I’m travelling in the USA for a week or so visiting family – so here’s a short blog on my summer kitchen. I might blog on that when the dust settles.  It’s been a lot of family in a week.

I am blessed when it comes to space, equipment, gadgets and these days – time – for baking.  The upside of being married to one’s general contractor (aka the Davinator) is that he builds you one of these – a second kitchen.

This is where the magic happens…….

It’s an American thing, I think to have a second or ‘summer’ or ‘working’  kitchen, often in the basement (also much more common in America).  Before air conditioning was ubiquitous, having a kitchen in the basement was life saver during a hot summer. Year round, all the hard work happened in the summer kitchen and the ‘upstairs’ kitchen always looked nice. Like this…

This is our family kitchen.  It’s part of a big L shaped kitchen, dining area, TV area.

The working kitchen can look like a bomb went off in it and no one will be the wiser.

But my ‘summer kitchen’ was inspired by Mrs F, the mother of an Italian-American guy I dated in college.  She had the best ‘summer’ kitchen I’ve seen.  I went out with Al the first time because he was good looking and he drove a blue Trans-am with the big bird painted on the hood  (1979 folks)(Did you know there are blogs on those Trans-am birds  ) . I kept on going out with him because I loved  his very Italian-American mother.  She was a great cook as well and had a big kitchen in the basement.

Mrs F never did anything more complicated than make coffee and assemble food (maybe warm it up)  in the upstairs kitchen. Of course, it was always spotless. Think kitchen showroom.

Mrs F made perfect Italian coffee in one of these, BTW.  She was a coffee snob in 1979.  So far ahead of trend.  All the rest of us were drinking Maxwell House if feeling fancy and Sanka if you were at your grandmother’s.  Well at least at my grandmother’s.   I adored Mrs F and she taught me a lot about good Italian food. What happened to Al you ask? Well basically he was a nutter and I had to break up with him the hard way.

The Davinator built me my ‘summer’ kitchen.  It’s got oodles of storage, more counter space, a deep sink, an enormous oven, my KitchenAid disappears beneath the counter and oh so much more.  I’ve got room for stuff that gets used infrequently – like the Millenium Falcon cake pan, the 50 different Christmas cookie cutters,  20 round cake pans of different sizes and functions, loaf pans galore, tart pans big small and miniature.  I could go on.  Well, a marble rolling pin, an ordinary rolling pin and a special long dowel rolling pin for pasta.  A gazillion mixing bowls.  All my speciality baking ingredients.  Okay, I’m going to stop now.

It’s on the northeast corner of the house so it stays cool but I baked plenty before I had the summer kitchen.   It’s a luxury but it really enables complex stuff like sourdough bread and fancy decorating.  It’s a space that inspires me.

What inspires you?

It’s called  a quick bread because the leavening agent is baking power but it is genuinely quick to prepare,  to cook and to clean up.  And if your vegetable garden goes into courgette overdrive – you can use the courgettes and make the family happy at the same time.

Whole wheat courgette bread – zucchini for los Americanos.

Ingredients

Dry:

• 225 grams whole wheat flour
• 120 grams plain white flour or bread flour (NOT self raising)
• 150 grams caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Wet:

• 2 large eggs
• 170 mls milk
• 60 mls vegetable oil (corn or rapeseed, not olive oil)

Other:

• 350 grams grated courgette
• 85 grams raisins
• 60 grams chopped walnuts
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest (see top tip below)

Instructions

Preheat your oven.  175C non-fan/160C fan.  Prepare a large loaf pan (900 gram/2 lb/23x13cms) or two small loaf pans (450gram/1lb/12×6).   Either grease with a hard fat (butter or lard) or line with paper.

Whisk together the dry ingredients (from whole wheat flour down to nutmeg) in a large bowl.  Make sure they are well mixed.

Prep the ‘other’ ingredients and put them in a bowl (don’t need to mix).

A top tip; you can buy lemon zest and keep it in the freezer or use Dr Oetker or another substitute.  Sometimes its just too much to have to have a lemon in the fridge to zest.   Another suggestion; if you do a lot of baking with nuts and vegetables, you might want to get a mini-chopper like this one.   No, I’m not sponsored by Amazon, it’s just where I do my appliance shopping.  I find it much easier to use and to clean up if I’m not working with big quantities.

Put all the ‘wet’ ingredients in a bowl or a big mixing jug and whisk to blend smoothly.  Pour the wet into the dry and mix well.  Then add the ‘other’ ingredients to the mixture and stir until incorporated.  Scoop the batter into the prepared pan and place in the oven.

Bake for an hour and then check the temperature (if more than 90C you’re done and out it comes).  If you don’t have a thermometer, if the top looks wet and wobbles, it’s not done.   It’s unlikely to be done after an hour – tent the top loosely with foil and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven when it’s done, cool in the pan for 15 minutes or so.  Then remove from the pan and cool completely on a wire rack.

Top tips and gadgets

Loaf pan liners are very convenient and speed prep, cooking and clean up.  I use an ice cream scoop with a trigger to fill the pan.  The mini-chopper comes into its own for chopping nuts – buying pre-chopped nuts is expensive plus they get stale. But chopping your own by hand is too time consuming for me.   Prepared lemon zest is also a big time saver and means you can keep lemons in the ‘pantry’ (zest and bottled juice)  rather than needing fresh for baking.

Recipe count

47 quick bread recipes; 4 completed! OMG what was I thinking.

White bread – it shouldn’t look like a perfect loaf from the supermarket. Lumpy and full of character is great.

This is a recipe for a simple white loaf that anyone can make.  Good for nervous or newbie bakers. Also a guide to ‘must have’ and  ‘really useful’ equipment.

What equipment do you really need to ‘bake’?  There are things you must have,  things that are really helpful and things that are luxuries (not really that useful).   I’m fond of gadgets and gizmos (the Amazon delivery guy is a practically part of the family) but when you get down to it – baking a simple white loaf does not require fancy equipment.

You want to make a simple white loaf of bread, here’s what you need.

Recipe

Ingredients:  plain (NOT self raising) white flour, instant yeast, salt and water. Don’t sweat the flour, any old plain white flour will do.  Spend your mental energy on yeast.  You want ‘instant’ yeast, not quick yeast or yeast cakes.   Here’s a good reference if you’re bemused by the various names and descriptions of yeast.

500 grams of flour

4 grams instant dry yeast

1 tsp salt

350 mls (plus some extra) room temperature water

A bit of sunflower oil for your ‘low knead’ process.

Equipment (must have):  an oven,  a spoon, two mixing bowls, a loaf pan and a kitchen scale.   And time.   This recipe needs a small loaf pan,  often marked ‘500 grams’ or in old money ‘1 lb’ and it’s about 15 cm by 9 cms.  If all you’ve got is a big one, double the recipe.  Or Amazon……

Instructions:

Prep your loaf pan; either line with parchment or grease with butter or lard.  Don’t use oil, use a ‘hard fat’ (gets hard when refrigerated).

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.   Put in about 340 mls of water.  If it looks shaggy and dry, add a bit more water.  We’re going to do ‘low knead’, so a little bit wet is okay.   Gather the dough into a ball, cover the bowl with cling film or the other mixing bowl (or a shower cap see below) wait ten minutes.  Now comes the ‘low knead’.

Put a bit of oil on your worktop protector, put a little on your hands, and scoop the dough out of the bowl.  Squish it flat then fold the dough in by half towards you, press it down with the heel of your hand, lift and rotate a quarter turn.  Repeat 7 or 8 times quickly.  Put a bit of oil in your clean bowl and put the dough in the bowl. Turn it over.  Cover wait ten minutes and repeat.  Do this two more times.  (That makes four times in total).

If you struggle to keep track of how many times you’ve stretched and folded the dough; first time poke one hole with your finger, second time two holes, etc.   You’ve stretched and folded 4 times –  Now you’re ready to shape the loaf.

Press the dough into a flat rectangle about 10 cm by 15 cms.  Fold in one side 5 cms, then the other side, flip it upside down and tuck the ends into the shape of a rugby ball.  Put it in your prepared loaf pan.  Cover with cling film or a shower cap and wait for at least an hour.  Don’t rush this final stage.  Let it double in size in the pan.   Towards the end of this stage, preheat your oven.   When it’s ready, take the cover off the loaf and dust with a little bit more flour or slash the top if you’re feeling fancy.

Normal oven 220C/fan oven 200C/Gas mark 7

Put the loaf in the oven.  Wait 10 minutes.  Turn the heat down to 190C/170C- fan/gas mark 5.   After 30 minutes, the loaf should be ready.  Either test with your thermometer  (at least 90C) or tap to see if it sounds hollow when tapped.  If not done, go for another 5 minutes and then check again.

Tip it out of the tin when ready and you’re off. Wait a few minutes so you don’t burn your mouth and then get out the butter and enjoy fresh white bread with butter.  Nothing finer than that.

More on ‘low knead’

If you want to knead bread and reduce your gym time by 15 minutes go right ahead.  But it’s not necessary.  A quiet revolution has been going on out there for what I call low knead bread. It’s called ‘no knead but  ‘no-knead’ bread is like a ‘no iron’ 100% cotton shirt – marketing over reality.  Low knead takes more elapsed time but produces the same outcome for most bread.  Knead away if you want to save time but understand it’s really just exercise.

Equipment

Clockwise from top left; baking mat, dough scraper, fast read thermometer, cheap shower cap.

Equipment (really helpful): If you’re going invest in a bit more equipment here’s my list; a dough scraper, a cheap plastic shower cap, a baking mat or work surface protector, a thermometer. And loaf pan liners are fairly cheap and save a lot of time.   If you stay in hotels there’s almost always a cheap shower cap in the bathroom – no one actually uses it to shower, they take them home for their favourite baker.  Or you can buy 50 on line.   The baking mat is like one of these:  baking mat.  The dough scraper is much better for mixing and blending dough than a spoon or spatula.  And the thermometer takes the guess work out of ‘is it done’.  If it’s more than 90C, it’s done.

Equipment (not much use): a proving drawer, a special proving basket, special covers for the special proving basket, a bread machine.

I had a bread machine and I sold it on eBay.   I’ve got lots and lots of storage, I had room for it but it annoyed me.   Why – it sat there on the counter and looked sullen most of the time because I wasn’t using it.  I love the feel of the dough in my hands and watching the dough become bread.

A proving drawer just forces the prove and makes your bread rise faster.  This is good on the Great British Bake Off when you’re cooking against the clock but not in real life.  Proving baskets and covers are for free form bread – mostly sourdough.  Doesn’t do anything a bowl doesn’t do and is harder to clean – even with the liner and or cover.

Good luck and happy baking.

Sourdough starter – 3 different flours.

Two sticks rubbing together make a spark. Two casual questions gave me an idea. Someone asked me a great question – what ‘order’ am I going to cook the recipes in.  And then my stepdaughter Faye asked about sourdough bread because it’s the artisan bread of the moment and she said ‘the best bread I’ve ever eaten was sourdough’.  My daughter Clare (when she eats carbs) also loves sourdough.  So I’m starting with the sourdough.

Sourdough is bread made from a live ‘starter’ as the leavening agent rather than using purchased yeast or a chemical leaven like baking soda or baking powder.  It is the heritage of bread.  Yeast occurs in nature. Before yeast came from the store in cakes or a tiny tin – cooks had a ‘starter’ for bread.  It’s flour and water that has captured wild yeast and started to ferment.  There a lots of good blogs on sourdough starter.   Here’s one from Kitchn that worked for me.  I also carefully read the King Arthur Flour Sourdough Guide.  There is a good section in cookbook on working whole grain levain (the fancy name for a starter).

I’ve jumped in with both feet and have white, rye and whole wheat starters on the go.  It’s a hurry up and wait feeling though – it’s a week before there will be any bread.

Does that mean there hasn’t been any baking? Get away.  I made these Champagne Strawberry Cupcakes and the brioche recipe of the Tour de France food blogger, Jonathan Harris-Bass.

Technically ‘strawberry prosecco cupcakes’ but you get the idea.

Yes, there is a sports writer and foodie who is blogging a recipe a day for the duration of the Tour de France.  I can’t ‘cook along’ with him and actually have any kind of normal life or doing any of my own baking.  But he’s making me so homesick for France that I’m resolved to try some of his recipes.  This brioche recipe got the thumbs up from the Davinator.  Brioche is the best way to misuse eggs, butter and flour.

Brioche and it’s not burnt, it’s glazed on top.

Can I cook my way through this book?

I have so many interests I’m not expecting to be bored in retirement.  But I’ve decided I need a quest.  Weed free flower beds – although laudable – are not quest worthy.  Neither is the perfectly organised linen closet . (Although also on my personal list of to dos).

My quest is to cook every recipe in my favourite baking cookbook ‘King Arthur Flour Whole Grain’.    I haven’t dared to count the recipes (yet) but it runs to 612 pages including the appendices .  It starts with granola and waffle recipe, runs the gamut of muffins, cakes, breads, scones, pies, rolls and quiches.  Any type of baked good you can imagine is in this book and made with whole grains.

My sister gave me this book several years ago and there are a number of family favourites already;  pumpkin bread, banana chocolate chip muffins, the best damn brownies ever and sunrise muffins.  TBH – I’ve never had an out and out fail using this book.   Some of the recipes require patience.  Not sure I will report every single recipe separately but I will keep a running tally.  And report back on the good, the bad and the ugly.

Cake or death!