Yesterday, feeling nostalgic for somewhat less alarming times, I remembered being a student in Aix-en-Provence, and how I grew fat and happy in 1986, sitting in my blue-shuttered window seat overlooking the second-hand bookshop in rue des Cordeliers , reading anything I could get my hands on, drinking rough local rose and eating mainly walnut baguette with French butter.  (And potato puree – also with French butter!)

This morning, I made a couple of baguettes aux noix, for old times’ sake, and to go with our Dalmatian bean stew (fazol) for supper.   It’s an easy bake;  30 %  leaven, and a blend of white and brown spelt and a little rye, with handfuls of crushed walnuts.   Next time, I’ll add some walnut oil for good measure.   I put the baguettes in couches to prove, then baked them in trays.    We’ve already started eating them….   hope there’s some left for supper.

Oh, and I found time during proving to start fermenting some veg from Ben’s Farm Shop in Yealmpton:  sweet rainbow carrots, tangy baby turnips, taut celery, garlic, fresh ginger and pointy peppers.   Okay, I know it’s not bread, but it’s one more step in the direction of self-reliance  – which, in times like these, we probably all need more than we know.  I’m thinking of building a root cellar as  you read this!

We have spent over a year developing our gluten free sourdough recipes, and have a waiting list of students eager for the follow-on to our Udemy course, ‘Deliciously Gluten Free Artisan Breads‘.

‘Naturally Gluten Free Sourdough‘ will show people how to build their own gluten free starter cultures, how to make and use gluten free leavens (there are lots of different kinds), and how to make beautiful, bouncy, gluten free sourdough breads, rolls and pizza.

Given the bad press that industrially produced GF bread is beginning to quite rightly attract,  we’re looking forward to seeing a lot more students on our live courses at The Artisan Bakery School, and online.

I am practising baking for Mothers Day, when I’ll be selling these garland breads at the Sparkwell Farmers Market, this Sunday.  They are based on a traditional ‘korovai’ bread,  which is baked for family celebrations in eastern Europe, the circular shape symbolising family unity.  They are made with wheat flour, eggs, butter, vanilla, citrus zest and rum, or in this case orange liqueur, and have a semi-sweet taste with the lightest, softest crumb.   The decorations are all hand-shaped, from a different dough made with double cream.

If you would like one for any other special occasion, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Happy Mothers Day, everyone.

To prove, my last post notwithstanding, that not all passions are purple, here is my latest venture into fermentation: Mexican escabeche!  It’s all vibrant colour, tingling tastebuds and bubbling jars.  It’s also easy-peasy to make.  Just chopped veg, chilli peppers, bay leaves, peppercorns, sea salt, organic cider vinegar and water.  Dissolve salt in water with cider, pour over veg in sterilised jar, tuck a cabbage or a cauliflower leaf over the veg to keep it submerged, then leave for 3 – 5 days to ferment. If liquid drops below surface, top up with more salt water.  Will keep for about a month in the fridge.

This  natural fermentation is a fantastic probiotic, and the veg make a wonderful, light, fiery, crunchy side dish for crusty sourdough bread and fresh butter.

To answer my own question, then: yes, I would not only pickle a rainbow, I’d very happily eat it too.

This one was for Dragan, on Valentine’s Day; not because he cares one jot about Valentine’s, but because as a  true Dalmatian, he loves pomegranates, and the  deep, lipstick pink of them looks so stunning against the violet cabbage, I couldn’t resist sending him a little message.   Fermenting dough is usually more in our line, but we’re expanding into fermented vegetables this year, because it’s all so good for our guts.  The pebble holding the cabbage down is from the local beach, and sauerkraut is now bubbling nicely.  We’re looking forward to having purple with everything!  

Anyone who works from home knows that ‘weekend’ can be a bit of a woolly concept, i.e. it doesn’t always happen at the end of the week. It might be a Tuesday lie-in, or a Wednesday night out, then a full-on thrash through Fri, Sat, Sun.   Personally, I love weekends because they tend to bring baking students, and especially when the students come to stay over.  This Friday, Sarah from Belfast arrived to do the Deliciously Gluten Free Artisan Breads course with me on the Saturday.  We had a great time getting to know her over dinner by the fire on Friday night, and a good laugh baking GF with her on Saturday. It’s always fun seeing someone get their first stir in a jar of GF sourdough!  We hope she’ll be coming back with her boyfriend later this year, to do some wood fired cooking in the garden…

Not that kind of affair!  I mean, the local farmers market and farmers breakfast, held in Sparkwell village community hall just up the road from us here. It’s been going since October 2018, and I think it’s really beginning to gather momentum.   We take orders on Facebook and email, to get a rough idea of numbers, and then take a guess at how many to bake ‘on spec’.  Dragan and I set the leavens and scale out the flours the night before, then get up at 5 am to start mixing the ‘Pilgrims’  – naturally leavened large white organic loaves in the form of the pilgrim’s shell (in my basket in the photo).   It was minus 2 degrees outside this morning, so I was pretty glad to be indoors in  the bakery!   And our guess on numbers turned out to be almost spot on.  Just one slice of focaccia left to take home  –  that’s a very happy baker on her way to a long soak in the bath!

We had a great time on Saturday with returning student Slafka and her husband Dave, on a special course combining both Wood Fired Pizza and The Magic of Wood Fired Cookery.  We had two ovens on the go:  on Big Mama indoors (best in January weather) we baked sea bass, mushrooms stuffed with St Agur cheese and garlic, potatoes tartiflette (think cream, herbs and wine),  onion flowers with bbq sauce, and pears stuffed with hazelnut frangipane for dessert.   Outside the kitchen door, we allowed our students to light Huff, manage all the fire and bake pizza in, under Dragan’s watchful eye.   It hailed at all the wrong moments, but the gleam in our students’ eyes told us all we needed to know: they’ve got the fire bug fair and square.

One of the few truly seasonal activities left in the modern kitchen, making Seville orange marmalade for the first time this week made me very happy.  I liked the connection I felt going back through time, through my mother (the Marmalade Queen) and all my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, for centuries.  I added a couple of lemons, as many people do, and the fragrance in the kitchen was spectacular.

As I started rather late at night, and hadn’t really prepared anything in advance (like scrubbing and sterilising jars), I did the basic squeezing and shredding, then left it till the morning (5am) when I got up to bake for the Cornwood Stores.  While the doughs were rising, I sterilised the jars, and managed to dissolve Billingtons Caster sugar in the fruit and water, but then I had to stop to shape the loaves… I finally got to boil it all up around 3 o’clock in the afternoon.  Marmaladus Interruptus!  But it worked.  Deliciously.

Black cherry jam on buttery chocolate toast, that’s what I’m talking about.  No pictures of said toast, because we’ve eaten it all now, but lots of lovely shots of it before  it was, well, toast.

Gluten free sourdough, vegan,  AND chocolate. Bread doesn’t get more virtuous or more delectable.  The highly nutritious teff flour, combined with arrowroot, brown rice leaven and raw cacao results in a luscious loaf.  No xanthan gum, no modified starches, no cheating at all.

Why not learn to bake your own gluten free sourdough? Our next two courses on Saturday 9th and Saturday 16th February. But don’t leave it too long, you know what those chocaholics are like…