Bread and knitting
Tuesday 2nd August 2011
Bread is a food I have avoided for some time now because I stopped enjoying it and it often made me feel – not ill, but not well. It disagreed with me. I went to Glastonbury and bought spelt flour, organic bread from the wholefood cafe there and that seemed OK, if very, very filling and heavy – and anyway, it’s a long way to go for a loaf of bread. So I sort of gave it up. No big deal. Except, I
like bread and I missed it.
When a friend suggested that we go on the
River Cottage ‘Bread’ course, I was keen and that was, if I’m honest, mainly because I was convinced that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be there. He wasn’t. Celia, with whom I went, was quite right. I don’t think he goes there much, mainly to film for the telly I suppose. But anyway, it’s a very cool and interesting place, River Cottage HQ, AKA Park Farm. For example, they pick you up from the car-park in a tractor-pulled trailer. Ouch. That is one long, bumpy track down to the farm.
(Note: it said in the literature that we should wear sturdy footwear. So of course I wore black and silver, chunky high-heel-and-platform Doc Martens, which were fine as I wear these shoes or similar all the time and can walk miles and teach all day in mine, but it/I kind of didn’t fit it. I shrug, they looked
fab. Here they are:
Yes. I know. But I am used to wearing them and they are dreamily comfy, so I don’t care. Just because we are making bread, does not mean that style must be abandoned at the farm gate…)
It turns out that even ‘good’ bread – let’s say you’ve gone to all the time and trouble of going to an up-market supermaket for a wholemeal loaf – is likely to be kind of ‘hurried’ in its production. Fast food, by bread standards, using dried ‘express’ yeast, not having enough water, too much salt, maybe accelerators, over-processed flour, fats may be added, and the whole thing happens really quickly. Aidan, our master-baker and tutor, who owns and runs the
Phoenix Bakery in Weymouth explained that real bread making is a slow process. That is not to say that you are involved all that much. It’s slow – but not time-consuming. You can go away and get on with your life while, for example, your sour-dough starter is growing. This is a clever and ancient method of harvesting wild yeast from the air and growing a sort of culture to make your own bread – no need to even use bought yeast at all. You just have to accept that it will take days to start the sour-dough off and then the proving of your loaves will take a lot longer too because you are using this slow-working wild yeast. That’s fine. I like the slow-lane. The longer the process and the better the ingredients, the more ‘wholesome’ your bread will be, less likely to upset your tummy – in fact, it’s rare for people who are unable to tolerate bought bread to have a bad reaction to bread made in this long slow way.
If I wanted a fast turn-around on a knitwear design, I’d never be a hand-knitter. That is what M&S is for. I think, reflecting on the day at River Cottage with Aidan, that making bread his way is like knitting, my way. I’m not fast and I have stopped trying to be. I spend ages thinking and designing and planning – as evidenced by the time it is taking me to get the kits ready, for example. I think these are the main analogies I came away with: buying a mass-produced loaf is like buying a cheap knit from a mass-production High Street retailer with bargain basement prices. Making your own bread but using fast-acting yeasts and having a loaf banged out in a morning is like knitting with a knitting machine. Aidan, on the other hand, bakes bread like I design and produce hand-crafted knit-wear: slowly. Carefully. With my own energy in the product.
I was not 100% happy with my loaf. It’s not a thing of beauty. But Aidan said, quite rightly, that doesn’t affect the taste. I suppose I am applying knit-wear expectations to it, in which my designs have to be both beautiful (in my eyes at least) and practical. I will have to work on this with my future bread-making. For example, I wouldn’t wear an ugly scarf just because it was warm. So I need to make my bread look better (or stop worrying that it’s flat and squat…), but this was my first attempt and it does taste very good!
We also made pizza, a food I dislike usually, but these were actually delicious. I was a bit freaked out by the 20 plus people rammed into the tiny kitchen of River Cottage HQ, though it was also great to see the real place. The oven in which they usually make pizzas was inexplicably missing as were the bread ovens usually in the classroom area, so there was a certain amount of improvisation – the bread oven in the little inglenook was literally going like a furnace, with flames jetting out of it, so the burning logs had to be dragged out and left to burn in the inglenook. By this time the small room was approaching melt-down temperatures. Aidan whose unhappy task it was to cook the blasted pizzas, one by one, was heroic. I’d have said: knickers to that! and we’d have had to forgo the best pizzas we’d ever eaten…but no, he manfully went in again and again to post and then retrieve the food, which came out like molten lava (and sometimes burned and crispy or with bits of charred log adhered to it, but there was so much of it, it didn’t matter).
Now we’d been told that these would be the best pizzas we’d ever eaten and that they Were Not Our Lunch, i.e., don’t utterly gorge on them as you will lose your appetite. Well, it was like a feeding frenzy. Honestly, you’d have thought that half these folks had never had a hot meal, despite the evidence to the contrary. My pizza was the last but one to go in and to be honest, I’d got a bit bored of the pizza bit of the day by then, and I had also offered to share my dough with a small, very shy and quiet lady who was even more retiring that I was and who therefore had no dough of her own. So I said: you shape it, I’ll top it! Oh dear, it was shame that she was a vegetarian. I never thought to ask, as I adorned the pizza with fat bacon and salami….oopsie.
To be honest, it can’t have been a great day for her because just before lunch, Ollie the chef – very young, very,
very enthusiastic and really charming but mainly disturbingly passionate about curing meat – got us all into his kitchen to look at three butchered pigs that he was happily – no, not happily,
manically – rubbing down with a rather yummy smelling salt/sugar/juniper/bay mix. As he rubbed, he slapped the meat, showed us how fat it was (fat in a
good way) and talked dreamily of curing bacon and pork. I do like to see a man happy in his work. Ollie is delirious. But I do see that being a veggie at River Cottage, where Ollie also produced a lunch of slow-braised brisket of beef about which he eulogised first (the vegetarian lady got a lovely alternative, but still left it all and all her pudding…) might be a challenge. Before we went I saw that they said in the literature: any dietary requirements? and then it said, rather cajolingly: if you are a vegetarian, do you eat fish? This is of course a pitifully hopeful River Cottage attempt to get them to eat at least
some once-living thing, but it did make me laugh because vegetarians don’t eat meat or fish. At all. I am now an enthusiastic meat and especially fish eater but I used never to eat meat (though I always ate fish and was therefore, not a vegetarian). I don’t mind or even care what choices people make as long as they eat responsible and fair food. But gosh, I bet Ollie finds it all a bit baffling!
Anyway, I have now read the River Cottage Bread book that we were given, started my own sour dough starter that will provide the yeast and a rather tangy taste for my bread, and I have become obsessed with making my own clay oven in the garden, step-by-step instructions for which are also in the book! This will require 8 pails of squidgy clay – any ideas, people? At River Cottage they dig it out of their lake. Here we are on sand…But I am undaunted, and one day soon, I will have a clay oven like this, outside the back door:
I’m very excited! Aidan says his own bread book will be out in the next few months and I will certainly be getting that because his ways of bread making are even slower than the recipes in the River Cottage book – and I am a slow-food, slow-living, slow-lane girl. Except for shoes. And cycling. Oh, and running…but apart from that.
Good luck with sour dough starter and bread. I love s/d makes great toast and perfect for crostini. But I’ve yet to master it so will follow you progress.
the sour-dough starter is incredibly sulky!
fish-eaters who claim to be veggies drive me up the wall! its the sort of pedantic thing that really gets to me. i’ve never made bread before, love a bit of cake baking though.