Bread Matters (30 page)

Basic Festive Bread Dough

This dough is usually made with milk to give a slightly richer, softer texture. However, water will work just about as well: there is enough additional enrichment in the form of egg, butter and sugar to make the difference between milk and water fairly slight. Proportionally more butter, sugar and egg are used than in the bun dough given at the beginning of this chapter. For the same reasons as for the bun dough, an initial ferment is required to condition the yeast before the main dough is mixed.

The ferment

5g Sugar

5g Fresh yeast

60g Milk or water (at 32°C)

50g Stoneground wholemeal flour

120g Total

Dissolve the sugar and yeast in the milk or water and then beat in the flour to make a soft paste. Leave the ferment covered in a warm place until it has risen to its full extent and dropped. This should take about an hour, depending on the temperature.

Festive bread dough

30g Sugar

70g Strong white flour

40g Stoneground wholemeal flour

50g Egg (1 egg)

120g Ferment (from above)

50g Salted butter

360g Total

Stir the sugar into the flours, then add the egg and the ferment. Work into a dough, knead for a minute to begin developing the gluten, then add the butter. Knead energetically for about 10 minutes by hand (5 minutes in a mixer). Do not be tempted to add extra flour: the dough should be very soft and quite sticky. It will firm up a bit as it ferments. Cover loosely with a polythene bag and leave in a warm place to rise for about an hour. Then turn the dough out on to the worktop and add any spices, fruits or nuts that are called for.

Kulich

This delicious and impressive festive bread is very similar to the Italian panettone. It is ideal with a cup of tea or strong coffee.

Kulich is the traditional Russian Easter cake, made with an enriched yeasted dough, spices, fruit and nuts. This recipe comes from
A Gift to Young Housewives
by Elena Molokhovets (1904), widely regarded as the Russian Mrs Beeton. The recipes in
A Gift
are for quantities appropriate to a well-to-do pre-revolutionary family. The copy I saw belonged to a Leningrad family who had survived the siege of 1941-2, when hundreds of thousands of Russians starved. They told me that, when they had literally nothing to eat, they used to read Elena Molokhovets out loud to each other: the descriptions of mammoth feasts somehow assuaged their hunger by transporting them into a forgotten, fantastic world.

Kulich (pronounced ‘cool-each’) and its cousin krendel are made from the same dough. Whereas kulich is usually baked in a cylindrical cake mould and is often accompanied at Easter by paskha (a cream and curd cheese mixture with fruit and nuts), krendel is a freestanding loaf or plait.

Makes 1 kulich

Fruit and nut mix

80g Raisins

30g Candied mixed peel

30g Flaked or nibbed almonds or other nuts

20g Rum, brandy, vodka or fruit juice

160g Total

Put the fruit and nuts in a small bowl or strong polythene bag and pour the liquid over them. It is best to do this the day before making the kulich. Stir the fruit through with your fingers or give the bag a shake from time to time to help the liquid soak in.

Kulich dough

160g Fruit and Nut Mix (from above)

360g Basic Festive Bread Dough (page 260)

520g Total

Drain any excess liquid from the fruit and nuts and fold them gently into the prepared festive bread dough. Cover the dough and let it rise for another 30 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare a baking case. You can use a bought-in panettone case or improvise as follows. Line the sides of an ordinary 12.5cm round cake tin with stiff brown paper, extending it to a height of 15cm. Inside this, line the bottom and sides of the tin with baking parchment. You can do the same sort of thing with a catering-size vegetable or fruit tin with both ends removed, placed on a baking tray.

Taking care to knock as little air out of the dough as possible, shape it so as to present a neat, unbroken surface on the top of the loaf and drop it into the prepared baking case. Pick off any pieces of fruit that are projecting through the top surface, otherwise they will burn.

When the dough has proved to a point where the finger test tells you that it is nearing its maximum expansion, place the tin in a moderate oven (about 180°C) and bake for 30-40 minutes. Check to make sure the inside is baked by inserting a thin skewer. If it comes out clean, the kulich is done.

Paskha

The word
paskha
means Easter in Russian. In culinary language, it refers to a mixture of cream and curd cheeses, sweetened with sugar and sometimes flavoured with various combinations of raisins, citrus zest, vanilla and nuts. Paskha was traditionally pressed into conical wooden moulds whose sides were indented with religious symbols, such as the Orthodox cross and the initial letters (XB) of the Russian Easter greeting ‘Christ is Risen’. Weights were placed on the cheese to squeeze some of the moisture out. The firmed cheese was turned out and cut into slices, which were served with kulich.

The recipe below is known as Royal Pashka. It is delicious in its own right and would make a great accompaniment to fresh or stewed fruit. Served with kulich, it turns teatime into something special.

Some shops supplying the large Russian community in London now stock the curd cheese
(tvorog)
and soured cream
(smetana)
mentioned in the recipe. If you cannot get hold of the exact equivalents, don’t worry. Use as natural a cream cheese as you can find (but not cottage cheese) and soured cream or crème fraîche.

For those of us who do not have a wooden paskha mould in the pantry, some alternative must be improvised. Home cheesemaking suppliers sell something called a coulommier mould—an aluminium dish with holes in it, designed for making soft or semi-soft cheeses. A square pyramid mould is available at modest cost. Otherwise, a polypropylene pudding basin with a few holes drilled in the lower half would do the trick.

Makes 1 paskha

225g Curd (or cream) cheese

50g Egg (1 egg)

50g Unsalted butter

90g Soured cream (or crème fraîche)

75g Golden granulated or caster sugar

2g Vanilla powder or natural vanilla extract

15g Almonds

15g Currants or raisins

522g Total

Pass the curd cheese through a fine sieve into a saucepan and add the egg, butter and soured cream. Heat this gently, stirring all the time, until you see the first telltale bubble showing that the mixture is coming to the boil. Remove it from the heat and cool it completely (Elena Molokhovets suggests putting it on ice to speed the process). Add the sugar, vanilla, almonds and currants or raisins and mix the whole lot well. Line your mould with muslin, put the mixture in it and put some weights on top to compress it and squeeze out some moisture. Leave it on a tray in the fridge for a few hours.

To serve, turn the paskha out of its mould on to a plate and remove the muslin. Slice and serve alongside a piece of kulich.

Stollen

Rich Christmas tea breads of German origin are found in various parts of northern Europe and seem to have had Christian or even earlier connotations. In one version from Dresden, the marzipan running through the middle of the loaf is used to create a shape suggestive of the infant Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. Other versions omit the marzipan altogether. In the recipe below, I use marzipan because it gives a wonderful moistness to the loaf, but I like to disperse it more evenly than in the Dresden stollen by rolling a sheet of it up with the dough, so that every mouthful benefits.

Makes 1 large stollen

Stollen fruits

70g Sultanas

60g Raisins

50g Candied mixed peel

20g Rum, brandy or fruit juice

200g Total

Place the fruit in a small bowl or strong polythene bag and pour the rum, brandy or juice over it (you can be more generous with the rum if you feel inclined). It is best to do this a few hours before making the stollen or even overnight. Stir the fruit through with your fingers or shake the bag periodically to help the liquid to soak in.

The marzipan

60g Ground almonds

20g Caster sugar

20g Icing sugar

20g Egg (whole, beaten)

120g Total

Mix these ingredients together to make a firm paste suitable for rolling on the worktop. It is a good idea to make this the day before and store it in a polythene bag in the refrigerator. Using two types of sugar may seem a bore, but with just one or the other the marzipan becomes either too gritty or too smooth. If you don’t have any icing sugar handy, whiz up the total quantity of ordinary sugar in a blender or coffee grinder to reduce its grittiness.

The stollen dough

200g Stollen Fruits (from above)

360g Basic Festive Bread Dough (page 260)

120g Marzipan (from above)

680g Total

Beaten egg, to glaze

Melted butter

Icing sugar for dusting

If you have been generous with the rum to soak your fruit, your largesse is now rewarded. Drain any excess liquid from the fruit and enjoy a cup of anticipatory good cheer. Fold the drained fruit gently into the prepared festive bread dough after it has had its hour of bulk fermentation, trying not to break up its structure completely but aiming to distribute the fruit reasonably evenly. Relax – the dough (and you perhaps) – for 10 minutes.

Using a light dusting of flour on the worktop and your rolling pin, roll the marzipan into a rectangle about 20 x 15cm. Then roll or stretch the dough out to make a rectangle very slightly larger than the marzipan. Place the marzipan on the dough, press down gently and then roll the whole thing up like a Swiss roll, finishing with the seam underneath the resulting log. Transfer to a baking tray lined with baking parchment.

Brush the stollen thoroughly with beaten egg, being careful not to leave any tide marks around the edge. Cover loosely and put in a warm place to prove, making sure that the cover cannot come into contact with the dough. When the stollen is proved, bake in a moderate oven (180°C) for 30-40 minutes, until it is golden brown all over. As soon as it is out of the oven, brush it liberally with melted butter, then leave to cool. Sprinkle all over with icing sugar and, if you like, decorate your stollen with a red ribbon.

Simple icing sugar will soak quite quickly into the surface of the stollen (you can be sure that the everlasting dusting on commercial stollen with a long shelf life is fortified with strange additives). The traditional remedy is to dust your stollen afresh with icing sugar just before serving. Some traditional German products are sold with a little sachet of sugar for just this purpose.

Schiacciata di Uva (Tuscan Harvest Bread)

Schiacciata
(roughly pronounced ski-a-charter) means ‘squashed’ in Italian. The savoury versions of schiacciata are the Tuscan variant of Genoese focaccia and Neapolitan pizza. This is a slightly sweetened dough made into a filled flat bread, which celebrates multiple harvests. The Vin Santo is a fortified sweet wine fermented from raisins, not fresh grapes, and so is at two removes from this year’s harvest. The raisins are last year’s product, and the fresh grapes on top are this year’s. The best grapes to use for the topping are very ripe black ones (ideally seedless), which will bleed a little crimson juice into the dough as they are partially cooked during baking.

Warmed very slightly, this bread makes a great centrepiece on the table for pudding. It is equally good in slivers with fresh espresso.

Makes one fairly large (30cm) schiacciata

The fruit

30g Vin Santo, sherry or port

200g Raisins

230g Total

Pour the alcohol over the raisins and soak thoroughly, overnight if possible. Drain before using. Reserve any liquor as a reward for later.

The ferment

20g Sugar

5g Fresh yeast

100g Water (at 35°C)

75g Type 0 or plain white flour

200g Total

Dissolve the sugar and yeast in the water. Pour some of this on to the flour to make a paste. Mix until smooth, then gradually add the rest of the yeasty water. Whisk all together. Leave, covered, in a warm place until the ferment rises and then drops. This should take 40-60 minutes.

The dough

200g Ferment (from above)

100g Stoneground wholemeal flour

75g Type 0 or strong white flour

2g Sea salt

10g Raw cane sugar

30g Olive oil

50g Water

467g Total

Adjust the water temperature so that the final dough works out at about 27°C. Mix all the ingredients together and knead the dough until it is soft and supple. Cover it and put it to prove in a warm place for about an hour or at least until it has roughly doubled in bulk.

Divide the dough into 2 equal pieces and roll them into circles, each approximately 1cm thick and no more than 15cm in diameter. Line a baking tray with baking parchment and dust it with a little wholemeal flour or semolina. This will help the schiacciata to stretch as you complete its assembly.

Lay one disc of dough on the baking tray and spread the drained raisins over it evenly, almost to the edge. There will seem to be rather a lot, but don’t worry. Lay the second circle of dough on top of the raisins and seal the edges well. This is best done by using a little of the moisture from the raisins to dampen the edge of the bottom piece of dough, then pulling this bottom piece over the top of the upper piece and pressing down with a finger end to make the seal, Cornish-pasty fashion. Work your way round the whole thing like this.

You may now have a rather domed centre to your loaf, so press down gently with the flat of your hand to squash it a little. You may also have trapped some air between the dough layers, so get a skewer (a digital probe thermometer works well) and make a few holes for the air to escape. You should end up with a reasonably flat disc about 20cm in diameter. The final stage is to decorate the top with grapes.