Rice, lentils, pasta, Celtic toast and sourdough by lunch time

Rice

This week at Bread of Heron, the Heron Corn Mill's community bread group, we had one of those joyous moments when you get an unexpected insight into something you had no idea about.

If wheat flour comes into contact with any moisture, it soaks it up. That makes it unsuitable for dusting proving baskets. If anything, it increases the likelihood of the dough sticking to the basket. That's why proper bread often has a grey or white covering: the basket is traditionally dusted with either rye (grey) or rice (white) flour.

We were dusting our proving baskets this week using rice flour. One baker suddenly got a little excited when we turned the bread out of the baskets and the time came to slash the loaves. A possibility had occurred to this baker that nobody else had even imagined: the chance to be symbolic when baking bread!

The thought was - why not slash the bread with a symbol that identifies it as a rice loaf? It's easy if you know that the Chinese symbol for rice looks like this -

You just have to make your loaf look like this -

The one at the bottom looks like Zippy from Rainbow, which is fine too of course!

Well, you can imagine what a thrilling moment this was! Every week Bread of Heron is bringing people together to bake and break bread - people who may live 50 miles apart. We have people keeping a friendly eye on proceedings from foreign parts, using social media. And now, suddenly, in our shepherd's hut, with one sharp slash of the knife, the dual barriers of language and cultural experience are swept aside and the bread speaks for itself - "I am a rice loaf!". Truly, a wonderful moment.

Lentils

I was so thrilled about the rice, it put me in mind of another moment of cultural sharing, many years ago. A friend from Israel cooked a meal for us which included a dish that probably could have come from any number of countries in that part of the world - rice and lentils. This is such simple food, and so utterly delicious that I had about six bowls of it on that happy day when I first encountered it, and I've been cooking it at home ever since.

Our friend made it by separately pre-frying everything - garlic and onions, rice and green lentils - in oil, then boiling the rice and lentils in separate pans before combining the whole lot into a luscious sticky bowlful of pure pleasure. It looks like nothing special, but believe me, it's a match made in heaven. I can't bring myself to pre-fry the rice or the lentils, but using lots of oil and getting the onions really soft is essential to bring everything together at the end.

I used to work with an Indian chap, who invited me home for lunch one day, and cooked a lovely simple rice and dahl, which I suppose is the Indian equivalent of the same rice and lentils idea. Rather like the earlier evening, my enthusiasm got the better of me, and I finished off the whole panful of food. Greatly impressed, not to say astonished, my friend said rather proudly "you eat like an Indian", which is a compliment I treasure. As we waddled back to work in the afternoon, we met one of the other people living in my friend's house, who asked what was for lunch. "Pete's eaten it all!" was the slightly embarrassed reply. I had eaten the entire household's lunch. Who ate all the pies, indeed.

Pasta

A few years ago I got a pasta machine for rolling out fresh pasta. I couldn't get the hang of it at all and gave up in frustration and bitter disappointment. Millions of people apparently could do it, but I couldn't.

This year I got a new pasta machine - the extruding kind that works rather like a mincing machine, pushing fresh pasta through a brass die to form different shapes depending on the shape of the die. This I can manage! 

I learned with the first machine that you need to coat the pasta with semolina to stop it sticking to itself, so this time I dusted everything liberally with semolina as it came out of the machine. Once everything is coated, you can remove the excess semolina and save it for next time. Curiously, given that semolina is made of wheat, it doesn't seem to have the same stickiness problem that wheat flour has when used to dust proving baskets. Maybe it's just that it's a bit coarser.

Anyway, here are my home made fresh maccheroni that are currently in a box in the fridge, waiting for their day to come.

The very first pasta through the machine was caserecce, and it never got as far as the fridge. That's the bronze die it was extruded through -

Oh joy! And an endless source of Christmas present ideas, as there are any number of different shapes of pasta you can get dies to make.

Toast

Yesterday's newspapers used to finish up as tomorrow's fish and chip wrappers. If I were a slice of bread, I would hope to end my days as breadcrumbs. But this week's double sized white spelt loaf was always going to be toast. It toasted well from the off, and the last dry morsels went the way of all the rest - into the toaster. You served me well, my friend.

The way the toast arranged itself (artlessly, of course) on the plate, reminded me of a Celtic cross -

Sourdough

One of the veterans of my first Sourdough Saturday event last year wrote this week to say that she had managed to get sourdough onto the table at lunch time, rather than keeping the family (who are all keen bread fans) waiting till supper time. The trick is to do the first rise overnight. I've tried this myself, using the fridge to retard the rising. But I've always found that it retarded the bread so much that it had trouble getting going again in the morning. It rather defeats the object if the dough is so cold that it takes all day to warm up again for the second rise.

So the idea is to leave the dough to rise overnight in the kitchen rather than the fridge. This certainly means that the bread is a lot further on in the morning than it would have been if left in the fridge overnight. But crucially it is warm enough in the morning to be moved on into the basket with just a gentle stretch and fold and can be ready to bake in time for lunch.

Of course, it is going to help if your starter (and therefore your sponge) is very vigorously active when you make the dough. Without that precondition, you are never going to get that seemingly endless rising that proper sourdough is capable of, and which separates the fair loaf from the truly outstanding.

Inspired by this new idea, I got to work feeding my starters. Actually I am doing a daily feed of both my starters - wheat and rye - ready for the next Sourdough Saturday which is happening next month. Unless you are lucky enough to be baking every day, encouraging your sourdough to get into exhibition form inevitably produces a lot of waste starter. Fortunately now I have discovered the joys of sourdough muffins, I can cope with virtually unlimited amounts of spare starter. It works really well as muffins, giving a lovely stretchy crumb, if muffins can be said to have a crumb!

Another sourdough veteran suggested using up spare starter as sourdough pancakes. This sounded a bit edgy to me, so I thought I'd give it a try, This was today's first attempt, which was surprisingly good with honey, and not a trace of sourness as such - just a good robust texture. Another hit!