Month: March 2017

Rhubarb!

Rhubarb! Some may know, some may wonder what I am speaking about.

Rhubarb is definitely not, or maybe not yet, a fixture in the average customer’s grocery trolley.  In places it is even hard to find. Well, well, it is the right season around Sydney. Let me introduce you to it.

The rhubarb plant

Rhubarb is a perennial (it means it grows again and again every year on its own) low-lying plant.  The plant is half a metre tall and consist of long stalk of reddish colour which thick very large leaves. As a kid, we used to pinch leaves from the veges garden’s plant and use them as umbrellas!

The plant typically grows in temperate climate, hence you shall find plenty reference to it in Northern France, England, Belgium, Germany, etc and their equivalent climate countries around the world.  The stalk is what is eaten, cooked.  The leaves (I recently learned) are toxic!

rhubard stalk preparation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rhubarb Preparation

This is something you can get your child to help with, it is fun.

rhubard stalk preparation

  1. Cut the leaves and discard.rhubard stalk preparation
  2. Rinse/wash the stalks.rhubard stalk preparation
  3. Cut the bottom part of each stalk and pull any stringy skin that comes with it

Your rhubarb is ready.

What to do with it?

Here are 5 ideas of what to do with it:

Stewed rhubarb:

stewed rhubarb

This is the easiest use! Just cut in 5 cm pieces, place in a saucepan, add water until mid-heigth (of the rhubarb) and cook gently for about 15 minutes. When stirred it should come apart, just add some white sugar to taste. Want more precision, look HERE.

Rhubarb, yogurt and cereal breakfast

A great combination for an uncommon breakfast.  The name and the photo say it all. More HERE.

rhubarb, yoghurt & cereal

Roasted rhubarb

This one works great as a side to a vanilla pannacotta or the topping of a cake.  To find how to prepare it, click HERE. rhubarb

A simple rustic rhubarb tarte

This one is a french classic.  A short crust pastry, the rhubarb stalks are diced quite small and placed on the pastry.  There are 2 choices then: just add sugar and a few nuts of butter (not pictured here) or add an egg, milk, almond mixture, then bake! Yummy. The details HERE.

rhubarb tarte

And finally, a leavened dough rhubarb tart

This dough makes use of the roasted rhubarb and a northern France traditional tarte which dough is made with fresh yeast, the sugar tarte (tarte au sucre).  I will cover that tarte au sucre in an upcoming post, just delicious!

Rhubarb roasted on leevened dough Rhubarb roasted on leevened dough

Another birthday, another cake…

Another birthday, another cake…

Actually double it all up, however I did not take any photo of the first one.

The first cake was a large Paris- Brest salted caramel chocolate ganache. Miam.  Indulgent.

The second birthday cake had a few constraints: it had to be a plain cake and have plenty berries on top.  Easy for a child birthday cake!  For once!  What I really like in that cake, is the sponge cake I use to do it.  It is the fourth time I use it for  birthday cakes (see the unicorn cake and the pokemon cake) and I just love it. This is what I am sharing today.  For the full recipe, click HERE.

 

The sponge cake has hazelnut meal in it.  I love that little extra.  The rest is pretty simple, you only need to whip some cream and add some berries.  I have previously used a raspberry chocolate mousse (based on whipped cream) to fill it, It was beautiful!

A few golden rules with sponge cakes:

  • Use a tin not too wide
  • Make sure the eggs are at room temperature
  • Follow the recipe!

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Back to bread

Back to bread!

It has been a while since I last wrote about breads.  Let’s go back to breads!  I have updated my sourdough bread explanations with some photos and more details.

If you are still struggling with some aspects of the bread making, don’t be to hard on yourself, it takes time.  I remember posting on FB a photo two years ago of a bread I found amazing. Looking back, it was not such a good bread, a beginner’s bread starting to get the hang of it! Keep perseverating!

Just for fun, here is a gallery of sourdough overtime, all mine.

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More fun with 100% hydration breads

100% hydration bread is not to be confused with 100% starter hydration.  I am not blaming you if you are not sure of the difference, I wasn’t onto it myself for a bit, I thought this only related to the starter.  So, without being too technical, here you are:

100% hydration starter

This is when the starter contains exactly a ration of 1 to 1 of flour and water (by weight).  So, if you are always using a liquid starter (for those who make bread every day or every two days),  and feed it an equal weight of water and flour, you have a 100% hydration starter.

For those like me, who make bread from every two days to every week (or more), we would keep our starter as a stiff starter to ensure it doesn’t have a mega tantrum.  That is 2:2:1 (starter, flour, water).  In words: same weight of starter and flour, but half the weight of water.  It allows a slower development of the yeast and thus keeps for longer. When I save my starter, I take away 50 g of the developed starter (the rest will go in the bread I am about to make), 50 g of flour and 25 g of water. I mix it all in a ball and put back in the fridge!

Une petite disgression sur les ratios…./ lets explore these ratios….

As a result, when I develop the starter, the ratio of hydration is slightly less than 100%.  For a feed of 200 g water, 200 g flour, the starter is 25 g short of water to be 100% hydration (it is 90% hydration).

Does it make much a difference? It depends on the quantity of bread you make per batch.  For me 25 g out of a total weight of water (starter and bread) of 620 g of water (25 g in starter, 200 g in feed, 420 in the bread, minus removal of new starter assumed 25 g water), is a 4% difference in hydration.   In the end using the 90% or 100% hydration starter in the bread with the quantity I use does not make any difference.  The type and origin of the flour will have more influence at that stage that your hydration ratio.

When I go on holidays for a couple of weeks or more (it has worked up to 3 weeks, I have not tried more), I feed it additional flour and water keeping the ration 2:1 (twice as much flour as water).

Have I lost you? 

In brief, if you do a few breads at the time (750 g of flour or more), using a stiff or liquid starter before feeding it will not influence the end result.

100 % hydration breads, a trial

I have been reading blogs and following some keen bakers (Ca mia for example has great results with that method) working hard on 100% hydration breads.  This ratio applies when you make the bread itself (using 100 % hydration starter or your normal fed starter of course). For those breads, water is used in the same proportion as water. This makes for a very liquid dough.  Be assured, the process is completely different. Why do people do it? because of the bubbles! Big beautiful bubbles.

So, I gave it a go this week.  I doubled my quantity of starter at the feed stage (just making 2 “normal” sourdough as a back up!). And I had this watery mix which sticks so much to your hands and can end up in a big big messy kitchen before you know! That time you need plenty flour to prevent the dough from sticking onto the workbench or onto your banneton (I use a tea towel shaped in a “U” shape in my roasting dish).  When I baked it , I did not give it a chance to come back to room temperature thinking that the cold shape will be slightly firmer to move.  Even so, it is really very soft!

sourdough bread And the result? Yum!  In taste, much lighter, it is another bread! It is closer to the ciabatta.  One bread was a bit flat, the other bread was quite high but had a big bubble in the upper section in one part of the bread.  There is definitely a fault in my technique there.

sourdough bread

 

 

 

 

Welcome to autumn!

Welcome to autumn! Yeah !  And goodbye to summer fruits.  Ohhh 🙁

Here are two inspirations for you:

Autumn inspiration:  roasted fresh figsroasted figs, to serve with a panna cotta, ice cream, a cake or simply starte aux peches et romarinome yogurt.

 

 

End of summer inspiration: a peach frangipane tart.

Roasted figs

The first one is a dish everyone can make without much kitchen skills.  You need a non-stick fry-pan, some butter (salted is better), balsamic vinegar, honey and obviously fresh figs.  I bought a tray of over 40 figs for $15 last week, very cost-effective when you consider they can be at $2 piece! It is peak season, so go for it, it is now or never.  I had not cooked figs like this before and I must say I will do it again. Make sure to roast them just before serving.  And if you are into it, why not flamber them?

Recipe HERE.

roasted fresh figs roasted fresh figs

 

I served mine with a vanilla panna cotta and an orange semolina cake.  The cake recipe is from the GoodFood website.  The cake is surprisingly moist, even before adding the syrup (for the syrup I did not follow the recipe).

As for having figs, plus panna cotta plus cake at once, it was a bit of an extravaganza! The cake was not strickly necessary, it could have been some small dry biscuits, but I thought the children may not be so fan of the panna cotta (and I was wrong).

The frangipane peach tart

tarte aux peches et romarin

For this tart, I was pretty pleased with myself I must say. Ambrine was preparing a pizza (a school assignment was to prepare a meal).  I wanted to do a tart to use some peaches which didn’t look too good.  They ended up being really good actually! I decided at the last minute to use a tall edges tart tin and dress it up a little bit.  This is by no means something hard to make, it takes just a little more time. It took me from start to finish the same time as the pizza from start to finish (including dough), so about an hour and a half.

The tart is a plain short crust pastry, lightly blind baked, a frangipane custard at the bottom then the slices of peaches and to finish it off a brush of apricot jam and some rosemary. Yum!

Recipe HERE.tarte aux peches et romarin