I have acquired quite a few books on bread making over the last 3/4 years and dipped in and out of them, trying a recipe here and there, without full commitment to learning the craft properly.
This week my son has had Chicken Pox and we have been in quarantine at home, so what a perfect time to bake some bread! I picked up James Morton's Brilliant Bread book and found his recipe for breadsticks, and as I had Taramasalata in the fridge I thought I'd start with these, especially as they looked easy with the only ingredients being flour, water, yeast and salt.
When making something new I always read the recipe at least twice. With this one, even though it's a very straight forward recipe I read it through over and over as I was going through each stage. So after mixing, kneading, proving, dividing, rolling, proving again & dealing with the tricky art of getting them on the hot stone without knocking them back I was flummoxed when I realised there was no instruction on how long they should be in the oven. How did I miss that? This is clearly a mistake and I've never seen it in a book before. Can you believe I've managed to choose the one recipe without timing instructions! This felt like a Great British Bake Off moment, you know where they are given basic instructions and have to use their intuition. I made a guess at 10 minutes and eventually I left them in for 14. I don't think they were absolutely perfect and as I used my dough hook on my mixer to knead, I could be accused of cheating, but I was really happy with the result. Crispy on the outside whilst fluffy on the inside and delicious eaten whilst still warm, even my sick toddler, who hadn't eaten hardly anything for days devoured one. The remainder were fought over by the rest of the family and as they are so easy to make I'm going have them as a regular in my repertoire. I will probably have to double the recipe as 8 doesn't go far in a family of 6, and one is just not enough.....
No comments:
Post a Comment