Bread Matters (37 page)

There must also be a balance between bread and topping – for example, delicate salads or bland cheese such as mozzarella would be outfaced by too hearty a base. On the other hand, the sharpness of anchovies or the dense fattiness of salami needs more robust support than plain white toast.

The recipe below combines some of my favourite flavours with the bread that, of all the ones in this book, makes the most wonderful toast – naturally leavened
pain de campagne,
or French Country Bread.

Makes 2 bruschette, enough for a light meal

1 small Aubergine

50g Olive oil

1 medium Onion, very thinly sliced into rings

1 medium Red pepper, seeded and thinly sliced into rings

2 large slices French Country Bread (page 182)

1 large clove Garlic

100g Jutland Blue cheese (or similar)

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the aubergine lengthwise into thin strips. Brush these with a little of the olive oil on both sides and sear them on a griddle or under a grill. The aim is to soften and colour them without burning.

Put the remaining olive oil in a frying-pan. Add the onion and heat gently. Put a lid on the pan to sweat the onion. Add the red pepper and cook gently for a further 10 minutes or so until the pepper has softened.

Cut 2 thick slices of French Country Bread and toast them under a grill, colouring them on one side rather more than the other. Peel and squash the garlic clove and rub it all over the less toasted side of the bread. Then tip the onion and pepper on to the garlic side of the toast and spread evenly, taking care to make use of all the olive oil.

Ruck the aubergine slices into little folds and arrange them over the onion and pepper mixture, all along the top of the bruschetta. Cut the cheese into shavings, or crumble it on top of the aubergines. Season with a little salt and pepper if desired. Flash under the grill for a minute, immediately before serving so that the cheese is just beginning to melt.

I have only once dined in an officers’ mess. At sixth-form college I trained in the Inshore Rescue Boat service and was sent with a fellow student to Poole Harbour to see how the Royal Navy did things. After a cold day at sea, we scrubbed up as best we could and were treated to silver service in an almost deserted dining room. I was about to tuck into the soup when the immaculately dressed orderly removed the lid from a silver dish and proffered it with a gesture somewhere between a flourish and a challenge. I surveyed the dish and saw what looked like a pile of greasy wood chippings. I had absolutely no idea what to do with them, but would rather have died than appear ignorant. Spooning a few on to my side plate, I noticed a naval lip curl, but nothing was said. Years later, when a friend served soup with croûtons in it, I realised what I had done and re-lived the embarrassment all over again. I am including the following recipe as part of a continuing personal struggle with croûton-induced feelings of social inadequacy.

Green Salad with Croûtons

Croûtons are small squares of toasted or dried bread. Their crunch and dryness are a foil for softer, wetter textures. As with bruschetta, there is no need to fry them in oil. The most they need is a little drizzle.

Choose a light bread without any vegetable bits in it to make croûtons. The Altamura Bread on page 222 is ideal. A wholemeal loaf, such as Basic Bread (see page 141), has more body.

Dried croûtons can be cooled and stored in an airtight bag in the freezer.

Makes a good salad for 2

4 slices Altamura Bread (page 222)

4 cloves Garlic

2 Plum tomatoes

150g Mixed green leaves

50g Blue cheese (Jutland Blue or Roquefort)

20g Olive oil

5g Cider or raspberry vinegar

Arrange the slices of bread on a baking tray in an oven heated to no more than 130°C. The object is to dry the bread without it taking any extra colour. Turn the slices over from time to time to make sure that they dry out evenly. It may take up to an hour if the bread is fairly moist.

As soon as the dried bread is out of the oven, peel and squash the garlic cloves and use to rub each slice well. Cut each plum tomato in half and use one half for each slice, rubbing and squeezing gently so that the surface of the bread is slightly moistened. Now cut the bread slices into roughly 1cm croûtons.

Prepare a salad of mixed leaves with whatever you have to hand: rocket, dandelion, lamb’s lettuce, land cress, fresh coriander, endive etc. Put these in a large salad bowl and throw the croûtons on top.

Take the blue cheese and pass it through a garlic press or a mouli grater over the salad: fine strands of cheese are the object. Finally, whisk together the oil and vinegar to make a dressing and pour it over the salad. Toss the salad lightly and serve.

Crumbs

One of the most versatile ways of using bread is as crumbs, either fresh or dried. Crumbs work as a much better filler and thickener than floury starches because their particle size opens out the texture of whatever they are in. The recipes below use crumbs in a variety of ways.

I find the coarse side of a handheld cheese grater is the best tool for making fresh crumbs, provided the bread has a certain firmness to it. This way, some of the crusts (providing they are not too dark) can be grated as well. Rubbing crumbs in the fingers tends to produce rather uneven results with all but the driest bread. You can, of course, use a food processor for this job.

At the Village Bakery, we needed vast quantities of breadcrumbs for the thousands of Christmas puddings that we made each year. I used to cut left-over wholemeal loaves in half lengthways and set them out on trays next to the wood-fired oven. In a couple of days they would be bone dry and we crumbed them with our commercial heavy-duty vegetable grater, which screamed like a banshee and wore out blades with some regularity.

Stuffing

Stuffing recipes almost always call for fresh breadcrumbs but I think that this advice needs to be qualified. For one thing, as I have repeated
ad nauseam,
the crumb-softening enzymes used in much modern bread keep it so squishy for so many days that any attempt to turn it into crumbs is more likely to end up with soggy pellets, like the ones we used as ammunition for elastic-band catapults during boring lessons at school.

Assuming that nobody who has tolerated the rants on this subject so far is likely to use anything other than the best artisan (and preferably their own) bread for crumbs, I still think it wise to recommend making ‘fresh’ crumbs from bread that is two or three days’ old. At this age there need be no fear that it will be too dry and any hardness of the starches will vanish when the crumbs are mixed with milk or egg and subjected to the heat of cooking.

Simple Shallot and Parsley Stuffing

Crumbs made from Arkatena Bread will add a hint of fennel to Silvija Davidson’s recipe, which is recommended for roast meat, poultry or vegetables (e.g. peppers).

150g Arkatena Bread (page 190) or other

150g Shallots or onions, finely chopped

50g Unsalted butter

1 small bunch Parsley, finely chopped

a pinch Nutmeg, grated

A little beaten egg (or milk), to bind

Salt and pepper to taste

Make the bread into crumbs. Sauté the shallots or onions in the butter until soft and translucent. Add the breadcrumbs, parsley, nutmeg and some seasoning. Stir in just enough egg or milk to bind.

Fishcakes

This recipe uses both fresh and dried breadcrumbs. The fresh ones add body to the soft inside of the fishcakes, while the dried ones provide a contrasting crunch on the outside. I suggest the light but tangy French Country Bread for the middle and the more substantial Basic Bread for the outside, but other breads would work just as well.

To some extent, your choice of fish will determine the flavour of these cakes. In these days of over fishing and problems with commercial fish farming, try to choose organic or sustainably managed sources of fish. Graig Farm (see page 353) supplies an interesting range by mail order, some of which are caught off the island of St Helena. Fishcakes are a good way of disguising the flavours of fish like herring and mackerel, which are not to everyone’s taste.

Makes 6 large fishcakes

100g Wholemeal bread, sliced

120g French Country Bread (page 182), 1-2 days old

170g Fish fillet (cod, herring or mackerel etc)

30g Smoked salmon, finely chopped (optional)

50g Spring onion or red onion, finely chopped

1 heaped tablespoon Fresh herbs, finely chopped

150g Potato, mashed

2g Nutmeg, grated

Salt and pepper to taste

Beaten egg, for dipping

Olive oil for drizzling

Dry the wholemeal bread slices by leaving them in a warm place for a few days or by toasting them in a very low oven (130°C) until they are completely crisp. Grate them into crumbs either by hand or in a food processor.

Make the French Country Bread into crumbs.

Remove any skin or bones from the raw fish and chop it into small pieces. Then mix everything together except the wholemeal breadcrumbs and the beaten egg, seasoning with a little salt and pepper if desired. Work the mixture with your hands until it comes together.

Pour the beaten egg into a shallow bowl. Set out the dry wholemeal breadcrumbs in another bowl.

Shape the mixture into 6 fishcakes, dip them in the egg and then press them firmly into the dried wholemeal crumbs. Make sure the cakes are well covered.

Drizzle a little olive oil over both sides of each fishcake and cook them on a griddle, under a grill, in a frying-pan or in an ovenproof dish at 180°C for about 10 minutes, turning them halfway through cooking.

Charlotte Russe

Generally credited to the famous French chef Antonin Carême—one-time chef to Tsar Alexander I – and probably dedicated to Queen Charlotte, Princess Royal and eldest daughter of King George III, this delicious apple pudding is known in Russia by the charming diminutive
Sharlotka.
It is another breadcrumb recipe, but this time some of the crumbs are fried in butter. Some recipes for Charlotte call for slices of bread or, effectively, cake (in the form of ‘ladies’ fingers’) to line the mould. However, with the rye bread specified in Russian recipes, I think that a lining of crumbs makes for a more delicate pudding.

Russian recipes call for ‘black bread’, which just means an ordinary rye bread. I suggest using Borodinsky crumbs because of their malty coriander flavour. But one can have too much of a good thing, so it is probably best to remove the bottom crust where the whole coriander seeds are lodged. A plain rye bread would be a perfectly acceptable substitute.

Makes 1 plump Sharlotka

300g Borodinsky Bread (page 168), at least 4 days old

150g Butter

2g Ground cloves

5g Ground cinnamon

150g Raw cane sugar

150g White wine

6 medium Apples (cookers)

50g Ground almonds

50g Currants or raisins

Grate the Borodinsky bread to make crumbs. Use a little of the butter to grease a large pudding basin or mould, about 1.5 litres in capacity. Dust this thoroughly with some of the breadcrumbs, making sure that there are no blind spots. If the apple mix seeps through, Sharlotka may be reluctant to come out of her shell.

Fry the remaining breadcrumbs with the spices and 50g of the sugar in the rest of the butter. When they have caramelised slightly, remove them from the heat and pour on 100g of the white wine.

Peel, core and finely slice the apples. Mix with the rest of the sugar, the almonds, the currants or raisins and the rest of the white wine.

Put a layer of the breadcrumb mix in the bottom of the mould, followed by a layer of the apple mix, and so on, finishing with a layer of breadcrumb mix. Bake in a slow oven (150°C) for about an hour. Turn the mould upside down on to a serving dish and hope for the best. Serve warm with cream or crème-fraîche.

In the early days of the Village Bakery, we used to make ice cream. It was a good way of using gluts of soft fruit from the smallholding and surplus milk from Rosie, Tansy and Samantha (don’t ask), our house cows—until, that is, food hygiene regulations required us to invest in expensive equipment for real-time temperature monitoring, at which point we gave up. This was bad news for one regular customer, who was so fond of Brown Bread Ice Cream that he lamented its demise in a long ode in the style of the infamous Scottish ‘poet’, William McGonagall. Sadly, the text of this supreme piece of doggerel has been lost, which may come as some relief to the customer, who went on to become a Very Important Person and is now Master of an Oxford college.

Brown Bread Ice Cream

The surprising thing about the breadcrumbs in this recipe is that they stay crunchy even after being mixed with the liquid custard. The trick is to caramelise them with some sugar, after which they become brittle and almost impervious to softening.

The function of the breadcrumbs is mostly textural, so the choice of bread is not that important, though I can’t imagine olive bread working too well. But something like Borodinsky, which has bags of flavour and a certain sweetness, is worth trying.

Makes enough for 6 portions

85g Wholemeal bread, sliced

50g Butter

75g Raw cane sugar

400g Egg (8 eggs)

75g Caster sugar

500g Whole milk or single cream

1 Vanilla pod

Dry the wholemeal bread slices by leaving them in a warm place for a few days or by toasting them in a very low oven (130°C) until they are completely crisp. Grate them into crumbs either by hand or in a food processor. Fry these with the butter until they are crisp. Add the raw cane sugar and continue to heat, stirring regularly, until the mixture caramelises. Leave to cool and, if necessary, break it up into fine crumbs.