Monday 17 October 2011

I heart Hugh (he's bready brilliant)...

A little while ago my mothership sent me a pamphlet of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's breads and puddings from the Telegraph. Much as I dislike the tory press, their cookery booklets are not to be argued with and this one has proved (hur, hur) a gem. I'm about to tell you about three recipes from it.

First off, his basic bread recipe. I actually looking at the kneading diagrams for this, and stretched my way into some of the lightest loaves ever to come from my hands. 

I love bagels, they are one of my favourite things to eat of a weekend morning, and the fact that the dough needed poaching was intriguing enough to inspire me to have a go. The steps are thus: mix (quite a dry dough, presumably that is because they are soaked through in the pan of  water), knead, prove, shape, prove and then BOIL. I shaped the ring-doughnut shape pushing a hole in the middle and then stretching, rather than Hugh's way of rolling a sausage shape and then sticking together, because, as he even admits to in the recipe, they can come apart in the water if made like that. Poaching them (one minute each side, and I timed it) was fun, not least because they smelled amazing. Once out of the water, glaze with egg (I left some glazed, topped some with sesame seeds and others with Malden Salt and black pepper). Brilliant, I am now a bread genius, these were delicious--despite every one being a slightly different size!

Finally: brown bread ice-cream. When I first heard of this a few years ago, I assumed it was some hideous high fibre version of my favourite food. Not so--the bread is toasted in the oven with lots of sugar, the ice-cream itself is made from a custard base, with no fibre in sight, just lots of cream, sugar, whole milk and egg yolks. the toasty bits are mixed in as the mix is firming up in the ice-cream maker. I really enjoyed this, it tasted like premium ice-cream, and the bread was sort of caramelised and, although its flavour was distinctly recognisable, it worked.

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