pumpkinstrokemarrow

Hitherto, I have regarded making bread and making beer as the proper province of craftsmen doing it for a living. Something which one gets better at with practise. Something which one does better for doing a fair amount of it. All this because, for a while, while young, family bound and skint, I used to make some of my own beer. The product was clean & clear, alcoholic and drinkable but too strong, too fizzy and too flavoured. In the couple of years or so that I was trying, I never achieved anything like the quality of proper brewer beer. I don't recall when I last tasted someone else's home brew but I do recall tasting a fair amount of home or hotel baked bread and that never achieved anything like the quality of proper baker bread either. The difference being that there are very few proper bakers these days.

So, yesterday, being in a tight spot, I decided to move out of the blogchair and onto the offensive and try, for the first time in my life, to make my own bread. White, naturally. A decision made easier by the facts that BH had recipes from Delia to guide me and the materials she uses for making pizza dough.

First time around, a fair amount of performance. One does not know what things should feel like or look like. Continual consultation of the words of Delia. Started out OK, and the dried yeast responded well to sugar and warm water. Surprised by the suggestion that I should put a level table spoon of salt into a pound and a half of flour and settled for a level desert spoon. Don't use salt in cooking at all as a rule - beyond that which comes with preserved meat. Mixed everything up as per instructions to find that the dough was too damp. Had to add a fair amount of flour to bring it back to what I thought was the proper condition. Let it rise at room temperature and then went for the second knead. Dough starting to look quite like bread now. Went for the second rise. Cooked the two loaves for around 40 minutes at 210C (fan oven speak).

The result was quite eatable but nothing much like the white bloomers I get from Cheam. The finish of the crust was quite different and the crust was much thicker - rather more like that on the round Italian loaves I sometimes get from Alio's than that on English bloomers. The flesh was off-white rather than the on-white of baker bread. Rather heavier in texture than Cheam, again rather more like that of the Italian bread. But the bread had risen evenly with none of those compacted damp bits you get from Cheam on a bad day. Warm it tasted more like cake than bread. This morning, it has moved a bit in the bread direction.

I shall try again and will aim for a drier dough and see what difference that makes. I suspect it is going to be a while before I get the stuff right; for a recipe with few ingredients there are an awful lot of variables and an awful lot of variation in the product.

Or will I get fed up with the amount of time that it soaks up? Yesterday's effort knocked out most of the afternoon.

In the margins, interested to see one of those country league tables in the Guardian, à propos of one of those articles where the author moans about the declining position of the UK in the world. No. 7 and going down. Doom and gloom. Must apply magic bullet patented by the author to put things right. The claim was that, apart from the Indias and Brazils doing well, Turkey and Nigeria would be up there with us by 2050. With Turkey only being just behind Canada now. And I had thought that Turkey was a poor country. Beset with lots of religious bother and lots of barren mountain. Not to mention the curds. Turn to the CIA factbook to see what they say, to find that the population of Turkey is somewhat bigger than our own and that they have a rapidly growing economy. Lots of clothing and textiles - which is odd given that pub wisdom is that all that sort of thing is knocked out in the far east, not the near east.