Baking

How to bake French-style brioche bread

April 12, 2013
French brioche bread

Baking bread. It sneaks up on you. It starts slowly, just a little experiment, maybe a curious attempt at a simple loaf. Nothing out of the ordinary, just flour, salt, yeast, water and time. You find that it works. It works better than you could ever dare believe it’d work. Your bread tastes real, substantial, [...]

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Lekach, or Jewish honey cake

December 16, 2012
Lekach or honey cake for Rosh Hashanah, by Claudia Roden

This honey cake originated in Germany in the Middle Ages, and became a staple of the Jewish kitchen, finding a place as the traditional cake of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It symbolises a hope for a sweet and fruitful new year. Many dismiss honey cake as one of those traditional staples that simply [...]

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Baklava

October 21, 2012
Turkish baklava - a rich dessert of filo pastry, nuts and sugar syrup.

Leanne Kitchen’s Turkey has a piece in it about baklava, but no recipe. Kitchen declined to include one, because baklava is one of those things that’s best done professionally, by people who make it all the time, using those generations-old recipes and techniques that will live forever. Reading that did give me pause for thought, but [...]

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Fresh ginger cake

September 23, 2012
A spicy ginger cake made with fresh shredded ginger instead of the usual dried, powdered stuff. From a recipe by David Lebovitz.

Ginger is a common flavour in lots of cakes and biscuits, but the way it gets there is usually through the use of dried and ground ginger. Fresh ginger is more normally used as one of the first things in the pan at the bottom of an Asian or Chinese dish. In its dried form, [...]

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How to make croissants

May 5, 2012
how to make croissants

They look so complicated, with their elegant crescent shape and proudly airy layers of rich pastry, tightly curled up and falling over one another. Breaking one open sends a shower of buttery flakes everywhere and leaves your fingers satisfyingly greasy. Surely, this type of baking is the preserve of the professional? Or the French? But, [...]

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How to make parathas

April 28, 2012
How to make Indian or Pakistani parathas, enriched unleavened Asian flatbreads

A while ago, I spent some time in India, travelling around Rajasthan and the north of the country.  We ended up in the town of Jaiselmer, deep in the Rajasthani scrublands, a place that feels like the very edge of the world. The big tourist thing to do in Jaiselmer is to hire a guide [...]

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On why I bake bread

April 8, 2012
On the spiritual art of making bread

I made a couple of sourdough loaves yesterday. They started out the night before in a mixing bowl, a ladleful of starter mixed with flour and water. More flour in the morning, salt, kneading, proving, shaping, baking. 24 hours of waiting went into those loaves. Slow food, indeed. This batch was different from the last. [...]

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Hennickehammar’s toasted ginger cake

April 1, 2012
Hennickehammar's toasted ginger cake, from Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, by Diana Henry

This cake is like a lighter version of a Christmas fruit cake…many of the same ingredients, but without the stodge and the months of waiting.  It has all the same punchiness and body, but none of the heaviness. The usual medley of dried fruit is replaced by a single one – dried cranberries, plumped up in [...]

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