Beef Boregi with Herbs and Pine Nuts from Elra's Cooking

This was my first attempt ever, at using filo pastry and as I tried to separate the layers of filo from the package, Elra's words came to mind.

"You might not use the whole package, but always nice to have extra just in case you tear some."

And boy did I tear some...

In the end, I cheated by using bits of the torn pastry to patch-up holes in the rolled-up filo in the pan. It took 65 minutes before the top of my Boregi was nice and brown.

For the recipe, please go here.

I totally recommend this recipe and really loved the filling!

Blue Poppy Seed Sourdough Dinner Buns

I feed my starter once a week, and when I do this I pour everything into a plastic bowl and add 1 cup AP flour and 1 cup water and let it proof. This used to take more than 10 hours, but these days my starter is ready in a few hours.

When my starter is ready, I put half of it inside its container and feed it with 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup water. I use the rest of it to bake bread.

Now, this week I wanted something different. I wanted something different but not difficult or complicated since I had been dealing with some annoying things related to my water purifier for two days.

So I just made bread according to S. J. Ross's recipe adding around 1 Cup spelt flour into the mix and divided the dough up into 16 parts and topped them off with blue poppy seed.

The result was warm wholesome sourdough buns that tasted great with garlic parsley butter.

Here's the recipe.

Blue Poppy Seed Sourdough Dinner Buns

Ingredients

2 Cups Sponge

1 Cup Spelt Flour

2 Cups AP Flour*

2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

5 Tsp Brown Sugar

2 Tsp Coarse Spanish Sea Salt

1 Tbsp Blue Poppy Seeds

*Approximate amount. Depending on the state of your sponge and other conditions, you may need more or less.

Step 1: Add the spelt flour to the sponge and mix it.

Step 2: Add the sugar and oil and mix some more.

Step 3: Add the rest of the flour and knead it until it is more or less mixed.

Step 4: Let it rest for 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 5: Let it rest for another 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 6: Let it rest for another 30 minutes and then knead it around 100 times.

Step 7: Let the dough rest until it has risen to around twice its original size. If you create an indentation with your finger and it does not spring back your bread is risen.

Step 8: Divide the dough into 4. Roll these into thick logs and then divide these into 4 again. This will give you 16 buns.

Step 9: Cover your baking tray with oven paper and put some coarse corn flour on it.

Step 10: Place the balls of buns on the paper and cover with a kitchen cloth and let them rise for 1-2 hours.

Step 11: When they have risen, dampen the tops of the buns with luke warm water and sprinkle blue poppy seeds on them.

Step 12: Put a steaming tray of boiling water on the bottom of the oven and put the oven tray in place. Close the oven and turn it on. The temperature should be set to 175C (350F).

Step 13: Bake for around 30 minutes.

Step 14: Serve warm with dinner!

Osakaya in Mita, Tokyo

I've been remiss about blogging lately even more so than usual, because I've been spending a lot of time back in Japan. It may be difficult for some of you to imagine this, but this Japanese household did not even have one camera until recently and my sister's iPhone is currently on its way to the Apple Graveyard.

Anyway, I didn't make these. I wish I could say that I did.

These are Nerikiri from a wonderful Japanese sweets shop called Osakaya in Mita, Tokyo. Osakaya is a family business that has been around for 17 generations spanning a period of around 300 years.

Nerikiri are made from ingredients such as Shiratama Flour (processed glutinous rice flour), glutinous rice flour, sugar, Mizuame (starch syrup), Azuki bean paste, white bean paste or boiled egg yolks.

A good quality Nerikiri will have a very smooth texture and will have a subtle sweetness to it. Osakaya appears to blend their Azuki bean paste with white bean paste so that the flavor of Azuki does not dominate and become overpowering, but I don't really know what they do to achieve this effect.

I do however recommend that you pick-up some sweets at this shop if you are in the neighborhood. The quality of their sweets are really exceptional.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Christina Mohseni's Estate

I was at a Rotary Club dinner on March 9, 2011. I flew in to attend it, as I had had a craving for Lebanese food for quite some time. To my delight, my friend who accompanied me won a bottle of extra virgin olive oil in the raffle, and I was even more delighted when I found out this special bottle of olive oil was produced on an estate owned by Christina Mohseni, one of the members of the Rotary Club of London. The label has stains on it as it wasn't bottled industrially and was presumably hand carried from the estate in Bibbona to London.

The olive oil had a fresh spicy smell that brought back memories of a trip I made to Tuscany more than a decade ago. I drizzled some of it onto a plate and mopped it up with some focaccia I had just made. It was heavenly.

Thank you, Christina!

Sourdough Ciabatta

Ronny was going to make some sourdough Ciabatta this weekend, but upon examination of the recipe he was going to use, I saw baking soda in the ingredient list and I was turned off by it. We still wanted to make Ciabatta so I had to quickly find an alternative recipe and I turned to Elra and sure enough, Elra had made some.

The first step is to ascertain if you have the ingredients for making this.

You will need the following ingredients:

540g AP Flour or Strong Wheat Flour

1 Tbsp Sea Salt

2 Tbsp  Extra Virgin Olive Oil

610g Proofed Sourdough Starter (If you don't have enough, you can add extra water.)

355g Water (Use less water here if you add more water to the starter.)

I didn't have exactly 610 g starter. I only had 500g of it, so I just added 110g additional water. If fed, yeast will propagate and experience told me this wouldn't be an issue, and it wasn't. I added less water. Instead of 355g, I used 300g.

The original recipe uses some whole wheat flour, but my starter is fed on 100% whole wheat flour all the time so I just used unbleached wheat flour. Strong Bread Flour is better but you won't fail if you use AP Flour.

Mix all these ingredients for about 5 minutes making sure it's thoroughly mixed, and then mix it for another 5 minutes a little more vigorously this time. Let it sit for 30 minutes inside the bowl and prepare a clean oiled bowl while the dough is sitting.

Then next step is to fold the very wet dough on a heavily floured surface. Please see this video on how to do it. If your dough is very very wet, I suggest using two spatulas to fold it more than a few times until some of the flour is incorporated into the batter, making it more manageable.

Let the dough sit for another 60 minutes inside the oiled bowl, and repeat the above procedure. By now the dough should be more manageable and you can just fold it over horizontally, then vertically, like folding a letter. Return the dough to the oiled bowl.

Let the dough sit for 120 minutes this time. While waiting, clean out the other bowl and oil it. When the 120 minutes is up, fold the dough again and put it into the newly oiled bowl, cover it with plastic and fasten the edges with duct tape. This is to prevent any weird refrigerator smells permeating your dough.

I pretty much followed Elra's recipe even about the part where she left her dough lying in the refrigerator for 18 hours. This is because when you start making the Ciabatta on a Saturday afternoon, it's around 4 p.m. by the time it's ready to go into the refrigerator. Then you resume at around 10 a.m. the next day, if you're lazy like me. I believe the important thing here is to leave it in the refrigerator to mature for at least 9 hours and it shouldn't matter too much if you leave it there for a few more hours. It's probably not a good idea to leave it there for more than 24 hours though.

The morning after...

I don't have a couche, and I just used a heavily floured IKEA tea towel, sprinkled flour on the bread and covered it with cling film. I think covering them with a floured tea towel would have been better as the dough can stick to the cling film if you're not careful, but unfortunately the rest of my tea towels were in the laundry basket at the time. Here is a video by Susan from Wild Yeast on how to cut and transfer the dough to the floured tea towel or couche.

I let it rise for 1 hour and then started preheating the oven at 250C (475F). As soon as the oven reached this temperature, I placed an oven paper on a flat board (or any hard flat item) and carefully transferred the ciabatta dough with the side that was facing down, facing up this time. This is so that you have those nice artistic looking patterns on your bread when they are finished.

Then, I put a dish with boiling water onto the bottom of the oven. I use a pyrex casserole dish for this. I put the casserole dish in place and then pour boiling water into it, because it's less dangerous this way.

Remove the baking hot tray from the oven, and slide the dough onto the hot tray. This is much easier of course if you have a hard flat board underneath the oven paper. Put the tray back into the oven and shut the door.

Dial down the oven temperature to 230C (450F) and bake it for 20-30 minutes. If the loaves look anemic, bake them for another 5 minutes.

I'm also going to list Elra's references here and here. When you follow the link, it will lead you to Wild Yeast, and since this bread was very photogenic, I've decided to make an entry to Yeast Spotting.