork goulash, chicken cacciatore are but a few of the regulars to feature. Grabbing a few popular dishes from your local Chinese restaurant is an easy way to fill the spaces including Mongolian lamb and sweet and sour pork.

As they say and so much more. I will save the rest for next time. I try not to back dishes up too quickly for basically I need, there are some exceptions as mentioned above, about 120 different dishes to fill a 6 week cycle. That is quite a lot but it is important to not become too repetitive.

More thoughts from the kitchen to come in future weeks. I feel as though I have achieved something here by just getting the first words on the page (maybe page isn't the right word). Screen perhaps is more digitally appropriate.
 Hope you enjoy
Chef G