The nick of time

Today at Bread of Heron, the Heron Corn Mill's community bread group, we took a leaf out of the Staff of Life bread book and made a loaf designed for toasting. It should be a rich loaf, as it has full cream milk instead of water, and a good helping of treacle. It looks like a brown loaf, but that's mainly the effect of the treacle. There is a small amount of Heron Corn Mill rye, but mostly white flour. And then a few caraway seeds to make it a fragrant loaf. Quite a lovely combination!

Some people baked in tins, and others raised the bread in baskets. And there's always the question - to slash or not to slash? It's not immediately clear why you should at least consider slashing the tops of your loaves. But here is a good demonstration of the difference it makes.

The loaf on the left has been slashed on the way into the oven, and the loaf on the right has not been slashed. They both went in the same oven, and they both rose strongly when they hit the heat. As the bread swells in the oven, the tension on the surface increases until it gets to the point where something has to give. The slash on the left hand loaf gives it somewhere obvious to expand: open the cut a bit and there is immediately more room to stretch. The loaf on the right has to find its own weakest point and rip itself open along the line of least resistance. Very rustic of course, and it shows how unpredictably bread can behave in the oven. It will open up one way or the other, but slashing the bread reduces the unpredictability of how the bread will open up in the oven.

We had some young visitors today, from a school in Macclesfield, who came into the shepherd's hut to see what we were up to. I learned from one of them that Hovis was invented in Macclesfield, and I swapped the information that the thing that makes Hovis different from other bread is that it has lots of wheatgerm added - the very best bit of the grain, which is a "waste product" of roller milled white flour.

We were able to show the youngsters how different the same bread could look, depending on how you handle it. All three loaves in this picture are basically the same loaf, but one of them has been raised in a tin, and two have been raised in bannetons - wicker baskets. We showed them how the ridges of the basket left lines imprinted in the dough.

One of the bakers pointed out that the tin loaf had also tried to open itself up by ripping itself open along the edge of the tin. So even tin loaves might be candidates for slashing.

The other loaf we did today was a simple half and half loaf - half white and half Heron Corn Mill wholemeal wheat or spelt.

This is of course a lot lighter than a loaf using only wholemeal flour, but the Heron element should ensure a good flavour, and we added a few "bits" to make the texture a bit more interesting. Rye flakes, cracked wheat and linseeds are my regular choice here, though I have recently stocked up on wheat flakes and barley flakes as well. We only just got these loaves in the oven in the nick of time, because they were starting to hang over the side of the tins!

Life in Fife

We've just come home from a short break in the East Neuk of Fife. This is the east coast of Scotland, north of Edinburgh.

It's an area with a lot to say for itself - scenery, seafood, history, coastal walks and a really good music festival. We packed five concerts, 2 crabs, a lobster and fish and chips into a 3 night stay.

They are rightly proud of the seafood in the area, but there is not a great deal to shout about in the way of bread, so far as I could see. The allegedly artisan sourdough left a lot to be desired -

I would have given it at least another 5 minutes in the oven. But it was sadly lacking that firm sponginess that real sourdough should have. No evidence of oven leap. And the crust! Oh dear.

The seafood was another story though. There is a hut on the harbour at Crail which cooks lobster to order, and usually has crab as well. The day we were there, someone had stolen 2 boxes of crab, so it was just lobster. I'm much more of a crab person myself, but when in Crail, do as the Romans do.

You know it's fresh when it's like this -

I never ignore signs like this one -

There are a number of old mill sites along the East Neuk coast - Crail, Kilrenny, and this partially restored windmill at St Monans.

What's interesting about this mill is that it is not designed to grind corn. Rather, it was used to lift sea water up the hill side and drop it into salt pans, where it could be boiled to make sea salt. This is all that remains of the salt pans -

And they would have originally looked something like this -

The whole site would have looked like this, with the sea off to the right -

The salt operation relied on local coal, which fired the pans. The whole thing is nicely written up in this blog. It seems amazing that 7 tons of coal was needed to produce 1 ton of salt. And what is now an attractive place for tourists to look at was, in its own time, a genuine eyesore and pollution source.

Crail, where most of our concerts happened, also has evidence of an old mine, but it has all been back filled now. The story of industrial sabotage in 1620 makes interesting reading.

All in all, I found Fife to be a very attractive place. It was a bit like stepping back to a time when the pace of life was a lot more relaxed. And there is something engagingly direct about the people. On the Sunday morning I went out looking for milk, but everywhere in Anstruther was closed. I walked along the harbour as far as the pub at the end, and had a quick look through the window before giving up and turning back the way I had come. An old boy out walking his dog stood eyeing me up curiously for a while, and then asked, with a very strong emphasis on the last word "are you LOST?". It was clear that the thought process that preceded this question was "you are behaving strangely. I have been trying to account for your erratic behaviour. Are you LOST?". When I explained what I was up to, he came back with "I thought you were maybe looking for a drink of BEER". Lost or thirsty - it had to be one or the other I suppose.

Anstruther has a place of last resort - when the milk shops and the pubs are all closed, this would be the place for me -