Holidays and Bread

I've been away in the Scottish borders for a week - it's a part of the country I love more each time I go there. It has idyllic scenery packed full of romantic architecture and history, we saw a deer in the garden (it was a badger last time), there are house martins nesting above the windows, we heard wood peckers in the trees behind the house, and there's a particularly brilliant bookshop a couple of villages away - what's not to love. We're lucky to have a particularly comfortable flat to borrow, it has an aga in it which has rather added to my love affair with the location and basically means I've spent the last week living a pleasantly middle class dream.  

With the aga waiting for me part of my holiday packing was the River Cottage 'Bread' handbook. I can't remember now if it was the first or second book from the River Cottage series that I bought but it was certainly the one that sold me on them, I think it's the best basic bread guide around - I've certainly not seen anything to beat it yet. What I particularly like about all the handbooks is the general format they share. The size is convenient, they feel nice, and you get a lot of information packed into a neat little package. In this case there are instructions for making an outdoor bread oven, a few recipes for left over bread (the summer pudding is excellent) and things to put on it (nettle pesto, beetroot houmous), and of course there are a lot of bread recipes.

The basic loaf is fool proof - thanks to the very good instructions that explain not only what you do to make a successful loaf, but also why you do it - which I always like to know. Just recently though I've discovered a love of English Muffins - it's taken me a while, I'm not sure why it's taken me all these years to discover them but it has, still now I've discovered them there's no holding back. I had looked up Dan Lepard's recipe but good as it sounds it's also quite a long winded take on the humble muffin. Daniel Stevens version here is rather simpler, relatively quick to make (nothing with yeast is quite instant) and absolutely delicious. The recipe is here.

Other holiday highlights included a couple of visits to the excellent Mainstreet Trading Company, it's a

combination of bookshop, cafe, home ware stuff, and now a deli. The bookshop part is one of those fantastic independent stores which manage to cram all sorts of good things into quite a small space without feeling in the least bit crowded. The cafe is very nice as is the deli and all the other bits. It's a great example of how this kind of thing should be done - every time I've been there it's been busy and is over all far more than the sum of it's parts. There was also plenty of time for reading, as well as just sitting enjoying the scenery (whilst drinking champagne and eating scones) so basically the perfect getaway. 

Building a Wood-Fired Oven for Bread and Pizza – Tom Jaine

There’s something about a bank holiday weekend that calls for a project, so far I’ve spent the afternoon reading about building a wood-fired oven. I don’t have a garden so an oven of my own isn’t really on the cards; tentative suggestions to the Scottish one regarding his garden haven’t been met with any real enthusiasm which is fair enough given we wouldn’t actually be around to use it much. I do however plan to send this book to my father – this is exactly the sort of thing he does so I may not be entirely deprived of proper pizza and bread of the like I’ve never had the chance to taste yet. (The timing is propitious as well - father and stepmother are off to Italy in a few weeks where the food ought to inspire, and we’re all already a bit envious of the oven my cousin built a month ago...)

But back to the book which Tom Jaine very kindly sent me a little while back. Tom runs Prospect books which made me particularly curious to see what his contribution to the English Kitchen series would be like – it’s a more than worthy addition. (I have vague intentions of doing a Prospect week which whether it happens or not is a testament to my love of this publisher.) Because wooden floored flats aren’t ideal homes for wood fired ovens I always intended to pass this book on, but having spent a happy few hours absorbing information I’m ridiculously unwilling to part with it (the chance that dad will deliver is reconciling me to the idea, but still).

Object of Envy

The instructions for building mercifully leave nothing to the imagination and are pitched at the amateur which made me feel like I could genuinely have a go at doing this myself (I think it would be fun which is not a feeling I’ve ever associated with the prospect of brick laying before). What really excites me though is the history and culture of these ovens, that and getting a thorough understanding of how they work. It’s not so much that the doings are complicated although every individual oven will have its idiosyncrasies which would take time to learn and master, and I suspect that the bit where you transfer stuff into the oven and in turn extract it would take quite a bit of practice, but that they are so old.

Bread – when it comes to food it doesn’t get much more fundamental than that, there are few things I find it more satisfactory to make, and few things that taste or smell better than bread fresh out the oven. When I knead dough I think of my mother doing the same thing in the kitchen of my childhood and all the generations before us over thousands of years – and until really very recently in all that history it would have been baked like this, often in community ovens. Bread feels like something almost magical again – it will be a while before I can raise any enthusiasm for a ready sliced loaf of supermarket white.