Bread In An Instant

I thoroughly enjoy exploring new cookbooks, especially the ones that give me a new perspective on familiar dishes or techniques. I am just as happy today with my trio of British cookbooks as I was when I bought them two weeks ago, especially with Mr. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

My lunches for the past two weeks (I am a very dedicated brown bagger) have come from his River Cottage Everyday, and his recipes have even made it into friends' dinner parties after a few dishes caught the eye of my various visitors as they idly flipped through the book as it lay about in my living room.

But the real revelation that he has facilitated for me has been regarding bread...one of my favorite subjects...soda bread to be exact.

As the dear Mr. F-W points out in the preamble to the recipe, sometimes when the bread box is empty, all you want to is replenish it quickly. No rising, no waiting, no starter, no proofing. Just immediate fresh bread. His solution of soda bread is one I would never have thought of.

I've always considered soda bread to be a component appropriate strictly for the breakfast table, as the versions I've had generally seem to have currants, which somehow makes me think of scones, which in turn makes me think of early morning pastries. But this does not have to be the case! Raisins may be omitted, savory elements may be added, and you have a bread appropriate for any time of day.

Simply combine flour, baking soda and yogurt (along with a few other choice ingredients),

stir like mad, but not for too long!

Knead for a few seconds at most, cut a hot cross bun like cross in the top (although perhaps not so deep as I did...my loaf opened up a bit dramatically) and voila, you have your daily bread in less than an hour.

Classic Soda Bread

from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday

500 g flour (or enough to make a sticky but not too sticky dough)

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

400 ml buttermilk or yogurt thinned with milk

A little milk, if necessary

Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl and stir in the salt. Make a well in the center and pour in the buttermilk, stirring as you go. If necessary, add a tablespoon or two of milk to bring the mixture together; it should form a soft dough, just this side of sticky. Tip it out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead lightly for about a minute, just long enough to pull it together into a loose ball but no longer--you need to get it into the oven while the baking soda is still doing its stuff. You're not looking for the kind of smooth, elastic dough you'd get with a yeast-based bread.

Put the round of dough on a lightly floured baking sheet and dust generously with flour. Mark a deep cross in it with a sharp, serrated knife, cutting about two thirds of the way through the loaf. Put it in an oven preheated to 200 degrees C and bake for 40-45 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped underneath.

Cool on a wire rack if like a crunchy crust, or wrap in a clean tea towel if you prefer a soft crust.

Varition: Six-seed soda bread

Mix together 2 tablespoons each of sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, poppy and linseeds (I just used whatever I had in the house, which did not include this full list!), plus 1 teaspoon of fennel seeds; set aside. Follow the main recipe but use half white flour and half wholemeal flour. Add all but 1 tablespoon of the seeds to the dry ingredients before proceeding as above. After cutting a cross in the top of the loaf, brush it with buttermilk or ordinary milk and sprinkle with the remaining seeds. Bake as above.

Give Us This Day...Again

My love of homemade bread is no secret. I've been through Dan Lepard's genius book of artisan loaves, I've messed around with Michael Ruhlman's ratio, and I've occasionally even dipped into Deborah Madison's bread chapters for inspiration. I feel pretty happy with my repertoire at this point...a bread for every mood if you will.

So when my mother claimed that she had the end all be all recipe that I simply had to try, I was skeptical. And I was even more skeptical when she told me that the origin of the recipe was a book she had picked up on a bargain table in some big box retail store, the name of which she could not recall.

Therefore when the recipe arrived in the mail (yes, the actual mail, envelope, stamp the whole thing...to be fair my parents' scanner was broken...they are not normally quite so traditional) it sat around on a tabletop for many weeks before I formed the loaves. Which as it turns out, was my loss.

The bread is dense and chewy in the most satisfying way possible and ever so slightly sweet. Do not be fooled by the very Berkley-esque list of ingredients, the bread is the farthest thing from one of those "healthy obligations" that seems to hang over your head the longer it stays in your kitchen (yes, CSA box, I'm looking at you). And do not be intimidated by the ingredient list either. I have no idea what malted wheat flakes are. I found something flakey in my refrigerator that looked like it could be wheat based...in retrospect I think it could have been wheat bran, but frankly I couldn't tell the difference. Throw whatever grainy/flakey/wheaty items you've got and I can virtually guarantee a phenomenal outcome.

Anthony's Grain Bread

My mother's adaption of the recipe from Linda Collister and Anthony Blake's Country Bread

Makes 3 loaves

To start:

1 cup (100g) malted wheat flakes (or whatever approximation you can find)

5 tablespoons (50g) chopped rye berries (I didn't chop them, and actually may have accidentally used kamut instead of rye now that I think about it)

1/2 cup (50g) cracked wheat

1/4 cup (50g) steel-cut oats, roughly chopped

1/4 cup (40g) rye berries

1 tablespoon (10g) pearl barley

4-5 tablespoons molasses, depending on your taste

4 cups boiling water

To finish:

2 cups (200g) dark rye flour

1 3/4 cups (200g) coarse whole-wheat flour, preferably stoneground

4 cups (500g) unbleached white bread flour

3 teaspoons fine sea salt

3 0.6-oz cakes fresh yeast (50g), or three envelopes of dry yeast

2/3 cup (150ml) lukewarm water

2/3 cup (150ml) stout, at room temperature

1 tablespoon sunflower or light olive oil

3 loaf pans, well greased

Start by combining the first six ingredients in a large bowl. Add the molasses to the measured boiling water and stir until dispersed, then add to the dry ingredients and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap and leave for 24 hours.

The next day, the soaked mixture should resemble coarse, sloppy porridge. Add the rye, whole-wheat, and white flours and the salt. Crumble the yeast into the luke-warm water and stir until dispersed, then add the stout. Pour the liquid into the grain and flour mixture, and mix thoroughly to make a firm but not stiff dough. Add a little more water if necessary, or, if the dough feels very sticky, work in a little extra white flour.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface and knead thoroughly for 10 minutes (dust your hands and the work surface with flour only if the dough is sticky). Shape the dough into a ball. Put the oil into a clean, large bowl, add the ball of dough, and flip it over so it is coated with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature until doubled in size--about 2 hours, but add more time in cold weather, less in hot.

Punch down the risen dough and divide it into three equal portions. Shape each into an oblong to fit the pans, then put the dough neatly into the pans. Cover and leave as before until doubled in size--allow 1 1/2 hours.

Toward the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Uncover the loaves and dust with a little rye or whole-wheat flour. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the loaves sound hollow when unmolded and tapped underneath. Turn out and cool on a wire rack.

The bread is best if left for a day before slicing, and will keep for 5 days, or can be toasted. Once thoroughly cooled, it can be frozen for up to a month.

Give Us This Day...

Oddly, I'm still making my own bread. Despite the heat, humidity, time constraints and the availability of good bread at retail establishments, I still bake a loaf every week or two. I suppose I like the ritual of it, just as I enjoy my morning tea out of a pot rather than a tea bag, despite the fact that the taste is really the same if I'm honest about it.


For the last six months or so, my bi-weekly/weekly loaf has been one from Dan Lepard's wonderful bread book The Handmade Loaf. But this weekend, inspired by Michael Ruhlman's exhortation to use ratios when it comes to bread baking (and everything else, actually), I went outside my comfort zone and abandoned all of my recipe books. And the result was a triumph.



I think this may be my best loaf ever. High, round, crusty with a tender yet substantial interior texture. What was this miraculous non-recipe? Well, you need a scale, but beyond that it couldn't be easier. 1 part sourdough starter (I used the starter I had on hand, but if you don't have any check out this Ruhlman post, which describes an easy 48 hour method for developing one), 1 part water, 2 parts bread flour and 1% salt by weight.


Now I hewed to the 1:1 water and starter ratio (350 grams of each) and the recommended salt level (14 grams), but I also threw in a few handfuls of wheat germ to give the bread a little gravitas, and then just added enough flour to make a dough. I can only assume it was somewhere in the neighborhood of the 700 grams that would have been called for. I kneaded like crazy once the dough was well formed, until it felt tight and it sprang back when I pressed it, and then I left it to rise in a clean, oiled bowl until it doubled in bulk (yesterday that was about two hours, but it varies pretty dramatically).

Following the first rise I punched it down and then formed it into a boule, which I let rise in a bread basket. I had a few errands to run, so threw it in the refrigerator while I was out. Once back, I left it out at room temperature for an hour to take the chill off. And in the meantime, despite the hellish temperature, I preheated the oven, with my Dutch oven inside, to 450 degrees. Once everything was ready, I dumped the formed dough in the Dutch oven, clamped the lid on so that the bread would rise in a humid atmosphere, and baked it for 30 minutes. Then, to ensure a crisp golden crust, I removed the lid and baked for another 20 minutes. And happiness ensued.