Small Plot, Big Ideas

I probably wouldn’t have thought of trying to bake soda bread if I hadn’t seen it mentioned during a an old River Cottage program I happened to watch recently.

If I’m honest I would have guessed that soda bread must be something like sour dough which I believe takes some time and effort to make and that is not my sort of thing. It’s possible that I have this wrong as I’ve not made sour dough (yet) but I can’t usually be bothered with recipes that need leaving overnight or bursts of activity every so often – it must be an attention span problem on my part!

Soda bread on the other hand seemed to be just my sort of recipe – easy to make, no particularly special ingredients, very little preparation time and most importantly almost impossible to mess up! What could possibly go wrong…

I found this handy soda bread recipe on the web which also describe what to do when there is no buttermilk. This  is essential for me as we never normally have that and certainly didn’t have it when I decided to try making this! It all seemed fairly straightforward so away I went and a short time later a nice looking loaf of soda bread was cooling on a rack.

The only minor catastrophe was (I think) a misreading of the quantities when not using buttermilk but I managed by just adding more and more flour until the consistency looked about right!

My first loaf of soda bread

As can be seen, the final result was pretty impressive to my untrained eye and by the morning there was only enough left for a couple of slices of toast!

When the whole loaf goes that quickly it can’t be all bad, just imagine what would have happened if I’d made a “proper” soda bread rather than this first test run.

Sliced soda bread

Next on my list of breads to try is maybe adapting this focaccia recipe on the BBC website which I might attempt to make into a garlic/cheese “tear and share” to go with some pasta.

Last night I had another go a bread baking with a few minor tweaks to the basic recipe and I managed to turn out a couple of truly majestic tasting but diminutive white loaves. Each of my attempts at bread making yield slightly different results, some of which are better than others  but this most recent effort was generally considered an excellent batch.

Each time I like to vary the approach slightly to get a better understanding of how that affects the results so this time I decided to split the resulting dough between two loaf tins not using a single tin as normal.

Another variation was the use of Allinson Premium White Very Strong Bread Flour which I hadn’t tried before. Maybe this explains the good results but I’m not giving up all the credit just yet.

Also while leaving the dough to prove for an hour or so in the tins before baking, I decided to put them in the oven which had  retained a little heat from use earlier in the evening.

The oven wasn’t by any means hot but just warmer than the kitchen and I believe this also influenced the results. I can’t let Allinson’s get all the glory!

If there is a downside to this batch of bread I would have to say it was the loaf size. I know we should value quality rather  than quantity but I would have prefered both in equal amounts!

Next time I think I will increase the quantities used by about 50% so that each loaf is visually just that little more impressive.

Another planned future variation will be to experiment with adding seeds (e.g. pumpkin, poppy etc) or other flavourings before baking.

I’m always on the look out for  good  bread recipes though so please pass them on to me!

After my first 2 attempts at bread making (white bread rolls and after that a loaf) had proved fairly successful if slightly stodgy, it was clearly time to up my game and try making brown bread.

We had a great time up at the Rothbury Food and Craft Festival yesterday which had lots of interesting local produce on offer including a tasty goat burger made with meat from Lakewood goats and some excellent Brinkburn goats cheese from Northumberland Cheese.

Apparently the goat burger was made by the clever butchers at  Blagdon Farm Shop so as we had never been there before we headed over afterwards for a flying visit.

I spotted this (probably over-priced) bag of stone ground brown flour which led to the idea of making some wholemeal bread.

The fact that it was produced relatively locally by Heatherslaw Corn Mill at Cornhill-on-Tweed was also an influence I suppose but I didn’t need too much encouragement for a new bread experiment really.

After going through the process which is now fairly familiar to me, the dough was left to rise in the loaf tin on top of the oven as it warmed.

This time I decided to learn from the stodgy past experience and give the dough more time to rise – a total of 1.5 hours rather than 1 hour during my previous attempts.

Immediately before it went into the oven the whole thing looked very impressive and remarkably professional for me!

There followed a tense wait with much peering through the glass door on the oven while enjoying the fresh baking smells that filled the kitchen. Eventually it was time to take it out of the oven and assess the results of my efforts.

A truly majestic wholemeal loaf and even when sliced it looked good… I think that this lunchtime will be wholemeal bread and goats cheese!