Low-knead bread

Before the COVID-19 lockdown of early 2020 it had been a while since I had made bread. As I was suddenly home it seemed like a good time to get back to regularly making bread. Panic buying had depleted the local supermarkets' stock of flour, and while I managed to find some strong white flour and some wholemeal flour, it seemed impossible to find rye flour. This was a shame, as the bread recipe I used most required some rye flour. Somewhere on social media I read a suggestion to try making bread with some cooked oats, and this got me thinking if I could replace the rye flour with cooked oats.

A little bit of trial and error got me to this recipe. There are many steps, but not that much kneading. 

Ingredients

• 310 ml water
• 50 gr rolled oats
• 15 gr unsalted butter
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp sugar (black treacle or honey)
• 1 tsp yeast 
• 275 gr strong white flour
• 75 gr strong wholemeal flour

Needed

• Oven
• Loaf tin
• Mixing bowl
• Big spatula
• Kettle
• Measuring cup
• Tsp and tbsp measures

Steps

1. Boil the kettle.
2. Pour 310 ml of boiling water into a large mixing bowl (I use the one from our Kenwood mixer)
3. Add the oats, butter, salt and sugar.
4. Leave for about twenty minutes until it has cooled enough (yeast apparently works hardest around 35℃ and dies somewhere around 60℃, so I just stick my finger in it to check that it is about body temperature).
5. Once cool enough, sprinkle the yeast on top.
6. Leave again for a few minutes until some foam has appeared, that's the yeast having been reactivated.
7. Add the flours.
8. Mix - I use the dough hook on our mixer and give it some wellie for only a few minutes - but am under the impression that just mixing well should be enough at this stage.
9. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and leave to rest for 10 to 15 minutes. This should probably be "in a warm place," but I've just left it on the kitchen work surface so far.
10. Uncover. Take a plastic spatula and lift the dough from one side and fold it over. Turn the bowl a quarter and do the same again. Repeat until you've turned the bowl around a few times.
11. Repeat steps 9 and 10 three or four times (reuse the tea towel!)
12. Grease and line your loaf tin. You'll want to stick the baking paper down quite well, as it will help with the next step.
13. "Tip" the dough into the loaf tin. In reality this will mean scraping it out with the spatula.
14. Stretch the dough a little so it sort of fills the loaf tin. It will rise to fill it, but if you push or pull it a little towards both ends the end result will be a more even loaf.
15. Cover the loaf tin with a dome of kitchen foil, making sure that the kitchen foil does not touch the dough, and that the dough has room to rise. I make the dome small enough that the loaf tin plus dome will fit in the top oven of our double oven.
16. Put the dough in a warm spot to rise. For this I use our top oven, which I will switch on for about a minute to 30℃. Don't want the oven to be warmer, as I don't want to kill the yeast at this point. 
17. Wait for about half an hour. You might want to check on your dough to make sure it still has room under the kitchen foil dome. If it's not got room left, just take the foil off (but save it).
18. Preheat your main oven to 230℃.
19. When the oven is hot enough and you think your dough is ready to be baked (my estimate of this is "somewhere before it all spills over the edge of the loaf tin") move the loaf tin into the oven. Take the kitchen foil off if you haven't yet. Save the foil.
20. After 10 minutes, turn the oven down to 200℃.
21. Bake for another 25 minutes. It's probably wise to check the last 5 or 10 minutes to see if the bread needs protection from burning. If it does, stick the foil dome on top.
22. Take bread out of the oven and tip it out on a wire rack.
23. Tap the bottom. If it sounds hollow, it's probably done. If it does not sound hollow, stick it back in the oven for another 10 minutes (no need for the tin).

The timings might be a little off, not only because not all ovens are the same, but also because I actually use a tin that is 1.5 the size and have adjusted the ingredients accordingly, but am not entirely sure about adjusting the baking timings.

Now that I have found rye flour in the shops again I skip the oats steps, and add 50 gr rye flour along with the other flours.

Mincemeat Turnovers

Every New Year's Eve I crave oliebollen, but since these require deep frying and hence too much faff, I make appelflappen. Apple turnovers are the only traditional Dutch New Year's Eve food that isn't deep fried, but baked in the oven instead.



Last year I made the filling for the appelflappen from scratch. This year I used a jar of mincemeat instead. Far from traditional, but if the number of these minceflappen that my daughter ate is anything to go by then it was a success! Using a jar is definitely easier than making the filling from scratch, but I thought the mincemeat turned out a bit runny. I think I prefer the more traditional apple turnovers, but think that the ease of using a jar will probably win me over to make these again next New Year.

500gr puff pastry
400gr mincemeat
1 beaten egg
About 2 tsp sugar

Pre-heat fan oven to 200°C.

Roll out puff pastry thinly.

Cut pastry into twelve squares of about 12cm.

Place small heap of filling in centre of each square.



Fold each square over to form a triangle.



Brush with the beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar.



Bake in oven for about 10-15 minutes.

1 January 2017

I made two batches yesterday for a party, but because I only had one jar of mincemeat I made one version with a more traditional apple and sultana filling.

For the mincemeat version I heated the mincemeat in a pan and drained the liquid off through a sieve. This helped the consistency of the mincemeat turnovers, but not necessarily the flavour!

For the apple and sultana turnovers I used one cored and peeled and chopped apple and an inexact amount of sultanas and currants soaked in sherry with speculaas kruiden (cinnamon would do). Before folding the pastry over the filling I put a thin marzipan sausage on the filling.
This version was much tastier than the one with mincemeat and is the one I will be making in the future.

Cheat's Trifle

For the last four years I have made a trifle for our Christmas dinner. You know you've been accepted when your family let's the foreigner make the trifle.

When I was looking for trifle recipes my wife initially suggested I would make Heston Blumenthal's version*. Hah, very funny, love, but no. I decided to go for Rick Stein's Traditional English Trifle.

Well, I looked at it.

And then I took every shortcut I could think of.

Bake my own madeira cake? Oh, look, cheap supermarket's madeira cake.
Make my own custard? Ooo, look, cheap supermarket's fresh custard...

I've never actually made Rick Stein's trifle and as a result I don't have a clue whether my shortcut version has any positive relation to his, but my family likes it, so who am I not to keep making it?

Since I'm not actually following Rick Stein's recipe I've always had to guess most of the quantities and have ended up buying too much. My main reason for writing this down is so next year I can finally stop buying too many ingredients.



While most celebrity chefs always seem to suggest getting the best ingredients money can buy, I suggest getting the "normal" range of fresh custard from your supermarket, and the cheapest madeira cake you can get.

2 * 500gr tubs fresh custard (I use Sainsbury's Fresh Custard, not the one from their Taste the Difference range)
1.5 jars raspberry conserve (I use Bon Maman)
4 * 265gr madeira cake (I use Sainsbury's Basics Madeira Cake)
200 gr milk chocolate
480 ml double cream
Oloroso sherry (about 20 spoonfuls, far less than a bottle)

This gives me about two medium sized serving bowls and a bit more worth of trifle. I tend to create little individual ones without the sherry for the kids and put all the sherry in the main bowls.

Day before serving (i.e. Christmas Eve):
Cut the cakes length ways into slices about 1cm thick, cut the "crusts" off.
Put one layer of cake on the bottom of your serving bowl.
Spread about two spoonfuls of jam on it.
Add another layer of cake + jam.
Depending on the height of your serving bowl, you might want to add another layer of cake + jam.
Drizzle over the sherry and give it a bit of time to sink in, you can help it by poking the cake layers with a knife to create a few holes.
Pour the custard on top, cover with cling film and put in the fridge.

Grate the chocolate (First time I bought a packed of grated chocolate, and since I haven't been able to find that cheat anymore I now grate the chocolate using a food processor). Cover and put in the fridge as well.

Just before serving (Christmas Day):
Whip cream, scoop and spread on top of the trifles, sprinkle over the grated chocolate.

There is no chocolate in Rick Stein's recipe, but I think the sprinkled chocolate looks and tastes good and the kids love doing the sprinkling.

Enjoy.

* I used to have a link to Heston Blumenthal's trifle recipe, but the recipe seems to have disappeared from the BBC Food website. I can't find the recipe online now, but it is the one that takes 6 hours to make and requires wonderful kitchen implements such as an electric drill and a blow dryer. [UPDATE: I found a simplified version of Blumenthal's trifle, which still seems like an awful lot of work.]

Witte Rijst met Krenten

This recipe may well make you believe that Dutch cuisine deserves the reputation that British cuisine has, but if you, like me, love rice and, like me, love currants, and, like me, have a sweet tooth, you might think this is the best dish in the world.

The other day I had eaten a big bowl of soup earlier on and neither fancied eating a complete meal, nor going out to the shops to buy a snack. Looking in our cupboards, I noticed all the ready-made snacks had already disappeared in our stomachs. My wife, who as always shared my predicament, decided to just boil some rice and snack on that. I would have gone along with that, had it not reminded me of one of the greatest dishes I had as a child.

Using half of the rice she boiled I created a quick version of this "white rice with currants", and it was just as delicious as back when I could hardly reach the top of the dinner table. I have never heard of anyone else eating or even knowing of this dish, so I thought a blog entry might be in order.

To be sure I was making enough of a fool of myself I searched for some other online recipes. Apparently, witte rijst met krenten is a speciality from a region on the other side of the Netherlands from where I grew up and the few recipes for it that are available online make something not quite the same, so I like to imagine my mom created this dish based on what it was called.

Our family version is a simple dish, that we used to eat whenever we had fried fish.. Yes, not everybody has chips and vinegar with fish! Often on a Wednesday, when the mobile fish monger would be in town, my dad would go out on his bicycle and buy some fried fish, and while he was out, my mom would prepare this dish. As soon as my dad returned dinner would be served: White rice with currants and fried fish.

The basic premise of mom's version of this dish is: boil long grain white rice and currants in semi-skimmed milk until the rice is cooked and serve. Not the most nutritiously balanced meal in the world, but there you go... Use as much rice as you would like to eat, and stir in as many currants to make it visually similar to a Dalmatian - the dogs are sometimes called 'rijst met krenten' dogs in Dutch. If the result looks like 'rice, currant and milk soup with not enough liquid' then congratulations! That's what we were aiming for, so don't drain the milk. Eat with a spoon.

My quick version mentioned above consisted of me putting the already boiled rice back in the pan, adding currants and milk and bringing it to a boil, but this can only be considered quick because my wife had already boiled the rice.

When I told my wife my plans with the rice she put on her disgusted face and said: "So you're going to have it as pudding?" I suppose she was right, it could be called a delayed pudding after the bowl of soup I had earlier on, but considering I have always eaten it as a main course, I saw it as a snack this time.

Originally posted at foodster.net

Untraditional Hutspot

This dish has a history that goes back to 1574 when the Spanish left an old version of it behind when they gave up besieging the city of Leiden. Potatoes and possibly carrots weren't known in Europe as edible at the time and were added to the recipe later.
The way most Dutch people now eat it is as a mash of potatoes, carrots, onions and rib of beef. Personally I don't like the rib of beef and have made this dish for years without it. Last week I experimented a bit more with it and came up with a version that is even tastier.

It's perfect winter comfort food, although I eat it all year round. It would be easy to make a vegetarian version of this by removing the sausage and using vegetable stock.

2 to 3 litres chicken stock * (because of availability I used a mixture of about 20% vegetable stock and 80% chicken stock)
1 kg carrots (the big chunky ones you get in winter would be best)
600 g potato (one big baking potato)
500 g red sweet potato *
300 g can of borlotti beans (or brown beans if you can get them)
400 g of onions and/or shallots
2 leeks
2 garlic cloves
teaspoon of dried chopped dill *
half teaspoon of 'Provencal herbs' *
salt
low fat smoked sausage (optional. I think low fat smoked sausage tastes better than the full fat kind)
freshly ground pepper

* I didn't actually measure these ingredients, this is just a guess

Serves four, apart from the sausage which only serves two. If you are making it for two, make it for four, it's perfect for reheating.

Bring the stock to a boil in a large pan and add the not too finely chopped onions, shallots, garlic, leeks and the dill, Provencal herbs and some salt to a large pan.
Chop the potato, sweet potato and carrots into equal pieces (carrots a bit smaller than the potatoes) and add them to pan,
Bring back to boil.
If adding the smoked sausage, remove it from all packaging and lay it on top of the vegetables in the pan (on the package it will probably say something like 'boil for 15 minutes in packaging', just ignore that).
Simmer for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the potatoes and the carrots are cooked.
Add the beans (drained) and keep it going for a bit longer to heat the beans.

Remove the sausage.
Drain (catching the liquid).
Mash (add a slight amount of the liquid or milk to make a fairly smooth mash).
Season with the pepper and possibly some salt.

Serve with the sausage.

Originally posted at foodster.net