Thoughts on baking and my daily bread

Being a baker's daughter from Sweden, where most people still do quite a lot of cooking and baking "from scratch" I am always surprised at people's ignorance when it come to baking. (Incidentally, there is no word for 'from scratch' in Swedish, that's the way it is assumed to be done.) Once when serving a bread-loaf filled with olives and feta cheese, someone asked how I got the stuff so seamlessly into the middle of the bread. And after having talked at length about my newest sourdough bread (yes, I know...) my colleague asked whether I used self-raising flour for that. And last but not least, the deprived take-out dinner child's surprised look when she saw me make pizza made me want to cry. She did know that she can make her own pizza!

Real mozzarella and parmesan cheese - from Italy and not the Australian varieties widely available here i Singapore. The latter tend to have an aftertaste of milk powder, which I find difficult accept. And homemade tomatosauce, the only one with my picky kids' stamp of approval; only a little onions and garlic, boiled for at least half an hour with canned tomatoes and then mixed until completely smooth.

My daily bread

My best friend when making bread is the sponge (raskdeg på svenska!) - it's a mix of flour, water, salt and yeast that is made in the evening, to bake with the next day (or any 8-12 hour period that suits your schedule). My dad always made a sponge, but he never left it overnight.  As for the quantities, I use around 700 ml of water for a teaspoon of dry yeast, a couple of teaspoons of salt and then enough flour to make it into a loose dough. I usually use normal white wheat flour to get the yeast and gluten into action (as described above), which is the whole point of the sponge. Mix it for a while to make sure the gluten wakes up and starts forming threads. Then leave it over night.

If you want to add some healthy ingredients in the dough, it's best to it from the beginning. So before adding anything else to the water, I mix oats, oat bran, wheat germ, ground flax and other ingredients that like to soak a little into the water, and leave for 15-30 mins. Then I add the flour, yeast and salt and mix to a gooey consistency, and wait until morning. (Some would advice leaving out the salt in the sponge, but I find that it makes little difference to the proofing process and I don't run the risk of forgetting to add the salt the next day, which used to happen about every other time or so...).
In the morning, this is what you get; a visibly bubbly dough ready to feed with more flour and knead until manageable:

Sponge in the morning, after proofing in room temperature over night. 

Into the sponge, I usually white and whole grain flour of some sort, and add some soy-, blackbean-, buckwheat- and quinoa flour for added nutrition and variation. But not enough for the kids to notice. Then let it rise a few more times, about an hour or two each time, knead in a machine before the first proofing period (if you have one), then on the workbench. Add more flour to make it workable, but you may keep the dough fairly loose if you can manage it. You will see it growing and becoming really alive as you go through this process. Before the final proofing period, sift a generous amount of flour and/or oats/oat bran/polenta on a tea towel, place this in a basket or large bowl. Shape the dough into some sort of round shape and place it on the towel in the bowl. (Later you can experiment with other shapes, but this is the easiest, especially if you have a loose dough.) Turn the oven on 240 degrees and put a tray in to heat it up.

When the big bun looks fully grown in the bowl - after maybe an hour - take the oven tray out, gently place your big dough bun on it, floury side down on the tray, and place in the oven. Leave at 240 degrees until the bread has gotten crusty and brown, then lower to 200 degrees. It should take an hour until it is ready. Take it out and let it cool on a rack. The looser you keep the dough, the crustier and chewier the bread will be. This is the result:

My daily bread. 

My kids love it, also toasted when it's a couple of days old. It's easy once you get the hang of it. Especially if you live in countries with not much bread tradition, it is such an asset to be able to make your own bread. Here in Asia, bread tends to be the American toast variety, and often filled with a lot of additives to keep it fresh forever. I love most Asian food, but when it comes to bread, I gotta make my own!

Burmese food - a beautiful mix of all things Asian

Traditional Burmese fermented tea-leaf salad. Apart from the actual tea-leaves, it was really good.

Burma (Myanmar) is one of the poorest countries in Asia, it is on the verge of possibly overthrowing decades of military rule, and their are still ethnic and religious violence in the northern provinces. Nevertheless, in addition to its stunning beaches and friendly people, the food holds promise an amazing future as a tourism destination. 

Burmese food is an amazing mix of the regional cuisines - Chinese, Thai and Indian - with additional influences from the rest of South East Asia. This is what we saw (and partially ate) the week before Christmas 2013: 

Bye, bye birdies - see you in a wok full of oil!

Vietnamese 'raw' spring rolls.

Squid salad, Thai style.

Fried pancake batter of some sort.

Fish and chicken in a street stall.

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Fried sweet dough with sesame seeds; in Chinatown.

Tiny mandarins.

Spring rolls and fritters are always popular street food all over SE Asia.

Hot pot - another Chinese influence. I have had it in Guizhou; in Switzerland we called it fondue Chinoise.

Palm sugar.

Rice with beans (left); also served for breakfast in our guesthouse.

Whole durian fruit.

Durian opened - and smelly.

Dried seafood.

Fried bugs of some sort; the kids guessed cockroaches, but I think not.

Green papaya, sold by the slice.

Samosas.

Rice, rice, and rice, and also some rice at the back.

Breakfast from the steamer.

Back to school snack - sneaky-healthy wholegrain muffins!

I bake these for my very picky 7-yearold and he has no clue what hits him when he eats these bad boys pretty much every day for school snack. These muffins look like basic vanilla muffins, but they are filled with lots of wholegrain goodness! The secret is all about hiding the good stuff under a layer of sprinkles. Not ideal, but what are you going to do....

Bake in 180 degrees C for around 20-25 minutes as muffins (or around 30-35 minutes in large, flat, greased baking tin and cut into smaller pieces when cool).

¾  cup white flour

¼  cup whole wheat or spelt flour

½ cup ground flaxseed

½ cup wheat germ  

1 cup brown sugar (or ½ cup brown sugar and ½ cup stevia)

1 tsp salt

3 tsp baking powder

½ tsp bourbon vanilla powder

1 egg

¾ cup milk

1/3 cup cold pressed vegetable oil (macademia or sunflower seed)

Multi-colored sprinkles 

Combine dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients in the main mixing bowl. Fold the dry ingredients in the wet until just combined. Pour in baking tin or muffin liners. Just before going into the oven, add sprinkles on top to make them 100% irresistible even to the most sensitive palates (well, eyes maybe)!

Dusting off the pasta machine

After all the cooking of Christmas food and New Year's buffet, we were all sick and tired of complicating things so we wanted pasta, some of us with pesto and some without. Anyway, the two greedy Italians roadshow inspired this recipe, but I had no energy to make my own pesto. (Partly because I cannot get European basil in my grocery store.) You may need to add some extra water to the dough if it is too hard, but it should obviously be much more dense than normal bread dough.

4 dl plain flour
3 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
(1-2 tablespoons water)

Sift the flour onto the worktop, make a little whole in the middle where you put the eggs and eggyolks. Wisk around with your fingers in the eggs, moving outward to incorporate the four little by little. Continue working until dough is smooth - if you don't get there, add a a tablespoon of water or two and knead on.

Roll out the dough with your pastamachine if you have one, otherwise, use a rolling pin. (Have never tried it, but should work. At least you have less to clean afterwards!) First to flatten it, then to make the tagliatelle (if you don't have a past machine, just roll up the pasta sheets and cut them into thinner strands. Then hang them to dry for at least an hour before cooking - a clothes rack will do!

Oat germ and quinoa bread

This yeast bread is made from a dough that has risen for about 24 hours the first time around, to make the spongue. After about four rounds of kneading and rising on the countertop over the course of a lazy day at home, this is the result:

...a crusty, fragrant bread to go with our pork stew.

Egg heart

I love browsing in Asian home and kitchen supply shops. Picked up this today at Isetan, the Japanese dep't store, to make heart shaped fried eggs.

Cool veggies

Climate and culture dictates what we eat here in Singapore (and probably elsewhere as well). It's difficult to keep things fresh because of the heat and the humidity (egg quality seems to be a particular challenge; for more on this, see http://www.globaltrends.com/blog/entry/the-challenge-of-feeding-singapore) but we also have a range of amazing fruits and vegetables. But there is clearly also a cultural element to what is available - mainly Chinese and Indian, but also other South East Asian produce. Shopping for new year's I found some amazing veg in our local wet market.

These are some big radishes - see the (seemingly) tiny lime i put into the mix for comparison!

And there's not just a lot of fresh ginger in stock, there's also yellow ginger (no, they are not maggots)....

....and the young ginger (I'm expecting young yellow ginger any day now).

 

 Finally, this cabbage is too beautiful to eat.

New York Cheesecake - fast inte riktigt (med pepparkakor och citrus)

Nu skulle det ske, tänkte jag. Och det skulle det och jag gjorde den - den perfekta cheesecaken. Nästan. Åtminstone som jag vill ha den: krämig men ändå fast. Botten gjorde jag på gamla pepparkakor och smör. Men själva fyllingen var bäst. Min vana trogen funderade jag på hur man skulle kunna göra denna kaka nyttigare - och då menar jag inte med mindre kalorier utan med mer näring och fibrer - men jag gav upp. Tre matskedar grahamsmjöl istället för vetemjöl hade inte gjort varken från eller till i det här sammanhanget! Det hade desutom säkert förstört kakan.

Här är receptet:

1 kg Philadelphia eller annan liknande ost (men absolut ingen light-skit!)
2,5 dl socker
skal av en citron och en apelsin
1dl creme fraiche (ingen light-skit här heller!)
2 dl vispgrädde
1 krm vaniljpulver
3 msk vetemjöl
3 stora ägg + 1 gula

Botten: 
Ta digestivekex eller pepparkakor eller andra kex som blivit över i skåpet. Mixa eller stöt, blanda med smält smör, pressa in i botten på en springform och gör en kant som sträcker sig upp ett par centimeter upp över skarven. Ställ kallt eller förbaka i ugnen i tio minuter (och ställ i det senare fallet i frysen så att den är kall när fyllningen hälls i.)

Fyllningen:
Mixa osten till en glansig röra i ett par minuter. (Jag kör med Kitcheaid, men elvisp går säkert lika bra.) 
Häll i sockret och vispa tills smeten är helt slät. Blanda sen i mjölet, vaniljpulvret och citrusskalen. Skrapa ner väggarna på skålen flera gånger så att allt blir jämnt fördelat. Sen är det dags för äggen, blanda ner dem ett och ett på medelhög hastighet. Vispa creme fraiche och grädde till en jämn smet i en separat skål, och tillsätt detta som sista ingrediens i fyllingen. Rör tills smeten är jämn, inte längre.

Klä springformen med två lager aluminiumfolie och häll sedan smeten i formen. Ställ formen i en långpanna, in med den i ugnen och häll sedan i kokande vatten så att det når ca 2-3 cm upp på kakformens kant. Baka i 180 grader i vattenbad i en timma. Stäng av ugnen och låta kakan stå stå kvar i en timma till medan ugnen kallnar. Låt kallna helt och förvara i kylskåp; täck me aluminiumfolie.

• Alla ingredienser ska vara rumstempererade, särskilt osten - tag ut den ur kylen flera timmar innan du börjar baka.

• Tänk på att det är som en vaniljkräm som bakas i vattenbad, inte en vanlig sockerkakssmet. Om man får in för mycket luft i smeten och då blir det sprickor i kakan när den bakas.