Tag Archives: Daring Bakers

July 27, 2012

The Daring Bakers Challenge July 2012: Crazy for Crackers

Our July 2012 Daring Bakers’ Host was Dana McFarland and she challenged us to make homemade crackers! Dana showed us some techniques for making crackers and encouraged to use our creativity to make each cracker our own by using ingredients we love.

This was another challenge that I really liked the sound of. I’ve made a few crackery kind of things before, though none have made it to the pages of Rock Salt. My favourites have been these hazelnut and thyme matchsticks from LC, which were a huge hit even if I did manage to make them in wildly varying sizes instead of the delightfully uniform matchsticks that the recipe suggests. I was glad to try a couple of new recipes this month, though my inability to produce beautifully shaped crackers did rear its head again on the second batch…

The first crackers I tried were a departure form one of the suggested recipes. I made whole wheat olive and pine nut star crackers, which tasted better for being shaped as they were, I’m sure of it. The recipe is like this:

20 black olives
1 teaspoon smoked garlic powder (home made for preference)
140g self-raising whole wheat flour
140g plain flour
50g pine nuts, well crushed with a few larger pieces remaining
1½ teaspoons sea salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
195 ml water

I started the night before I was going to bake the crackers, though you could do it all in one day if you started early, by drying out the olives. I chopped them into appropriately sized bits, put them on a baking tray lined with greased tinfoil, and baked at 60C (a very low oven) for an hour and a half, until mostly dried. I left them in the oven overnight and took them out when I was ready to start making the crackers.

I dried out some smoked garlic cloves while I was about it, to make the garlic powder. The olive pieces shrink a little while they bake – they don’t look that appetising but they taste good! The flavour is concentrated as you dry them, and they are better for baking with when they’re a bit dehydrated, less likely to cause accidental sogginess.

When I was ready to start baking, I mixed the garlic powder, flours, pine nuts and salt together in a bowl, then added the oil and stirred through to form large crumbs. Finally, the water went in, enough to form a firm and dry dough. You can add it a little at a time, that’s the safest way.

I rested the dough, covered, for fifteen minutes before rolling out to about a quarter of an inch thick on a floured surface. I stamped the crackers out with my trusty star shaped cookie cutter, and baked for four minutes on each side, at 230C – a hot oven. This gave really crisp, biscuity crackers which were fine on their own but something pretty special when paired with a basil flavoured dip. There are no pictures of that, we ate it too fast…

My second crackers were Pepperjack Crackers, made following the given recipe but using the ‘icebox’ method. We don’t say ‘icebox’ here in the UK. Does it just mean fridge? Anyway, the recipe for these is as follows:

235g plain flour
225g grated pepper jack cheese, firmly packed
2 teaspoons dried oregano
½ teaspoon smoked sea salt
several turns black pepper
120 ml vegetable oil
120 ml cold water

I followed the recipe to a point, starting by combining the flour, cheese, oregano, salt and pepper in the food processor. Then I added the oil and pulsed until the mix resembled ‘wet sand’ – this is a sneak peak as to what that looked like:

I then added the water and pulsed until the dough came together completely – this was really quick. I rolled it out and shaped into a rectangular log, planning on slicing it into rectangular crackers later. Nice idea, right?

I stuck it in the freezer, but ended up leaving it there until the next day. This proved to be a mistake, because even after I’d let the dough thaw out on the counter, when I tried to slice it the crackers, well, cracked in the middle. Even though I was using a sharp knife, I ended up with lots of bits and pieces of dough everywhere, not the beautiful squared off shapes I’d imagined. I smooshed the dough back together again and rolled into a more standard round log. I proceeded to slice it up immediately instead of chilling it again – what an impatient woman I am. The result was more smooshiness and oddly shaped biscuits, as you can see.

I topped the crackers with a few turns of my trusty spice grinder containing salt, pepper, garlic, chili and fennel, then baked them. They went in a low oven, this time – 160C – for 20 minutes. They came out still looking odd but smelling great, a real saving grace.

Thank you to Dana for a great challenge, and I encourage you to go and check out the other Daring Bakers’ posts while you’re online. The variety of shapes, sizes and flavours is, as ever, outstanding. We’re a clever bunch. You can also find the PDF for this month, with the suggested techniques and recipes, here.

18 comments | tags: baking, crackers, Daring Bakers | posted in Dairy free, Healthy, Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Snacks, Spicy food, Vegan, Vegetarian

May 28, 2012

The Daring Bakers Challenge May 2012 – Challah

By Rock Salt

May’s Daring Bakers’ Challenge was pretty twisted – Ruth from The Crafts of Mommyhood challenged us to make challah! Using recipes from all over, and tips from “A Taste of Challah,” by Tamar Ansh, she encouraged us to bake beautifully braided breads.

Edit – for ALL the lowdown on challah, visit Ruth’s blog The Crafts of Mommyhood. She gives the history of challah, info about the significance of different methods of braiding, three recipes and even videos on how to braid the different loaves. She is an inspiration and a great Daring Baker!

I’ve been meaning to try challah (you don’t pronounce the c, if you were wondering) for some time. I love the look of it, but until now I didn’t know that there were so many different ways to braid a challah. The braids I tried were six strand braids, though you can also do a simpler three strand braid, a four strand braid or a really fancy round braid. I did want to try a round loaf this month but, alas, the time ran away with me! So much so, in fact, that my post is a day late. Tsk tsk.

I chose to make the Honey White recipe that was provided, which you can find here at Tammy’s Recipes.

My first attempt didn’t go too well… I didn’t add enough flour to the dough, which made it very soft and a bit, well… runny. Here are some photos, though I sort of gave up after it went in the oven so I don’t have a finished product photo!

The first challah dough after rising

The dough deflated a lot after punching down – it was very fragile

The dough was so elastic that as I rolled it out it just stretched and stretched, meaning that the strands I was braiding were growing as I worked with them. I thought I might never reach the end of them, like trying to drink a cup of tea in the rain. I rolled it into the scroll shape because it was a bit unmanageable by the time I was finished, and I rather liked the effect. It could have been a lovely loaf, if it hadn’t been so relaxed. It was still a nice bread, though a bit on the thin side. There was certainly lots of it – that was only using half the recipe.

I tried the same recipe again but adding more flour to get a tauter, firmer dough. This attempt went much better and kept its shape beautifully as I shaped and braided it.

This is the dough before rising – much more firm

I did a six strand braid, which was fun to pull together. I’m an old hand at the three strand braid, having had lots of toy ponies as a child whose tails I would braid. In fact any scarves I own that have tassels on the end get braided over and over again if I happen to be at a loose end. Bus journeys see a lot of braiding, for example. The six strand braid was a fun challenge – you start from the left and go over two, under one and over the last two, then repeat until you run out of space. Then you tuck the narrow ends under and let the challah rise for a little while before glazing and baking.

I happened to have run out of eggs, so I brushed the loaf with oil before scattering with sesame seeds. It didn’t give the lovely lacquered, deep coloured finish that you usually see on challah but I liked the end result all the same.

The close up shows the stripes in the finished loaf, which I think are made by the dough stretching as it rises. Stretch marks have never been so appetising.

I really enjoyed making challah. The bread itself is soft and rich and it kept me in sandwiches (tiny sandwiches) for a while. It wasn’t as yellow in colour as I’d expected, but I know there are hundreds of different recipes for challah available and some will include more eggs, or just egg yolks, to give that really deep colour. It was also quite a sweet bread, with the honey in the recipe – next on the list is a wholewheat challah, I’m looking forward to trying a more savoury version.

17 comments | tags: challah, Daring Bakers | posted in Bread, Dairy free, Eastern European food, Other people's recipes, Vegetarian

March 27, 2012

The Daring Bakers Challenge March 2012: Dutch Crunch Bread – AKA Tiger Bread

By Rock Salt

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

I was excited about this month’s challenge, even more so than usual, because it fit right in with The Year of Bread and gave me another kind of bread to try, one that I’d never even considered making even though I love it – tiger bread. Now, before we go any further, I’m not sure if the tiger bread that we get in the UK is the same as Dutch crunch; it does look similar but I’m fairly sure ours has cheese in it, plus the texture seems quite different. Maybe it’s just down to how fresh the bread is? Regardless, it was a lot of fun learning about this new technique and seeing everyone’s results in the Daring Bakers forum.

Dutch crunch isn’t a loaf in its own right, but rather it’s any loaf with a special topping applied before baking, which gives it the characteristic crackled finish. I usually link to the DB recipe PDF, but since the recipe is so short I’ll copy it out here, too. You can apply this topping to any loaf, though more fragile breads will be weighed down by it. I had good success by applying the topping immediately before baking.

Dutch Crunch or Tiger Bread Topping (makes enough to coat about six rolls or one loaf):

1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp rice flour (not glutinous rice flour; this is important)

Whisk all the ingredients together n a jug to form a thick but pourable paste. It should drip off your whisk when lifted out of the jug, rather than run in a stream. I noticed that it was almost like one of those mixtures of cornflour and water that are so cool to make – a non-Newtonian liquid, if you want to be clever about it (which I so often do). You know, when you mix cornflour with the right amount of water it becomes liquid when left alone but solid when you touch it? So that you can fill a swimming pool with the stuff and then walk over it, as long as you walk fast enough? If you don’t believe me just watch this:

Anyway that’s the consistency you’re looking for – thick and almost solid while you’re stirring it. I tried to show what I mean with these pictures.

Once you’ve whisked the topping together, let it sit for fifteen minutes. It will rise and puff up, so you’ll see lots of bubbles at the side and if you run a spoon through the surface, it’ll leave a gap.

Then, just before you bake your bread or rolls, apply a thick layer of the topping to the formed bread. So if you’re making rolls, like I did, let the dough rise, shape it into rolls, then let them rise again (as indicated by your recipe) before putting the topping on and putting them straight in the oven. It’s best to pour it on and then guide it into shape, if necessary, with the back of a spoon or a spatula. You want a nice thick layer to get the desired results, so don’t be afraid to slap it on there. Here’s how my rolls looked:

First I poured on the topping...

...then spread it with the back of a spoon.

The topping cracks and browns in the oven, giving you the final result of crisp, slightly sweet and decoratively finished bread.

The challenge also called for a one of a kind sandwich – I sort of missed the fact that it was supposed to be one of a kind and went for very ordinary but so tempting turkey salad. I layered rocket, halved tiny tomatoes and roast turkey breast on the roll, topped with an understated smidgen of mayonnaise (Heinz mayonnaise, it’s the best one apart from home made) and enjoyed. I looked forward to my lunch all morning, and it did not disappoint.

A note on rice flour: I have never had trouble buying rice flour when I’ve needed it; my last batch came from the ‘World Foods’ section of my local supermarket, but I’ve also bought it from Indian grocers, where I also buy most of my spices because you can buy them in bulk, for a much better price. I’ve seen it in the Chinese supermarket too, but be careful not to buy glutinous, sticky or sweet rice flour – this is a different thing and will not give you the result you’re after. Finally, you can grind your own rice flour from white or brown rice, as I did to make sesame prawn pancakes. If all else fails you can probably rely on the internet to procure some.

A note to my fellow Daring Bakers in the UK and Europe – have you heard about Foodie Penpals? Follow the link to find out more – it’s a parcel swap scheme with fellow foodies, you get to send and receive foodie parcels and make new blogging friends! Join up today and you’ll be matched with a penpal on the 5th of April – that’s next week! There’s no time like the present, and no present like a parcel full of thoughtful foodie gifts.

31 comments | tags: Daring Bakers, dutch crunch, tiger bread | posted in Bread, Other people's recipes, Vegetarian

February 27, 2012

The Daring Bakers Challenge February 2012: Muffins and Other Quick Breads

By Rock Salt

The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.

Quick breads is the general term for things like muffins, popovers, fruit loaf or even, I think, Yorkshire puddings – things that use baking powder or soda instead of yeast, and can be whipped up in under 90 minutes. They can be either sweet or savoury, but they’re not cakes – with quick breads, the usual method is to combine your wet and dry ingredients in two separate bowls, then mix them together quickly before baking. You don’t spend a lot of time mixing them, either – it’s usual for a muffin batter to be a bit lumpy, rather than the smooth, pourable batter you get with a cake.

This was the kind of challenge that let us make many variations during the month, much like last month’s scones. Once again, I started the month with what felt like bucketloads of ideas, but in reality I only made three variations. I can save up those other ideas for future projects. One of these months I’ll be on form and have dozens of goes at a challenge, as some of the other DBers do. Until then…

My first quick bread was a courgette, basil and lemon loaf. I’ve never baked with courgette before; in some parts of the world it’s as commonplace as banana bread, but not here – not yet anyway! I found this great recipe on The English Kitchen for courgette loaf, which I modified to make a gluten and dairy free version, with some added flavours…

200g wheat-free plain flour mix
pinch of salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
150g caster sugar
50g light brown sugar
2 large eggs, beaten
175ml basil oil
rind and juice of one lemon
60ml soy milk
2 large courgettes, grated

Combine the dry ingredients in one bowl, and the wet ingredients (including the courgette) in another. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix with a spatula until you can’t see any streaks of dry flour. Pour into a greased loaf tin (mine is 9″ by 5″). Bake at 150C (yes, a very low oven) for about an hour, until the loaf is risen, golden and springy to the touch. A wooden skewer will come out of the centre of the loaf clean, maybe with crumbs on it but definitely no wet batter. You might need a little extra time depending on your oven.

The thing about wheat free baking is that it can be drier and more crumbly than wheat-ful baking. Adding xanthan gum will help with this – the flour blend I’ve been using lately already has xanthan gum in it, so you don’t need to add extra, but you can buy the stuff separately without too much hassle – Sainsburys stocks it, or you can get it (of course) on Amazon. If you don’t want to add xantham gum, the other thing you can do is just add more liquid to the recipe – use your eye to judge when its at the right consistency, never mind what the recipe says. When this loaf went in the oven it was really liquid, I poured it from the bowl into the loaf tin. I will admit, I was a bit concerned that I’d gone too far… I forged ahead bravely, though, and it turned out that I’d done exactly the right thing. The final texture of the loaf was soft, the colour was pale and made a lovely backdrop for the bright colours of the courgette and lemon rind, and it rose up really tall, which is often another thing that gluten free food struggles to do.

Using basil oil adds flavour and moisture to the final loaf – you can use a plain oil instead, if you’d rather, or for a very subtle basil taste you can use half basil and half plain oil. When you bake with oil, you find that the finished product actually improves after a day or two, if you can wait that long. Usually I can’t.

My second challenge recipe was a savoury muffin, with sundried tomatoes, fresh herbs, garlic and double cheese. I combined two recipes from one of my books to create these, and they were really bursting with flavour, as you might imagine. They were especially good when pulled apart and spread liberally with a soft garlic cheese. MOAR CHEESE! MOAR GARLIC! Here’s the recipe to make 12 muffins:

280g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch salt
100g sundried tomatoes, chopped
2 tbsp chopped basil leaves
2 tbsp chopped parsley leaves
1 large clove garlic, crushed
2 large eggs
150g cream cheese
6 tbsp olive oil
100ml milk
20g grated mature gouda cheese

The method is just the same – mix the dry and wet ingredients separately, only leaving out the parmesan cheese. I put the tomatoes, herbs and garlic in with the dry, though its not a deal breaker if they go in with the wet, instead. The cream cheese will take a bit of whisking to get it to mix with the eggs and milk, persevere! Mix the wet and dry together. It might seem like you’ll never get to the end of the mixing but just keep going. Once combined, divide into muffin cases and sprinkle with the gouda, or any other cheese you fancy. Bake at 200C for about 20 minutes, until the cheese is golden and your kitchen smells like bready heaven.

My last go at this challenge was blueberry muffins with a coconut streusel topping. These were also a combination of two recipes – blueberry muffins from Movita Beaucoup and the idea of a streusel topping from these carrot muffins. Needless to say, I did make a couple of changes to both recipes, so here’s my version, to make 12 small square muffins and 12 mini muffins (or 12 normal sized muffins, probably).

Coconut Streusel Topping

60g buckweat flour
40g dessicated coconut
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
25g cold butter, cut into small pieces

For the muffins:

170g golden caster sugar
110g self raising whole wheat flour
110g plain flour
pinch salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
zest 1 orange
80ml olive oil
1 large egg
150ml soy milk
125g blueberries

Make the streusel topping first. Mix all the dry ingredients together and get in amongst it with your fingers to break up the brown sugar. Then add the butter and pinch in to the dry ingredients, as though you were making scones, until the dry ingredients are all rubbed in to the butter. This way, nothing will be too dry and burn in the oven.

Make the muffin mix now – you guessed it, the wet and dry method. So simple. Divide the mix into your chosen cases, then top with a hearty teaspoon of the streusel. Press the streusel into the batter and bake at 200C. The square muffins took 20 minutes, while the mini ones only took ten.

This recipe makes really blueberry-centric muffins, which is exactly the way I like them. What’s the point in a muffin with one sad, lonely, shrivelled blueberry in the middle somewhere? Using fresh blueberries, and lots of them, gives you great bursts of blueberries, almost like fresh, sweet jam all through the sponge. Incredible.

30 comments | tags: baking, blueberries, courgette loaf, Daring Bakers, muffins | posted in Bread, Cake, Dairy free, Gluten free, Original recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

January 27, 2012

The Daring Bakers Challenge January 2012: Scones or Biscuits, Biscuits or Scones

By Rock Salt

Audax Artifex was our January 2012 Daring Bakers’ host. Aud worked tirelessly to master light and fluffy scones (a/k/a biscuits) to help us create delicious and perfect batches in our own kitchens!

Ah, the humble scone! Oft-overlooked, but really, when you come down to it, isn’t it a fine thing? They are so easy to make, require so few ingredients and are very versatile. My favourite is the simple plain scone – flour, baking powder, butter and sugar brought together with cold milk to make a satisfying snack with butter, jam, clotted cream or all of the above. When I was little we used to have them with butter, jam and skooshy cream – you know, the pretend cream that comes in a pressurised container that you can never resist skooshing straight into your mouth at least once? Yum. However, the scone can take on many guises. Here in Scotland, you most commonly see plain, fruit, treacle or cheese scones – if I’ve missed any classic scones off the list do let me know! You can add whatever you fancy, though, as the Daring Bakers have more than ably demonstrated – if you Google the quote at the start of my post you’ll be able to see all the other posts from this month. Or, if you have a lot of free time, you can work your way through the DB blog directory. Fair warning – it’ll make you hungry.

As Audax explained to us this month, scones and biscuits are almost the same thing. Scones tend to be kneaded before cutting and baking, so they’re soft and bready inside, while biscuits tend to be folded and turned multiple times, as when making pastry, which makes them more crisp and layered. Biscuits will be served with dinner, in the place of Yorkshire puddings or bread rolls, or served as a meal in their own right with gravy; sausage gravy, for preference. I also saw a few DBers making sandwiches with them. Scones will be served as a snack, or sometimes for breakfast. They’re a quintessential part of an afternoon tea, with cucumber sandwiches and tea in china cups. They’re like long lost twins, biscuits and scones, fallen into different habits but at heart still just like one another.

Audax did a very thorough job in writing the challenge, and in providing screeds of hints and tips for making perfect scones, as well as giving his usual support and encouragement throughout the month. You can find the PDF file of the recipe and different methods here. I made three versions – it is so quick and inexpensive to make scones (or biscuits) that really I feel that I should have tried more!

First, I made plain scones, adding two tablespoons of sugar to the ingredients of the recipe challenge to make them sweet. In this attempt, I found that the specified amount of milk was too much, so the scones were a little too sticky to handle easily. It also meant that they needed a little longer to bake, and even then they were very soft and pale. On the upside, the extra liquid meant the crumb was very soft and moist. They were smashing with butter and jam – tiny little treats!

Second, I made sourdough biscuits, to another recipe that Audax linked to. This was Louie’s last outing before his major surgery, and the biscuits were very strongly flavoured – almost like cheese scones. They were particularly good with butter (unsurprisingly) and I served them with some questionable stovies, which I may post about, or I may wait until I’ve made a nicer looking batch… I folded and turned this dough, rather than kneading, and left bigger pieces of butter when I was rubbing the butter into the flour. I found that this gave nice layers and a great crispness to the biscuits, though they were still soft and bready inside.

Finally, I made my piece de resistance – smoked salmon and chive scones. I added less milk to these ones, and kneaded them instead of folding, to make sure they were tender inside. Here is my recipe for them, which makes only five 2.5 inch scones and one little misshapen one, with the rolled up cuttings:

150g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
generous pinch smoked sea salt
30g butter, grated and then froze
3 tsp finely chopped chives
45g smoked salmon, torn or cut into tiny scraps
60ml milk – you may need a little more
1 tablespoon milk, for glazing the tops of the scones

*Note: don’t preheat your oven just now; wait until later and have it heating while your scone mix rests and chills*

First, mix the flour and baking powder together. For the optimum rise in your final scones, sift these into the bowl; Audax’s recipe suggests sifting them three times. I am lazy in this respect and very, very rarely sift anything. I drop it into the bowl from a height, to try and get some air in there.

Next, add the grated butter, and use pinching motions to rub it in to the flour. It’s important to use the tips of your fingers, to keep the butter cold. If the butter gets too hot it will melt into the flour and make your scones tough. Keep rubbing the flour and butter together until you have that famous ‘breadcrumbs’ result – some people describe it as looking like coarse sand, too. A good tip for this part is to vigorously slide and shake the bowl back and forth across the counter, or tap it sharply, to bring all the biggest lumps of butter to the top. You can then make sure you’ve rubbed it in to the flour fully. Good, eh?

Flour and butter rubbed into 'breadcrumbs'

Add the chives to the bowl, and toss through with your fingers, then do the same with the salmon. Put the mix in the fridge, and turn on your oven to 220C. After twenty minutes, take the mix out of the fridge and proceed.

With smoked salmon and chives tossed through

Add the milk and stir in with a butter knife. A knife is easier to scrape off than a spatula or spoon and somehow brings the dough together better. Once it has come together, which won’t take long, have a feel of it. You want it to be a little wet and sticky but not unmanageable. This is another one of those recipes where practise will really help you to know how the dough should feel.

Line a baking sheet with foil and dust with flour.

Turn the dough out on to a lightly floured surface, and gently knead until smooth. This will take four or five kneadings. I don’t know if kneadings is a word, but that’s how many of them it’ll take. Pat it out until it’s about 3/4 of an inch thick. The thicker your dough is, the taller the final scones will be, but the fewer scones you’ll be able to make from one batch. Press a cutter into the dough *without twisting it*, then lift – the scone should come up with the cutter long enough for you to drop it on to the sheet. You can re-roll and cut any scraps, until you only have enough to roll one weird looking non-scone. Other people might throw this out, but I like to keep it – nobody likes waste. If you don’t have a cutter, or prefer square scones, you can pat the dough into a rectangle, and use a sharp knife to cut them out. Brush milk over the tops (but not the sides) for colour.

Your oven should be ready by now – if not, the scones will be happy to wait in the fridge until it is. Bake them for five minutes before rotating the baking sheet, and baking for another five. Take the scones out and put them on a cooling rack.