Daniel Etherington

Stevens’ Malted and seeded loaf

February 21st, 2010 · Baking

Malted and seeded loaf

These are my first loaves based on recipes from Dan Stevens’ River Cottage Handbook No.3: Bread.

In his intro to this recipe, Mr Stevens says it’s a very popular loaf at River Cottage. You really can’t beat a good loaf that uses “Granary”-style flour. “Granary” is trademarked to Hovis, so what we actually mean here is malted grain flour. Mr Stevens’ recipe is one of those fairly flexible ones, and he just talks about adding “2 handfuls of extras” in the form of whatever seeds you fancy, though with a caveat to watch the fennel seeds as they’re so pungent; I’d add “ditto caraway”, as any bread with caraway seeds in it is kinda defined by their flavour.

I made mine with pumpkin, sunflower, sesame (what is a sesame plant? Never occurred to me before but I have no idea), a few poppy seeds and some buckwheat (which I probably should have toasted first).

Unlike Mr Lepard in The Handmade Loaf and M Bertinet in Dough, Mr Stevens gives his water in volume, rather than weight, which suddenly felt a bit odd to me after using the former two books so much lately. Those guys have won be over with their rationale about the accuracy of weighing liquids rather than relying on eye to check mililitres.

Anyway. This uses:
1kg malted grain flour
10g dried easy-blend yeast (not used that for a while!)
20g fine salt
600ml warm water
And some old dough – I used 3T of my white leaven.
2 handfuls of seeds

I mixed all the dry ingredients, then made up the dough with the wet ingredients.

Mr Stevens’ basic dough method involves kneading for around 10 minutes, but my standard method these days, when I’m making a fairly dry dough such as this (and not using a sponge) is to use the Lepard method: knead for a few mins, form a ball, leave for 10 mins, knead for 10 secs or so, leave another 10 mins, knead for 10 secs or so, then again in another 10 mins.

Rested it for an hour and a half (ish), then I divided it 3/5th, 2/5ths, and made a small tin loaf and a large-ish baton. Left them to rise for another hour and a half ish. Brushed them with milk and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Baking on baking stone for about 20 mins at 240C, then reduced it to about 190 and gave them another 20 mins.

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Ciabatta

February 15th, 2010 · Baking

Ciabatta

This is my first stab at ciabatta, using the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough.

Despite being somewhat misshapen, they turned out very tasty. But it was touch-and-go for a while there.

Bertinet’s technique here involves making a “ferment” a day earlier – basically some dough that sits around giving the yeast a chance to do its thing. It’s kinda like a junior leaven. Except the batch I made with the quantities in the recipe resulted in a pretty dry ferment (350g flour, 180g water, 1/2 t fresh yeast), which looked nothing like the nice bubbly affair picture in the book. So when it came to making the second dough (450g strong white or ‘00′ flour – I did a mix; 10g yeast, 340g water, 50g olive oil, 15 salt), and combining them, it was hard going. The dry ferment and wet dough mix just refused to integrate. A lot of messy manipulation ensued.

Next time, I might experiment by just using my leaven instead of Bertinet’s ferment. It’ll make the dough even moister, but that’s good for ciabatta as I understand it from reading Dan Stevens’ recipe in the River Cottage Handbook 3: Bread.

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Bertinet baguettes

February 13th, 2010 · Baking

This is my first attempt at baguettes, using the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough. (Bertinet is a Breton, who trained in Paris, worked at some award-winning pubs in Britain, and now runs the Bertinet Kitchen, in Bath.)

Baguettes, epis

M Bertinet starts by dismissing British techniques for handling dough – we make it too dry, we abuse it with rough kneading, apparently. My past few years of baking have taught me not to add too much flour, and, when kneading, use the Dan Lepard technique where you simply oil the work surface slightly, rather than flouring it. Plus, I also already use a kneading technique that doesn’t involve half an hour of rough tugging and squashing. But Bertinent’s very wet dough is initially a little hard to get used to.

Bertinet’s technique involves lifting and slapping over the very wet, porridgey dough, to incoprate lots of air and encourage the formation of the nice, open structure. Luckily, the book comes with a DVD to explain this, as it’s a pretty feral process. He insists the dough will come together into a neat ball even with this high quantity of water, even without flouring the surface at all, but mine remained pretty recalcitrant, even after several minutes of kneading, so I succumbed to flouring the work surface just a wee bit. After that, it formed a ball nicely and became very manageable.

Before you get stuck into the messy kneading, he also uses an interesting technique where you rub fresh yeast into the flour dry, like rubbing fat into flour for scones or a crumble. I can’t see that this is any more effective than whisking it into the water, but it seems to work fine.

My ordinary domestic oven isn’t quite big enough for the stonking great long-as-your-arm baguettes you can buy commercially, but Bertinet encourages you to work small, make mini baguettes and whatnot. Which is fun, and good for mastering the techniques of shaping, folding, forming the spine of the dough so it retains an even shape on cooking (one of my baguettes came out a bit twisted so I’ve got to work on this!).

His also emphasises how important it is to use a baking stone and a peel, along with misting the inside of the oven. I didn’t have a baking stone or a particularly heavy baking tray to use instead at this point, and I didn’t trust myself to try and replicate the action of sliding the uncooked loaves off a tray (in lieu of a peel). So these are just a step in the right directionm risen and baked on a room temp baking sheet; the next batch I do I’ll use my new baking stone (actually a granite worktop saver – which only costs around a tenner) and report back with how that affects the texture. These weren’t bad for a first go. The crust was nice and crusty, and the flesh was open and light.

Oh, and the ones that aren’t actually standard straight baguettes are “epis” – you cut the raw baguette at intervals, turning the sections to alternate sides, making bits that can be broken off when sharing. The loaf resembles an ear of wheat – and indeed epi is the French word for the wheat ear. (Bit more about epi here). Rather nice.

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Handmade loaves

February 7th, 2010 · Baking

Although I blog about my baking over at Cake-Off, the emphasis there is on cakes, cupcakes, tray-baked cakes, biscuits, cookies and all things sweet and yummy. For my bread-making, I’m going to try and write about it a little more here.

I’ve been making bread on and off most of my adult life, starting, like much of my more homely, traditional interests, with the time I spent on small organic farms in the Buller Gorge, South Island, New Zealand in the late 1980s and 1990s (a couple of years in total, on about off). There, mentored and encouraged by first Mr Stephen McGraph of Newton Livery then, more significantly, by Ms Nadia Jowsey of Old Man Mountain, a highly accomplished baker and chef, I started to learn all about making real bread.

Last year, I was given a copy of The Handmade Loaf as a present. This excellent book is by Dan Lepard, the master baker who has been writing the baking column in the Weekend Guardian the past few years. Its emphasis is on using a natural leaven – aka levain, aka ferment – in your breads. I’m not sure I can entirely summarise the difference in results between a homemade loaf made with just commercial yeast (be in easy-blend, dried or fresh) and one made with your own leaven, but it certainly adds different qualities: you can achieve very different textures, but the main difference is probably a depth of flavour. Plus, where making your own bread is always deeply satisfying, that feeling is multiplied when the only raising agent you’re using is a natural yeast you’ve cultivated yourself. There are different methods of doing this, but Lepard’s basically involves using the natural yeasts presents on the skin of raisins, feeding it with flour and water, and nurturing it over a week or so.

Not all my experiments with the recipes from The Handmade Loaf have been a resounding success, but all have been informative experiences. And some of them have resulted in some of the best breads I’ve ever made.

Here are just a few examples from the past few months.

The mill loaf
This is second recipe in The Handmade Loaf. It uses leaven made with white flour (you can make rye leavens, etc), alongside white flour, wholewheat flour and rye flour. It’s a great all-rounder, for wholesome sarnies, top toast or just a few slices with a meal. It’s one of the recipes in the book I make the most, though for home use I half the book’s quantities, which call for half a kilo of levian, along with a kilo of flours (combined), and more than half a kilo of water.

Mill loaf, Oct 09

Onion and bay loaf
This is a yummy loaf where you chop some onion, then head it, along with some bay leaves, in milk. You then cool the milk and use it for the dough’s only liquid. The finished loaf is a lovely savoury affair, that’s both nice and alliumy and instilled with the distinctive sweetness of bay. This one uses both some white levain and some fresh yeast.

Onion and bay loaf

Lemon barley cob
Made this one a while back. It uses white leavain and some fresh yeast, combined with 100g barley flour and 150g white flour. A little lemon juice and zest gives it, in combination with the barley flour, gives it a slight tang. Need to practice this one a bit more.

Lemon barley cob

Ale bread with wheat grains
This is a great one, though takes a little more advanced planning. Its given distinction by the addition of wheat grains, which you simmer, then soak overnight in ale. I love ale. I love bread. And of course the two are closely related – or at least they used to be, before the advent of commercial yeast when much baking would apparently involve using the barm from beer-making for your yeast starter.

Ale bread with wheat grains

Rolled oat and apple bread
This is one of my favourites from The Handmade Loaf, so far. Adding the remains of the porridge to the bread dough was one of the things I learned from Stephen and Nadia, and this recipe incorporates a similar process – making some semi-porridge by soaking oats in boiling water. The apple here also keeps the loaf loaf and moist and soft. The recipe uses grated apple, but I had some pureed remains of our apples in the freezer, and added that instead on one occasion; the results were similarly successful.

Rolled oat and apple bread

Barm bread
Another connection with the old tradition of making beer with beer barm. Here, you make a barm by mixing bottle-conditioned ale with some white flour and white leaven the leaving it overnight. The loaf itself just uses this barm, water, strong white flour, and a little salt. Yum. Check out the texture – I’ve never achieved anything like that with a non-leaven bread. Though again, this needs a little practice, as it’s a bit too crusty.

Barm bread

Bottom line: get this book. And get baking! That said though, what’s with the prices on that book now? Mitchel Beazley – do another print run for crying out loud!

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Flour

February 4th, 2010 · Main thread

Quick inventory of the flour I’ve got:
Strong white flour
Strong wholemeal flour of an organic persuasion
Stromg wholemeal flour ground at the watermill at Otterton in Devon
Four grained malted flour from Swaffham Mill in Cambridge
Self-raising white flour
Plain white flour
Tipo ‘00′ flour
Chickpea flour
Rice flour
Rye flour
Barley flour
White maize flour, aka masa harina
Buckwhea flour
And today’s new addition:
Millet flour

It’s all piling up on the top of/tipping off the kitchen cupboard. Having a passionate interest in baking can be a bit impractical when you don’t have much storage space…

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Modern Warfare 2: party chat support in multiplayer

December 3rd, 2009 · Main thread

With Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, Party Chat has been disabled for the majority of the multiplayer game modes, much to the irritation of players like me who prefer to just party up with a few real friends and chat, you know, like normal people who don’t want to be audio spammed by obnoxious teenagers.

The reason Party Chat’s been banned was supposedly something to do with cheating – with friends in Party Chat on calling out positions in ranked matches or dead friends reporting positions in Search and Destroy mode. Or something. Was it really that common in COD4: MW? I guess it was common enough for the developers and publishers to take action. Shame. Aw well.

I couldn’t find this online anywhere, so here’s a full list of the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer modes, and whether they support Party Chat:

Team Deathmatch – No
Mercenary Team Deathmatch – Yes
Free-for-all – Yes
Domination – No
Ground war – Yes
Demolition – No
Sabotage – No
Headquarters Pro – No
Search & Destroy – No
Capture the Flag – No
3rd Person Team Tactical – Yes
Hardcore Ricochet Search & Destroy – Yes
Hardcore Team Deathmatch – No
3rd Person Cage Match – Yes
Team Deathmatch Express- No
Mosh Pit – No
Hardcore Ricochet HQ Pro – No

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Telecom tower

November 8th, 2009 · Uncategorized

Or whatever it’s called these days officially.

Telecom tower, Nov 09

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The Great Gates of Moria

November 8th, 2009 · Main thread

Moria Great Gates, aka East-gate, aka Dimrill Gate

When I saw  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the scenes involving Moria, one thing that struck me was – if Moria was such a major kingdom for the dwarves, how come the door was so small? I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion, but my Tolkien knowledge was still a bit patchy. Serious fans could probably have told me straight away. That’s because the Fellowship entered through the West-gate, aka the Doors of Durin, aka the Hollin Gate. And that wasn’t the main, original gate. The dwarves began constructing Moria from the east, from Dimrill Dale, which is adjacent to Lothlorien. The first, main entrance to Moria is therefore the East-gate, or Dimrill Gate.

One of the reasons I got into playing the excellent MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online was because I wanted to see more of Moria than is seen in the films. So one exciting thing was reaching the First Hall – the oldest area of Moria the dwarves mined – and exiting Moria through the Dimrill Gate for the first time. Now that’s a proper door, and you could actually imagine it accommodating the necessary trade traffic etc to support a vast underground kingdom like Moria, or Khazad-dûm as it was originally known, the Dwarrodelf.

Screengrabs from games never really get across the atmosphere of a place, but the artists of Turbine, the developers of the game, have done incredibly work. Although Peter Jackson and his team created some of the best, most epic cinema ever with the films, and artists over the years have visualised Middle-earth with great skill and imagination (notably the estimable Alan Lee, who was a major influence on Jackson’s vision for the films), one thing I’m enjoying about the game is just how comprehensively it can create a detailed, populated Middle-earth and hopefully will continue to do so all the way to Minas Tirith and on into (*ulp*) Mordor.

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Battle of the movie nice guys

October 2nd, 2009 · Main thread

I recently caught Adventureland, the romantic comedy directed by Greg Mottola. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as a high school grad who has to get a job in a lame theme park when his family can’t afford to support his academic progress. He’s not just any high school grad though – he’s that US high school movie stock character, the sensitive nice guy, who’s a kind of off-shoot of the geeks we saw up frattish movies in the 80s, and certainly influenced by John Hughes, who broadened out the repertoire of teen characters in the movies. (Though arguably these modern sensitive guys are more like Hughes’ sensitive girls – Molly Ringwald’s characters in Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink).

When Adventureland opened, some critics and bloggers commented on how Eisenberg was “the new Michael Cera“, who played the not dissimilar sensitive guy character in Mottola’s previous film, Superbad. Such comments, however, are kinda reductive and kinda insulting to both these actors. They’re not the first actors play the senstive guy and they won’t be the last. Jason Biggs got a bit stuck playing senstive, virginal guys in and after the American Pie movies, for starters, and maybe one could trace the archetype back to Ben Braddock.

That said, it certainly seems easy to get typecast if your look and acting style hit certain notes, and these two do have a similar screen presence, even right down to interchangeable occasional semi-jewfros. Cera played the senstive nice guy in Juno, and then again in Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist – an East Coast, high school graduate, lessons-in-life romantic comedy that’s actually closely comparable to Adventureland.

Both Cera and Eisenberg do seem to have been essaying the same skinny senstive chap a lot, and vying for similar roles, but the latter is in no way the “new” former. He’s American and five years older for starters (born 83, compared to 88), and made his feature film breakthrough in 2002’s Roger Dodger. The Canadian Cera, meanwhile, appeared on ‘Arrested Development’ on TV from 2003 to 2006 and made his movie breakthrough with Superbad. I’ve not seen Zombieland yet, but a friend says Eisenberg is still stuck in the sensitive guy role, even if he’s stepping outside the romantic comedy framework to instead fight zombies.

Talking of fighting, Cera gets his chance to break the typecasting with Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, his current project. This movie is based on a series of superb, off-beat comics by Canadian writer-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. I’m seriously hoping that Edgar Wright, the co-creator of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz not only manages to make the leap to North America, working on a movie without his regular collaborators (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost – who are instead working with the aforementioned Mottola on geeks-on-a-road-trip-meet-an-alien movie Paul), but also manages to translate Scott Pilgrim to the screen. Scott is an unusual character – he most certainly is not a stock sensitive guy. In fact, he’s kinda insensitive – he’s a law unto himself, oblivious to many social niceties, but irresistible to woman, somehow, and totally cool with a stream of girls. He’s not the sensitive virginal guy holding off for the right girl. Though in the book, he meets the right girl, and has to win her over by fighting  her “seven evil exes”. Wright has real challenge to understand this unusual character and bring him to the screen – especially if he’s got the baggage of all Cera’s sensitive guy previous roles.

With them both having played so many similar roles, but now both progressing by actually having to fight stuff, it does beg the question: who’d win in a fight between Eisenberg and Cera. Maybe someone needs to write a movie with two sensitive nice guys vying for the same girl who have to resolve their differences by manning up, and having a scrap. A proper scrap mind, no girly hair-pulling or pinching.

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“Don’t look so worried”

September 17th, 2009 · Blogroll

Said the consultant in King’s College Hospital’s orthopaedic department, a place I’ve been visiting on and off the past few years.

I’ve been having what many people of a certain age, and I’d guess particularly tall people who like running, or sports, experience – knee problems. In New Zealand a few years ago, I started getting knee issues. I’d had them before, and they’d usually fading away, so I assumed this would be a similar case. But no. And by the time I got home to the UK, I was having a lot of pain and even “giving way” issues, where the knee suddenly buckled. Running was obviously out, and even getting up to the bus stop at the top of the road was painful for a while. So I got into the system, asking a GP, getting referred to a sports clinic injury, getting an MRI, and finally seeing a consultant at King’s, who, after a bizarre aside about the dangers of cycling in London, told me I had tears to the meniscal cartilage – the shock absorbing disc between the knee and the tibia (shinbone). Joy.

The pain subsided, however, so I opted out of surgery for a year or so. Things didn’t improve though, so I got back onto the surgical list, and a few weeks ago had a keyhole arthroscopy at the King’s Day Surgery. Keyhole surgery – what amazing technology. Although I was put out with a general anaesthetic, I was able to walk out with the aid of just one crutch afterwards, and within a few days, most of the swelling was gone, and I only had an ache, not pain.

At this point, I’d like to say -  Thanks NHS. You might keep me sitting around in waiting rooms for hours on occasion, you rarely seem to answer the phone, some of your facilities look a bit knackered, and it wasn’t exactly helpful that the surgeon told me what he’d done mere minutes after I woke up and was still in cookoo land, or that nurse couldn’t read his writing to explain any better, but thanks to my taxes and your staff, I got my knee done. The op was around the same time many people in the US and UK were slagging off the NHS, in the on-going debate over Obama’s proposed reforms. Well, all I can say is that I doubt any of those people doing the slagging were poor (they mostly seemed to be Tory or Republican politicians). I’m self-employed, I don’t earn a great deal, and there’s no way I could have afforded surgery privately. So stuff you, critics of the NHS. Hands off. New Labour might be doing a good job of continuing the undermining of the welfare state started by their Tory predecessors, but it’s a great idealogical insitution that needs preserving. Society should take care of itself, by way of taxes, and the NHS is a great, ongoing example of that.

Anway, back to today and my follow-up appointment. The worried look came when the consultant was explaining again about my op, and what had been done to my knee. Specifically it came with her use of the word “osteoarthritis”, something nobody had bothered to mention to me before. Now, I realise that at 39, I’m probably past the life expectancy of a homo sapien were I wandering the savanna millennial ago and living a more realistic life as as part of the nature of things. But living in modern Britain as I do, I’m only about midway through the male life expectancy. I do have other 40-ish friends with arthritis, but it’s more something I associate with an older generation; for example, it’s something that started troubling both my parents in their sixties. “Don’t look so worried.” I guess I looked worried, in part, as I’m ignorant about osteoarthritis, alongside that little matter of no one mentioning it before, and a GP friend who also had a knee arthroscopy telling me his knees were fully back to business afterwards, so I was semi expecting something like that.

“Osteoarthritis usually develops in people who are over 50 years of age, and it is more common in women than in men” So says the intro to the condition on the NHS site. Darn. I’m neither of those things. “It is commonly thought that osteoarthritis is an inevitable part of getting older, but this is not true. Younger people can also be affected by osteoarthritis, often as a result of an injury or another joint condition.” Ok. In my case, she told me not to worry too much, as it was minor. The only thing she specifically told me to avoid was marathon running. I missing running, but I never planned to do a marathon, so I guess that’s ok. Still a bugger though – you see all those older people running marathons, Jimmy Saville and the like. It’s a bit of a mean twist of fate my knees are ropey in my 30s, and theirs are still going (presumably) strong. I can’t help but worry, a bit, despite the consultant’s reassurances.

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