Left-over loaves

We make a big effort to try and keep our bread waste to an absolute minimum, but sometimes a stray stale loaf makes it back to our kitchen looking for a good home.  I have a couple of favourite ways of using up old bread, and the one I want to share today is Bread and Cheese Pudding.

I think Bread and Cheese Pudding might have taken the place of Macaroni Cheese as my top cheesy comfort food.  Back in the old days when I was a pasta eater, Macaroni Cheese with home-made tomato sauce used to be a big favourite of mine.  Whilst I've become reconciled to the idea of cauliflower cheese over the years, the presence of brassica gives it an air of virtue which is not entirely welcome in a comfort food situation.  Bread and Cheese Pudding made with wholemeal bread, with a mustard flavoured custard and crisp cheese topping, is nourishing, comforting, and downright delicious on a cold evening.

This is also a great way of using up a loaf you've forgotten to put the salt into, just add an extra teaspoon of salt to the custard mix.

Bread and Cheese Pudding

About five slices of slightly past-its-best wholemeal bread.
250ml whole milk
150ml creme fraiche
2 medium eggs
1 heaped teaspoon grainy mustard
Salt and Pepper
Good strong cheese, grated.  I leave the amount up to you - I like a great deal both in the custard (about 150g) and on the top (about 200g), but if you only have a small amount leave it for the top and have the custard without cheese in.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/GM 4.

Chop the bread into 3cm-ish cubes (you can arrange the slices artfully in the dish, if you like, but I find cubes less of a faff) and tip into an oven-proof dish.  Earthen-wear is good for a custard based dish.

Thoroughly mix together the milk, cream, eggs, mustard and salt and pepper, together with your cheese not destined for the top.  Pour over the bread cubes and top with the remaining grated cheese.  If you can, leave it for a hour or so at this stage to let the bread absorb some custard.

Place in the oven and bake for about an hour.  Check after 45 minutes by giving it a good poke right in the middle - the custard should be soft but no longer liquid.

Serve with tomato sauce, and even some green veg - if you're feeling especially virtuous!

Flour types for starters

Following the Cultured Cooking event in Cupar, Kerstin wrote to ask:

I could not get hold of rye flour yesterday in Cupar so started off with spelt - it might be a couple of weeks. Will there be a problem "converting" the starter later on?  Is it still ok to use strong flour in the actual bread as  that's what I have? And spelt. 

The yeasts and lacto-bacillae will consume any fermentable material you give them, so in terms of keeping the culture alive, there is no problem in feeding it with different kinds of flour. In my experience, softer flours (with less protein, and hence more carbohydrate) tend to ferment a little bit quicker than strong ones, and whole grain flours ferment a whole lot faster than white flours. Beyond that, yes, different flours do bring different characteristics both in terms of their own flavour and the kinds of fermentation they seem to promote. To some extent, all starters have something of their history in their characteristics (like all of us, I guess) - so a starter that has been 'converted' to spelt and back to rye might be a litle different from one which was rye all along,  but they are all good for making good bread.

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Questions about sourness

Vitalyi, a fellow home-baker-turned-pro in Yekaterinburg, writes with some questions about leaven refreshment and sourness:

According to our experience we use 3hrs for fermentation and 2hrs 30mins
for final prove at 25 celcius. We have found that the shorter final proof, the
less oven spring is. When the final proof longs 2hrs, the volume of the loaf is
visibly less. Maybe there is another reason for the phenomenon.

My Reply:
Volume is greatest when the dough develops the right combination of strength (to trap gas) and elasticity (to stretch without tearing). When the
proof is too short, the dough is strong without being elastic and the
strength prevents expansion. This can cause bursting and tearing. When
the proof is too long the dough is elastic but strength lessens, and it
cannot hold so much gas - so volume suffers. An overprooved loaf tends
to flatten a little and may tear as it does so. But lots of things
contribute to dough development, not just the length of the final proof;
these include the ripeness of the leaven, the stiffness of the dough,
the temperature of the dough and the length of the initial ferment.

 

Is it crucial for the sourness of the final loaf that the starter should
be refreshed just before the mixing and kneading of the dough?

My reply:
This depends what you mean by 'just before'. The crucial factor is that the
the leaven should be correctly developed when it is added to the final
dough. What counts as 'correctly developed' depends on how you want your
bread to turn out. There are lots of ways to create sourness; in
general longer, cooler, stiffer ferments favour lacto-bacillic
fermentation (and thus result in more sourness), whilst short, soft,
warm ferments favour yeast fermentation (resulting in more gas
production). The trick is to balance flavour with texture and volume -
sourness is produced by acid; too much acid can harm the strength of the
dough. In my experience, 25 Celsius creates a good balance for a final
dough. I refresh my leaven twice before using it - the first time it is
warm (28 celsius or so), liquid (100% hydration) and short (4-6 hours),
the second is cool (less than 18 celsius), stiff (64% hydration for my
wholemeal wheat leaven) and long (12-16 hours, overnight). The first
creates lively yeasts, the second boosts the lacto-bacillae population.

Our wheat starter is maintained for more than half a year. We keep it
normally in refrigerator. Its water content is 100% and we feed it before
backing with 1:1 mixture of water and wholewheat flour, the weight of the
starter and the weight of the fresh dough being equal. Could you comment this
technique? How does it impact on the sourness of the final wheat bread? And why
do you use wholemeal rye leaven for the wheat bread? Is there any difference
between the words “starter” and “leaven”?

My reply:
100% hydration is a good compromise of the many factors affecting the action  of a starter. As a home-baker I maintained only one rye starter for
many years, and that was 100% hydration. I'm not sure that I have
understood the amount of starter that you use for refreshing - I use
20-40% of the flour weight, depending on how long I want to leave it for
and how warm the day is, so I might make 1.2kg of leaven using 500g
wholegrain rye flour, 500g water and 200g rye starter. See my above
comments about refreshing for some ideas about how different feeding
regimes impact on the final bread.


There isn't really any difference between 'starter' and 'leaven',
but I tend to use 'chef' for the perpetual culture that I keep in the
fridge, 'starter' for the first refreshment, and 'leaven' for the final
refreshment that gets used in the final dough.

Seasonal Schmeasonal

Provers, retarders and other electric temperature control devices have no place at the Steamie bakehouse. There isn't room, they're too expensive, and anyway, we're trying to minimize our power consumption. With us baking is very much a seasonal affair,  the details of temperature and humidity varying by the month. At this time of year, that means struggling to keep my dough warm and blowing on cold stiff fingers whilst I defrost the the van in the biting dark. Similarly, I LOVE cavolo nero, but I imagine I'd feel rather differently if I were responsible for harvesting the stuff. So in case anyone else is fed up with winter too, here's a decidedly a-seasonal lunch that we had today:



Griddled hearth haggerty (this week's special) and Cannellini bean hummus with paprika oil from Hugh Fernley-Wittingstalls new vegetable book (River Cottage Veg Everyday). Yum. Roll on summer!

Austerity Bread

A few years ago we were contemplating a period of austerity in our lives.  As the keeper of the household purse I spent some time considering the amount we spent on food, and how it could be reduced.  My first thought, and one that I imagine occurs to many in this situation, was to lower quality and put ethics to one side.  To drop the veg box, to buy non-organic milk, to get coffee which wasn't fair trade.  But this sat so ill with all that I believe about the food we eat - that it should be fair, that it shouldn't damage the environment, that it should be healthy - that I decided to think again.  The conclusion that I came to was that we had to make every (or almost every) mouthful count.

This meant that foods which are basically empty calories had very little place in our kitchen.  White rice and flour products, sugar, cake baking, all became real treats.  I took the same view with bread.  When money is tight I need every bit of food which goes onto my family's table to nourish them.  White bread, even delicious just-baked sourdough, has a high GI, reflecting the fact that the body turns it easily into blood sugar.  This leaves me hungry again pretty soon.  White bread is also without all those nutrients which wholemeal bread can give to your body.

To get the best from those nutrients your body needs some help.  Grain and grass eating animals have various strategies for dealing with the fact that grasses and their seeds are not actually very digestible.  Cows have multiple stomachs and rabbits have a method which, to spare delicate constitutions, I won't got into here.  Suffice to say, the grass they eat gets digested twice.  Humans need the bread-making method to help them to digest and assimilate the valuable nutrients, and that is where sourdough comes in.  The action of acid and the lacto-bacilli effectively performs a partial digestion on the flour, meaning that our mammallian digestive system can extract what we need it to from the bread.  With yeasted white bread the work of digesting the bread can actually mean an overall loss of nutrition.

So although it might seem a little counter-intuitive to say that high-quality, artisan bread is austerity bread, I have found this to be the case.  When every penny of the food budget needs to be counted, every mouthful that money pays for must do its work.  And I have found is that this is a pretty good situation to be in - naturally leavened bread tastes great, wholegrain breads have a depth and range of flavour white breads find it hard to match, when you learn how to cook good brown rice it tastes wonderful.  There's still a place for cake in our lives, but now it's the treat it really ought to be.

The last post

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Perks of the Job: No. 4

Along with all the gardening, going to the beach, getting rained on, and other summer activities which have been going on around here instead of blogging, we've been taking photos of our bread for our new website.

We've been taking 'whole loaf' and 'in use' pictures for the regular and the special loaves.  'In use' pictures required all kinds of props, including some smoked salmon, which goes so well with our Caraway Meteil. 

And of course once you've taken the photo, you can't just let that smoked salmon go to waste now, can you?

You can see the new site here.