Bread Matters (31 page)

The topping

150g Black grapes

20g Raw cane sugar

170g Total

Wash and dry the grapes and pull them off the bunch. In a random, free-spirited, Italian sort of way, push them firmly into the dough. You need to break the surface of the dough to make them stay in position, otherwise they will not survive final proof and baking, which will simply eject them and leave you with a ring of grapes around a naked schiacciata.

By the time you have finished pushing the grapes in, the schiacciata will have expanded to about 30cm in diameter. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the whole thing. Prove for about an hour, then bake for approximately 30 minutes in a moderate oven (180°C), which should not scorch the top.

Serve slightly warm, just as it is with a cup of coffee, or with cream or thick yoghurt as a dessert.

CHAPTER ELEVEN EASY AS PIE

‘Bread is the new chocolate.’

JOSEPHINE FAIRLEY
, co-founder of Green & Black’s,
(Living Earth,
Spring 2006)

Like it or not, fat is a health issue: we eat more of it than is good for us. The obvious answer is to eat fewer fatty things. But even if we have the will-power to follow such advice, there is still a place for occasional treats, not to mention the sheer convenience of pies and pasties that can be eaten on the hoof and without plates or cutlery. So here is some good news: yeast can replace fat.

Not directly, of course, but if you use a yeasted dough to make pies and pasties, croissants and Danish pastries, you may be eating half as much fat as you find in some traditional types of pastry. How can this be? So-called ‘shortcrust’ pastry, in which fat is combined with a soft (low-protein) flour and a minimum of liquid, can contain upwards of 40 per cent fat. Puff pastry, in which the flaky structure is achieved by folding fat between layers of unleavened dough, has about 30 per cent fat. By comparison, my croissants contain 20 per cent fat, pirozhki (Russian pasties) just over 18 per cent, and calzoni and trenchers less than 5 per cent (fillings are excluded from these calculations).

You are unlikely to find the forms of yeasted pastry described below in baker’s shops. Nowadays most pies and pasties are bought in from large specialist manufacturers and baked off from frozen. Almost all British pies and pasties are made with either shortcrust or puff pastry. So if you want to discover the delights of savoury snacks that are not running with grease, you will need to make your own. In most cases, this is as easy as making bread.

Here are some ideas for delicious pastries that build on your breadmaking expertise. 

Pirozhki

This Russian word means ‘little pies’. They vary in size and filling, though mushrooms and cabbage usually feature. Food memories are notoriously nostalgic, but few tastes can be more satisfying than warm pirozhki in a sliver of brown paper, bought for a few kopecks from a well-wrapped
baboushka
on a freezing Russian street. In those temperatures, the extra fat from deep-frying is a positive benefit. But pirozhki can equally well be baked in an oven. They can be reheated to good effect and make an excellent and traditional accompaniment to the soups for which Russian cuisine is famous.

The lightness of this pastry, which is quite a revelation, comes from the complementary effect of the yeast and the fats and egg. You need have no fear of overworking it and causing the gluten to toughen, which is one of the major concerns with conventional short pastry. Indeed, you must develop a satisfactory gluten network in the pastry so that it can aerate well; the fats lubricate the gluten network but they also expand with the heat of baking and contribute to lightness.

Makes 12 pirozhki

The pastry

10g Fresh yeast

50g Water

125g Unsalted butter

200g Plain white flour

200g Stoneground wholemeal flour

5g Sea salt

50g Egg (1 egg)

50g Soured cream (smetana) or low-fat yoghurt

690g Total

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Rub the butter into the flours. Add the salt, egg (keeping back a little to glaze the pastries), soured cream or yoghurt and yeasty water and mix to a soft dough. Knead for a minute or two, until smooth, then cover and leave to ferment in bulk for about 1 hour.

The filling

50g Onion, finely chopped

15g Chives, chopped

15g Butter

225g Cabbage, finely shredded

100g Hard-boiled eggs (2 eggs)

Sea salt and pepper to taste

405g Total

For the filling, fry the onion and chives gently in the butter until they are soft. Add the finely shredded cabbage and cover the pan with a lid. Steam the cabbage over a low heat, stirring every now and then to prevent sticking. The moisture released by the cabbage should be sufficient to lubricate the whole mixture. Remove from the heat when the cabbage has softened but not gone completely limp. Chop the hard-boiled eggs. Mix everything together and season to taste.

To make the pirozhki, divide the dough into 12 pieces and roll out each into a 10cm round. Fill with a generous heap of the cabbage mixture. Moisten the edges of the pastry with water, fold over to enclose the filling and crimp the edges together well. A Cornish pasty-style edge, in which the bottom layer is pulled up over the top and then crimped, helps prevent the filling leaking out. Brush the pirozhki evenly with beaten egg and arrange them, with plenty space to expand, on baking trays lined with baking parchment. Cover and prove until the pirozhki have grown appreciably. Bake in a moderate oven (180°C) until golden brown; 15-20 minutes should do. Serve at just above room temperature.

Calzoni

Calzoni are, in effect, low-fat pasties – bread dough shaped into pockets and filled with the savoury ingredients of your choice. Easier to transport than pizza, they are, of course, best eaten slightly warm.

You can fill a calzone with almost any kind of pizza topping – vegetable, fish, meat and so on. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that a very wet filling will tend to generate a lot of steam as it bakes and will reduce in size, so there is a danger of ending up with a half-empty calzone. The filling below avoids the bane of Italian cooking – tasteless mozzarella – in favour of something with a bit of real flavour. But you can use whatever cheese you have to hand, as long as it melts reasonably well.

Makes 4 good-sized calzoni

The dough

160g Sponge from Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

120g Type 0 or plain white flour

40g Stoneground wholemeal flour

75g Water (30°C)

3g Sea salt

10g Olive oil

408g Total

Beaten egg for sealing and glazing

Olive oil for brushing

Ferment the sponge for at least 8 hours, preferably 16-24. When you are ready to make the calzoni, mix the flours, water, salt and olive oil into the fermented sponge. Knead until silky smooth, then cover and leave to rise for about an hour.

The filling

50g Red onion, chopped

150g Sweet peppers (any colour), finely sliced

10g Olive oil

30g Rocket

150g Jutland Blue or Gorgonzola cheese

390g Total

Gently fry the onion and peppers in the olive oil for about 10 minutes, then leave to cool. Chop the rocket fairly small and crumble the cheese into it. Add the cooled onion and peppers and mix everything together. If the cheese you are using is not very salty, you may wish to add a little salt at this stage.

To make the calzoni, divide the dough into 4 pieces each weighing about 100g. Roll these gently into rounds and leave them to relax for 2 minutes. Then flatten each one out with a rolling pin into a round about 15cm in diameter and 5mm thick.

Brush a little beaten egg round the edge of each dough piece. Place a good dollop of filling in the middle, fold over the dough and seal the edges together, pasty-style. Arrange the calzoni on a baking tray lined with baking parchment and brush them with beaten egg. Cover the tray loosely with a polythene bag (but don’t let it touch the calzoni) and prove for about an hour, until the calzoni have grown appreciably in size.

Bake in a fairly hot oven (200°C) for 15-20 minutes. As soon as the calzoni are out of the oven, brush them with olive oil (which can be flavoured with garlic and/or herbs, if you like).

Trenchers

This recipe stretches the definition of pastry somewhat but I have included it here because you would eat this on the same occasions as pasties or calzoni. And after a foray to Russia and Italy, the inspiration for this delicious bread/pastry is decidedly home-grown.

Trenchers (perhaps from the French
tranche,
a slice) are mentioned in medieval times as thick slices of dark bread that were used as a kind of edible crockery: people would help themselves to meat and vegetables from large communal dishes, using their trencher to soak up the juices. In an early manifestation of conspicuous consumption (or maybe just waste), rich people would leave their soggy trencher to the servants, the poor or the dogs.

In the mid-1990s I found the trendy fascination with Mediterranean vegetables rather tiresome and wanted to create a baked snack based on English flavours. Thinking back to the tradition of the trencher and the ‘trencherman’ with his wholesome appetite, I came up with the idea of baking the vegetables into the bread. The problem was to find vegetable combinations that would compete with the intensity of Continental flavours. An experiment with beetroot and horseradish worked pretty well, but was rejected on the grounds that it was visually alarming. We eventually launched three varieties, with Chestnut & Ale among them. They were a commercial flop but I had fun trying out the fillings. Much to my surprise, my children loved the buttered parsnip one best.

The whole idea is essentially very similar to the flavoured breads described in Chapter 8. I offer a simple carrot filling below, but I suggest using your imagination and anything that is in season.

Makes 5 trenchers

570g Basic Savoury Bread Dough (page 212)

Spiced carrot filling

300g Carrots, finely grated

50g Butter

20g Honey

20g Cider vinegar

5g Fresh ginger root, finely grated

5g Ground cumin

400g Total

Put all the ingredients for the filling in a saucepan or frying-pan, cover and sweat over a low heat until just soft. Stir everything to ensure a good mixture.

Divide the prepared dough into 5 pieces. Roll these out into rectangles about 15 x 10cm. Spread the carrot filling over each piece of dough, almost to the edges. With the pieces of dough in ‘portrait’ orientation (i.e. with the shorter sides top and bottom), roll them from top to bottom towards you, like a Swiss roll, trying to avoid trapping too much air. If you roll too tightly, you risk elongating the tube that you are forming and thinning out the filling too much. If you roll too loosely, you may not spread the mixture sufficiently, with a risk of creating pockets of filling that may bake into a rather wet, doughy mess.

Place each piece of rolled-up dough seam-side down on a lightly floured baking tray and press down gently to form a reasonably neat rectangle. Dock (prick) the dough several times with a skewer to minimise the chance of it puffing up like pitta bread. Cover and prove for about an hour at room temperature.

Bake in a fairly hot oven (200°C) for about 15 minutes. If you want to keep the crust soft, brush it with a little oil or butter as soon as the trenchers are out of the oven.

Laminated dough

The family of pastries of which croissants are the best known exemplifies the combined effect of fat and yeast in a dough, which is deliberately manipulated to create a laminated (i.e. layered) structure. This basic principle can be deployed in a variety of pastries, both savoury and sweet. I offer below examples of three types of laminated dough: unsweetened croissant dough, sweetened Danish pastry dough, and lardy cake, which is both sweetened and fruited and assembled in a distinctive way.

In a laminated yeasted dough, the action of the yeast expands each thin layer of dough and the layers of fat melt and expand when subjected to heat, which vaporises the 20 per cent or so of the fat that is water. When the dough cools down, the fat solidifies again but a new open (and therefore light) structure has been created.

I cannot pretend that croissants, Danish pastries and the like are essential food or particularly healthy. A case might be made that anything as pleasurable as eating a pure butter croissant with a cup of fresh coffee must be good for mental health, but only the seriously addicted would resort to special pleading of this kind. I should know. For years I justified my habit on the grounds that my croissants were different and somewhat healthier than the rest. In the early days at the Village Bakery, we never used white flour because our one supplier, the local watermill, did not produce any. So anything lighter than wholemeal was made with the mill’s ‘85 per cent flour’, which had had about 15 per cent of the coarsest bran sifted out. Croissants made with this flour were browner than usual but they had a wonderful nutty taste and reasonable flakiness. Purists thought them rather earnest, but I clung on to the verdict of a French couple, who said they were as good as anything they had eaten at home.

The obvious problem with using anything other than the most refined white flour was that the bran particles tended to cut through the laminations and disrupt the uniformity of the fat/dough structure, making a slightly denser croissant. No problem, I used to say, with a mixture of defensiveness and self-righteousness, I am willing to trade a little flakiness for flavour and health.

I now take a different view. The
point
of a croissant is precisely that it is a deliciously unnecessary confection. The deliciousness comes from two elements: flaky texture and buttery flavour. Using a slightly branny flour reduces the flakiness and does nothing for the buttery flavour. Any supposed health gain from the bran is marginal. It would be healthier to eat more wholemeal bread and fewer croissants.