Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (36 page)

A good many readers of cookery articles must be bored to death with being told that one main dish, with a salad, cheese, and a loaf of crusty bread, makes an ample, balanced, nourishing, economical, easily-cooked and satisfying family meal. Well, so it does, if you can get it; in fact, the bread and the cheese would be a perfectly good meal without the so-called main dish. And the bleak truth is that mighty few of us can lay hands on either the cheese or the bread unless we happen to live within walking distance of a specialist cheese shop and a bakery which is not only independent and bakes its own bread but bakes it well and produces it for sale at an hour when the ordinary householder can go out and buy it.

I was driven to making my own bread because my local bakery, which does, in fact, produce quite acceptable French-type loaves, doesn’t have them on sale until midday, at which time I, in common with most other women in my neighbourhood, am already busy at the stove preparing lunch and it is highly inconvenient to leave the house. And such is the demand for even remotely edible bread, that if I leave my shopping until the afternoon, nothing but wrapped and sliced factory loaves are left on the baker’s shelves.

I repeat, I am not canvassing those who are prepared to put up with shop bread because they just have not the time or inclination to make it themselves; I am not preaching to those who buy shop bread because they actually like it; I am giving instructions purely as basic guidance to those who have already reached the conclusion that it is pretty ludicrous to spend three days planning menus to include shrimp-filled avocados, trout with almonds, fillet of beef in puff pastry, pineapple ice cream and no end of a palaver over the grinding and percolating of the coffee, if they cannot offer
their guests a decent piece of bread. It should be added, in fairness, that in those households where home-made and well-made bread is on offer nobody needs to worry about all that prestige-type food. Have it by all means, if that’s what you like, but if it’s prestige you’re after – or, to put it in a cruder way and since it isn’t unknown to any of us occasionally to do the right things for the wrong reasons – what will most impress your friends and arouse the maximum envy in your rivals is the sight and the taste of fresh, authentic, un-cranky bread, with its slightly rough and open texture, plain unvarnished crust, and perceptibly salty bite.

This is the kind of bread which should be cut in good thick chunky slices straight from the loaf left upon the table for all to see and enjoy.

In fact, if I go into a friend’s dining room and see no loaf on the table, I feel as uneasy as I do if there is no evidence of wine glasses or bottles. Now that I’ve been forced into making my own bread, I often take it with me. Nobody takes offence, any more than they did in the days of rationing when it was the custom to take one’s own marge or butter, sugar and eggs, or egg, whenever invited out to a meal.

It’s only a matter of time before the braver and angrier among us start taking our own bread to restaurants. After all, there are plenty of establishments to which we may take our own wine. I see nothing to prevent us taking our own bread as well. The restaurateurs can always increase their cover charges to include the loan of a bread knife – if they have one.

Flour for Bread

The ideal flours for English bread, and for all yeast doughs, are milled from hard wheat, whereas cake, short pastry and sauce flours are or should be soft-wheat flours. Hard flours have a high gluten content, which makes the dough more elastic and expansive. Soft flour tends to make rather flat bread. (French bread is mostly made from a softish flour because this is the type of wheat mainly grown in France. The French have adapted their bread techniques to their flour.) Nearly all the ordinary white flour sold by grocers in London and the southern area is soft household flour. In the Midlands and the North, where home-baked bread and yeast cakes are still made, the requisite flours are easier to come by.

Whole-wheat flour, stone-ground, 100%, 90% or 85%, whole
wheatmeal, can be bought from health food stores and the like. The first type, 100% wholemeal, is the whole grain of the wheat with nothing removed and nothing added. The 85% and 90% wheatmeal have husk and bran removed and make a lighter and finer loaf. Some wholefood addicts recommend these flours for pastry and sauces. I don’t.

The difference between hard gluten flours and ordinary soft household flours becomes apparent as soon as you start handling the dough. The first almost immediately becomes springy and lithe, the latter tends to be sticky and puttyish, although it becomes harder with kneading.

Flours can be mixed. For example, to save continual journeys and the carrying of large parcels of flour bought from a special shop, a mixture of say 125 g (4 oz) of 100% whole wheatmeal flour and 375 g (12 oz) of ordinary soft household flour make a quite respectable pale brown loaf, although not such a good one as strong plain or bakers’ white flour and 85% or 90% whole wheatmeal flour in the same proportions.

Some of the whole wheatmeal flours on sale in health food and crank shops make a heavy and pudding-like loaf. For that matter, much of the bread sold in these shops is inexpertly made, dry, heavy, calculated to put all but nut-food nuts right off home-made bread for life. Into the bargain, so-called home-made health food is extortionately expensive.

The Yeast

In spite of the disappearance of huge numbers of small independent bakeries, a few such shops are still to be found in most towns and suburbs. The bread they sell may not be up to much, but at least most of them will supply yeast if asked. If they won’t, it is because, in the concise phrase used by Mr Clement Freud in an
Observer
cookery article, they are bloody-minded. Or it could be that, as in the case of one of my local Chelsea bakeries, the assistants have made their own bye-laws as to the times of day they will dispense yeast. Or it may depend entirely upon the attitude adopted by the customer.

My own experience is that yeast should be asked for not as a rare favour (‘We don’t
sell
yeast, we oblige with it,’ I have been told by bakeresses) but as a commodity which it is to be taken for granted is sold by a baker as a publican sells beer and as a newsagent sells newspapers.

As opposed to brewers’ yeast, which is liquid (and very bitter), bakers’ yeast (formerly called German yeast, no doubt because it came from Holland) is compressed yeast. It looks like putty-coloured plasticine. Bakers who make their own bread on the premises will sell yeast – if they sell it at all – in small quantities, from 30 g (1 oz) upwards. Bakers’ yeast is also now sold by some health and whole-food shops.

Yeast can be stored for several days in an airtight box in the refrigerator, so long as it is kept perfectly dry.

It should feel cool and plastic to the touch and smell sweet and alive. The fresher the yeast, the easier it is to make the dough and the better the resulting loaf.

15 g (½ oz) of bakers’ yeast will aerate 500–750 g (1–1½ lb) of flour. For a 1.5 kg (3 lb) batch of dough, use 30 g (1 oz) of yeast.

Dough made with dried yeast in granules takes a lot longer to rise than dough made with bakers’ yeast, and the resulting bread tends to be dry and uninteresting because it lacks the characteristic flavour and smell of yeast. In other words, I find dried yeast unsatisfactory, although many people swear that it’s just as good and as easy to work with as bakers’ yeast.
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The Equipment

1. 1. A small self-sealing plastic box for the storage of yeast in the refrigerator.
   
2. 2. Scales.
   
3. 3. A cup for mixing the yeast and water.
   
4. 4. A measuring jug.
   
5. 5. A large mixing bowl or bread panshon (a wide earthenware bowl glazed inside) or large wooden bowl.
   
6. 6. A flour-shaker or caster.
   
7. 7. A plastic or rubber or wooden spatula or scraper.
   
8. 8. A clean tea-cloth and a small thick towel.
   
9. 9. Bread tins (1.2-litre/2-pint capacity for a loaf made with 500 g/ 1 lb of flour and 300 ml/½ pint of water). An attractive flat round loaf can be made in a shallow (5-cm/2-in) French cake tin. I make most of my bread in this type of tin, because I prefer the maximum proportion of crust to crumb. An ordinary round 1 kg (2 lb) cake tin also makes an attractive loaf. A long narrow aluminium tin makes a beautiful loaf, easy for slicing and ideal for sandwiches. It is worth bearing in mind that English bread used to be baked in earthenware pans. If you have no suitable tins, perhaps you have a straightforward earthenware casserole or pie dish which will serve the purpose. Some people even use ordinary flowerpots, very well rubbed with fat and they make perfectly good loaves. At Easter, I make bread in the fish-shaped moulds traditional to Alsace and Germany.
   
10. A wire grid or cake cooling rack.
    

AN ENGLISH LOAF

My advice to beginners is to start with the basic recipe for a loaf made with 500 g (1 lb) of flour, 15 g (½ oz) of yeast and 300 ml (½ pint) of water, and baked in a 1.2-litre (2-pint) capacity tin. Only when it is made and cut and pronounced passable or a failure, read the remainder of these notes. Then make another loaf. If after two or three attempts things still don’t seem quite right, try one of the variations. My recipe suits me and I know that it has suited quite a few complete beginners. That doesn’t say it will suit everybody. No recipe ever suits everybody, and this is perhaps more true of bread making and baking than of any other branch of cookery, with the exception of meat roasting.

For a loaf of 85% or 90% whole wheat flour or plain white flour, preferably strong or bakers’ flour, you need: 500 g (1 lb) plain white or wholemeal flour (or 350 g/12 oz to 125 g/4 oz wheatmeal), plus a little flour in a shaker or a bowl for sprinkling on the dough while kneading, 15 g (½ oz) bakers’ yeast, 2 heaped teaspoons of coarse rock or sea salt (more if you like salty bread – I do), and use 30 g (1 oz) per 500 g (1 lb) flour, about 300 ml (½ pint) of tepid water, fat for greasing the bread tin.

Put the yeast into a teacup, make it into a cream with 2 or 3 tablespoons of cold or tepid water.

Take off your rings and put them in a safe place.
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Put the flour into a big wide bowl, mix well, make a hole in the centre of the flour and pour in the yeast and water paste. Flick the flour over the yeast. Add the water, into which you have stirred the salt until it has dissolved. You may need a little more or a little less than the 300 ml (½ pint); this depends on the flour. Mix the dough. This can be done with your hands or with a spatula or long-handled wooden spoon. The mixture should come away fairly smoothly from the bowl, like pastry dough. At this stage, start kneading. (With a small batch of bread, you don’t need a board; mixing and kneading can be done in the bowl.) Almost at once, you feel that the dough is beginning to acquire its proper elastic quality. If it is too soft and wet – that is, if you have added too much water – you can dry it by sprinkling it with more flour, but after you have made bread a few times, you won’t need to do this because you will get to know just how much water your flour will absorb. Within a few seconds, the dough should be pliable enough to be rolled or folded over on itself in a roughly three-cornered fashion, then to be punched down again. If at this stage the dough is sticky, sprinkle it again with flour. Repeat the folding process three or four times.

Now form it into a large bun shape. Sprinkle it with flour, cover the bowl with a floured tea-cloth (the flour is to prevent the dough sticking to the cloth as it rises), and a small thick towel, folded.

In the winter, I leave my dough for its first rising for one to one and a half hours on top of the stove while the oven is on at 140°C/275°F/gas mark 1. When the weather is exceptionally cold, increase the oven heat a little.

The dough is sufficiently risen when it has just about doubled in volume.

Butter or grease a 1.2-litre (2-pint) capacity tin, warm it in the oven for a minute or two. Break down the risen dough. Knead it very thoroughly. Soon it will be like a piece of thick smooth cloth which you can pick up and smack down again on the table or into the bowl. This second kneading is more important than the first. The more you knock the dough about, the better it will be. The object is temporarily to check the action of the yeast. The second kneading for a pound of dough takes a maximum of three minutes. A big batch of dough obviously takes longer.

Advice to owners of electric mixers with dough-mixer attachment
: do the kneading by hand until you get used to the process;
when you know how it should feel and look, you can make larger batches and use the mixer.

Put the dough into the prepared tin, sprinkling the top with flour (for a wholemeal or half-wholemeal loaf, use wholemeal rather than white flour for this operation – it makes a more attractive crust) and giving it roughly the shape of the tin, which at this stage looks a good deal too big for the amount of dough.

Cover the tin with the floured cloth and towel and return it to a warm place for the dough to rise for the second time. In about 45 minutes to an hour (on top of the stove with the oven alight), the dough should have risen to the top of the tin and is ready to bake.

The airing cupboard and a warm spot close to a boiler are alternatives, and in summer, particularly in steamy weather, the dough can be left uncovered on the kitchen table without benefit of extra heat.

By this time, have the oven turned on at 240°C/475°F/gas mark 9. Put the bread in the centre of the oven. After 15 minutes turn down the heat to 220°C/425°F/gas mark 7. Cook for another 25-30 minutes. By now the loaf is slightly shrunk in the tin. Turn it out of the tin upside down on to a wire rack on the kitchen table. With your knuckle, tap the underside of the loaf. If it sounds hollow, like a drum, it is cooked. If it feels soft, it is undercooked. Return it, upside down, to the oven and let it cook for another 10–15 minutes with the oven turned down to 200°C/400°F/gas mark 6. An alternative timing, and temperature, is about 50 minutes at 220°C/425°F/gas mark 7 throughout the whole baking. Where bread is concerned a little too long in the oven is preferable to an undercooked loaf.