Sifting flour

Over the past couple of months I have been re-writing an old website of mine on bread baking.  This week I decided to sift some flour in the old medieval tradition, using a muslin bag.

It is a simple method of sifting - just sew a large piece of muslin into a bag shape, fill it with stoneground flour and shake it over a bowl until your arm aches, then shake it a bit more.

What you are left with is a bowl full of white flour and a bag full of bran and husk.  If you start with a cold milled, stoneground flour, the full flavour of the wheat will be retained.  These two components would be used by the baker to make different kinds of bread.

Wastel is a white loaf made from common flour.  It was a costly loaf in medieval times and was only generally eaten by the wealthy.  This is a firmer version of modern white bread, but with more taste.

The bran could be mixed with bean or pea flour to make a much cheaper bread called Pease Bread.  This type of bread was common when wheat flour was in short supply.  It is firm and nutty to the taste.

My all time bread to avoid is this one.  This is Clapbread, made from bran and rye flour.  It has an amazingly good taste, but it is heavy and very chewy.  All that bran is bound to have an effect.  This type of bread was made with the leftovers from making good bread, and probably the flour sweepings from the bakehouse floor.  Cheap bread for the poor folk!

The main bake would have been a stoneground wholemeal loaf.  Check out the website at http://bread.pursglove-ons.co.uk/

Baking Bread

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on redeveloping my bread site.  The website was originally put together as a simple design to illustrate how a website should be structured for my web design courses some years ago.  It is about time it was resurrected into a proper useful site.

To this end I have been baking breads of all types to produce pictures with which to illustrate the pages.  My latest is a Roman Slipper Bread made of Spelt flour and olive oil.  It is a messy dough to use and it is not dusted with flour or kneaded, just mixed, left and baked.

Roman Slipper Loaves - panis calceus

This is very reminiscent of ciabatta, which I also baked, using modern flour.  It has a different taste and texture, but is essentially a similar method of baking.

Italian ciabatta - slipper bread

Another adventure was to bake some Tudor loaves.  Manchet is a bread made from clubwheat flour, sifted with a muslin bag and re-sifted through a double muslin bag to make a fine white bread.  I also made a meslin loaf which is a mixture of common wheat and rye flour.  This is a very heavy bread with a rough texture.  In tudor times, the base of the meslin loaf was cut into a trencher plate in wealthy households.  After the meal the bread trenchers and food residue would be given to the worthy poor as a food handout - saves on washing up!

Meslin bread trencher

Tudor meals did not differentiate between savoury and sweat.  Meat, berries and flowers would be seen in the same remove (each course was called a remove).

Take a look at the website on http://bread.pursglove-ons.co.uk/ and see what you think.  It is not finished yet as I have the flour-producing mills to add.  I have spotted a couple of minor typo's - let me know if you spot anything that needs adjusting.

Christmas Bread

At Christmas I always bake bread that is a little different.  This year I have made a chocolate fruit loaf.  It starts with a bowl of raisins, sultanas and currants which are marinaded for at least 4 hours in a liquor.  For this I used a blackcurrant syrup from our summer harvest, with a little hot water.

For the dry ingredients I used a 500g mixture of a wholemeal spelt flour, white spelt flour and a strong white flour (for the gluten content).  To this I added a good tablespoon of cocoa powder and some dried yeast.  The dry ingredients were then whisked thoroughly to mix.

Honey was added to 200ml of boiling water in a jug, and another 200 ml of cold water was added to reduce the temperature.  The water was used to mix up the dough, along with a generous slug of walnut oil.  The dough was left to rise for an hour or so, until doubled in volume.  At this point the marinated fruit was drained and then placed over the dough.  The zest of an orange was grated onto the fruit and the whole mess was kneaded a second time into a stiff dough.  Seven equal sized balls of the dough were arranged in a round cake mould and left to rise.  The left over dough was shaped into a plat loaf.  A little nutmeg was grated on the top.

180 degrees  Celsius for 25 minutes was sufficient to bake the bread as spelt flour will burn in a very hot oven.

This will be a splendid tread on Christmas eve with some fine cheeses and a good wine.  OK, I also made a cashew and chocolate biscotti as an additional treat - it is Christmas and our friends will soon see it gone.

Working Late

Over the last two weeks I have been leaving for work at 8:20am and returning home at 6pm. This has meant that there has not been enough time during the week to make bread. So today I baked enough bread for the whole week - some square loaves a few rounds and some nann bread. It all freezes well and comes out like freshly baked bread - just take some out the night before you need it to allow it to fully defrost.
This shift is likely to go on until Christmas, so my bread baking is now restricted to weekends unless we want some quick and easy bread types.
Another surprise was finding a Comma butterfly in the garden. The broods are usually out in June and August, and mainly in the South of the country. It is unusual to see Comma butterflies this far north, and very unusual on a cold Autumn day.
The Comma is a type of fritillary that hibernates over the winter months in caves, sheds and other protected spaces, emerging in the warm weather to breed and lay eggs. To see one in Stoke, in October is quite exceptional.