mmmm butter

Every once in a while I like to challenge myself so in my current cooking doldrums, I did what any sane woman would do, I set myself a baking challenge. Now let me back up a bit. Over the winter and early spring, I became slightly obssessed with a show on PBS called The Great British Baking Show. I discovered back episodes of the series on youtube from the BBC where it is known as the Great British BakeOff and watched back to back into the wee hours on many a night. (Can't wait for the next series starting up again in August.)

 As I watched the series progress, the baking seemed so ambitious. All the tarts, breads, pastries the bakers came up with were amazing and then the technical challenges, especially in the last series, were generally things I'd never heard of. So sometime I'm going to try macarons but in the meantime, this summer, I decided to challenge myself to make rough puff pastry and croissants.

First up was rough puff pastry. We've been having a heat wave here, temperatures much higher than we are used to and days and days of sunshine which hasn't meant for days in the kitchen. So my project lapsed while we watched kite surfers, spent days at the beach with friends (and a goat wandering by), and a visit to a local animal rehab center.

Mudpie, a Vancouver Island marmot

Rosie the porcupine hiding behind a post

Awww - a baby possum

Then we had a slight cooling of temperatures and I got back to my projects - baking challenge and repairing a quilt (made over 20 years ago for my grandmother, which I got back after she died).

Women's equestrian drill team

I found a recipe on the BBC Good Food site and set to work. The recipe is from Gordon Ramsay and it worked for me. I added two more roll outs, fold and turns than Ramsay's recipe based on a couple of other recipes. I refrigerated the dough and used half for a savory pinwheel and half for a dessert pinwheel, both of which we liked.

Rough Puff Pastry (from BBC Good Food, Gordon Ramsay)
250 g all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
250 g butter, not cold, but not melted
~ 150 mL water

Add the flour and salt into a bowl. Cut the butter into smaller pieces and rub into the flour until you have it through the flour but still in largish pieces. Make a well in the flour and add most of the water and mix until a dough forms, using more water if required. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 20 minutes.

Pour onto a lightly floured surface, knead slightly and then roll into a rectangle. Roll only in one direction until the rectangle measures about 20 cm by 50 cm. Try and keep the edges straight and neat but don't fuss too much, it will get easier to keep the rectangle as you proceed. You should still be able to see streaks for butter. Fold down the top third of the dough into the center, fold up the bottom third over it and turn the dough a quarter turn (right or left but always go the same direction).

Roll out the dough again into the big rectangle and refold in thirds as per above. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 15 mins to rest and cool. Roll out again into the large rectangle, fold and turn, roll and fold again and refrigerate again for 15 mins. Now the dough is ready to be used. If there are scraps leftover from use, stack them so the layers remain instead of scrunching into a ball.

Ham and Cheese Pinwheels
1/2 batch of rough puff pastry
mustard
ham slices
cheese, sliced or grated

Preheat your oven to 400 deg F. Roll out the pastry into a rectangle measuring about 20 cm by 50 cm. Using about 1 tbsp of mustard, smooth a very thin layer across the whole of the pastry. Layer ham slices over about 2/3 of the pastry, making sure that the long edge of the pastry has a full layer of ham. Do the same with the cheese, if using grated cheese, you can cover the entire pastry. Roll up into a roll, starting on the long edge with ham, rolling as tightly as you can, pressing the end into the roll to form a seam. Slice off 1" wide slices off the log and place on an ungreased baking sheet filling facing upwards. Bake to 12-15 minutes until the pastry is golden brown. Let cool on the baking sheet.

Peach Pinwheels
When I made this I used peach slices, but think it would work better with diced peach so I've written the recipe with that as the suggestion.
1/2 batch of rough puff pastry
1 medium peach, diced
1 tsp melted butter
3 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ginger

Preheat your oven to 400 deg F. Roll out the pastry into a rectangle measuring about 20 cm by 50 cm.
Brush butter over the entire pastry, then sprinkle the brown sugar evenly over, followed by the cinnamon and the ginger. Spread the peach over the pastry, concentrate along one long side.

Roll up starting on the long side with the peach, rolling as tightly as you can, pressing the end into the roll to form a seam.  Cut 1" slices off the log and place on an ungreased baking sheet facing upward.

Bake to 12-15 minutes until the pastry is golden brown. Let cool on the baking sheet.

making bread

I’ve been making bread on and off for many years. I think the very first loaf I made was inspired by the bread we ate aboard the Schooner Lewis R French. I thought if they could make bread from scratch aboard a sailing ship and cook it in a wood stove, I should be able to manage it in my own kitchen. And I did. I made dill and cottage cheese bread and kneaded by hand. I alternated with a cheddar cheese loaf and a hearty white and the bread and kneading got me through a tough winter. Kneading bread is very therapeutic and it’s a wonderful outlet for worry and anger and sorrow. That was many years ago and I’ve moved on and for the most part, thankfully, am not so needful of the therapeutic aspects of kneading bread dough. For a few years, I faithfully made bread in a bread machine. Sometimes I would set it to start in the middle of the night and would wake to the smell of fresh baked bread but truthfully, the bread wasn’t amazing and I always found it weird to pull the paddle out of the loaf. And then the machine started baking the loaves so they were too dark and I put the machine away in a cupboard.

I started baking bread again with the advent of my kitchen aid mixer. And I’ve been very happy with the very much tweaked recipe from America’s Test Kitchen that I make week in and week out for our toast and sandwiches.

I love the artisanal loaves I sometimes pick up at bakeries and markets around town and periodically aspire to more adventurous baking. Last summer I picked up a copy of this book from the library and over the course of several weeks baked several loaves with various variations.

black olive version

My husband always thought it tasted like sourdough. For some reason, I haven’t baked those loaves in a while. I keep thinking I need to try the no-bake bread in a dutch oven but feel like a) my oven doesn’t get hot enough (and we are having issues with the heating element in the oven right now) and b) I don’t really have a dutch oven type dish that I feel is up to the task. Maybe I’m just a chicken but that was one of the reasons I liked this book – that wasn’t a requirement. I had the peel and the baking stone so I was good to go.

At the beginning of January, Tea came up with the idea of cooking challenges over at Tea and Cookies. And the first challenge was sourdough bread, made from homemade sourdough starter. So I started a batch of starter. It went all weird on me around the 7th day which was around the instructions 5th day (I did learn that you have to follow what the starter is doing and not just the instructions). I think at some point I had read the instructions incorrectly and got the flour/water additions mixed up and I think the temperature variations in the house proved too much for my baby starter. So I started again. I coddled the second batch and made sure it stayed warm – wrapping it up and having it near a heating pad. I told myself that if pioneer women could manage making starter and sourdough while farmsteading and on the Oregon trail, surely I could manage this in my kitchen. (Although in my darker moments, I thought they all must have used starter handed down from generations of women who had created the starter in warm summer months!) A week later I had starter and I was getting ready to bake my first sourdough loaf. I used the recipe that Tea posted on her site (the first one) and mixed away. And I got 2 funny looking loaves as a result.

They are delicious although not very tangy. But I assume the tanginess will develop as the starter ages. The dough smelt tangier than any of my previous bread recipes which was exciting. So if you are up for a challenge, try making your own starter and then your own sourdough. Or, get someone you know to make their own starter and then get some from them. I’m passing some of my starter to my sister-in-law and we’ll compare bread.

two jars of starter