I see you baby, 'mirin my pies....

Vegetable Pies

We get an occasional vegetarian come through the bakery, and I always feel bad that we dont provide a constant line available for vegetarians.  However, from time to time, we do produce vegetable pies, which I think (and I'm not being biased - not at all!) are absolutely amazing!  I beleive that a good vegetable pie has to be packed with vegetable goodness, and have a good amount of pepper to boost the (sometimes) bland vegetable flavours.

On another note, I was once told that salt and pepper are like the Jazz Fingers of the cooking world.  Eg, you can dance all you want, but when you use "Jazz Fingers" it makes it better.  Just the same, you can cook all you want, but if you add just the right amount of salt and pepper, you turn a good meal into an amazing meal!  (Maybe Google "Jazz Fingers", its a thing - beleive me!)

This pie is comprised of two components - a white sauce made the traditional way using a roux, and the meaty (in this case, vegetabley) filling.

White sauce:

Butter           500g
Flour            800g
Milk             4.5L


Melt the butter in a suacepan on low, then add flour.  Once this is a thick paste, add milk in 4-5 parts, mixing the milk into the roux each time to make a paste.  Once all the milk is added, keep the white sauce on a low heat, and regularly stir so that the bottom of the saucepan doesnt burn.

Filling:

Onions            1.5kg
Mushrooms    1.5kg
Carrots            1Kg
Vegetables     10kg
Salt                  60g
Pepper             50g
Chicken Stock  1L
White wine      500mL
Garlic              200g

Start the filling by frying off the onions, mushrooms, carrots and garlic.  Once this has cooked and softened, add the chicken stock, white wine, salt, pepper and assorted vegetables.  We used potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, squash and zuchini.  It should be noted however, that the squash and zuchini dont take much cooking, so we added them towards the end of the process.

Simmer the mix until the potatoes are just becoming soft.  Add the white sauce to the mix, and stir until it is an even mix.  We found that our mix wasnt thick enough, so we added a cornflour mix to thicken the final product.  We added 500g cornflour suspenended in 800mL water.

Combine this filling with our already amazing (again, im not biased!) pie pastry, and you have an epic stomach filler for a cold winters lunch!

Who would have thought that using such simple ingredients could result in such a vegy dice product?

 

Maths is fun! (if you want to cook)

I alluded to this post in my last blog, and here it is.  Maths!  Think about when you were back in school thinking "When am I ever going to need to know this stuff? I only want to cook stuff in a kitchen when I work!"

WELL...

Have you ever found a really good looking recipe in a book or on the internet that serves 8 people and uses measurements such as cups and spoons?  What if you have 23 people to feed?  There is no easy way of  measuring 3 and 7/8's cups of flour.  And what if your cup of flour is more or less heaped than the person who wrote the recipe?

Enter the maths.  Every baker has to have a fair understanding of percentages to make bread and cake.  Take the recipe I posted for the Pumpkin bread:

Flour 80%

Wholemeal Flour 20%
Pumpkin 35%
Salt 2.4%
Yeast 0.4%
Water 45%
Starter 30%

With this recipe, I can make a small dough for one loaf, or I can make 100 loaves simply by expanding the percentages out to the number I need.

The only thing you have to remember is that all the percentages are worked off the flour weight.  You will notice that the wholemeal flour + normal flour = 100%.

So if you make a dough that needs 1 Kg flour, for this recipe you need to have 800g white flour and 200g wholemeal flour.

Once we know that we need 1Kg of flour, we can easily work out how much of the other ingredient we need.  For example, 35% pumpkin is 350g, 2.4% salt is 24g etc.

Too easy right?  Well what if I want to make a pumpkin bread with 36kg flour?  (You might need a calculator for this one!)  Just find out what 35% of 36kg is... (12.6kg if you were wondering) and continue with the rest of the ingredients.  Voila! You have now upscaled the recipe from one loaf of bread to eighty!

It really is easy to do, and I dont understand why everyone doesnt write recipes like this.  There is a whole lot more maths behind the scenes like figuring out how much flour you need to be able to make 14 loaves or serves of the product, but we wont go there....

So just remember, next time you come up with a recipe, use weight measurements (because they are universal)  and express the recipe in percentages.  When you come back to make it again, you can expand or contract the recipe accurately to suit how many people you are catering for.

Because I have gone a whole post without a picture, I thought I would add this picture to lighten the mood... Enjoy the cat!

Netball with Pumpkins!

Under 12 State Netball Competition!

Congratualations to the Sunshine Coast under 12 netball girls, who played some really good games this year!  While unable to back last years win up, they came fourth, with one of their players selected for the Queensland team, and another player picked as a shadow for the Queensland team!  Overall, the Sunshine Coast girls had a great time in Barcaldine.  Thanks a lot girls for coming out and playing some great netball games!

Pumpkin Sourdough Bread

Over the last few weeks, the tourist season has really hit us.  The shop is regularly packed out to the door with tourists trying to get some coffee and cake.  As you can imagine, trying to keep product up during this demanding time is extremely hard, let alone time to sit down and write a blog entry!

However, when I recently went to Brisbane and visited a few well known bakeries, I found some inspiration for a new product! Pumpkin Sourdough!

In my spare time (like there is lots!) I came up with a great sourdough recipe.  While I will share the recipe, I would like to explain the reasons behind the ingredients and methods I used.

Recipe

Starter:

Flour 50%

Wholemeal Flour 50%

Sour starter 50%

Water 60%

Final Dough

Flour 80%

Wholemeal Flour 20%

Pumpkin 35%

Salt 2.4%

Yeast 0.4%

Water 45%

Starter 30%

Pepper to taste

Nutmeg to taste

For an explaination of the bakers percentages, check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage  Although, this is probably over complicated, I will endeavour to explain it in a simpler fashion in a future blog post.

The day before you want to make the sour dough, it is important to make the sour dough starter.  This starter gives flavor and body to the bread as well as being a replacement for commercial yeast.  I decided to use wholemeal flour in this starter to give an almost sweet nutty flavor to the final bread. 

The pumpkin also needs to be roasted the day before to allow it time to cool.  You only need to roast it until it is soft to stick a knife through.  My pumpkin took 1 hour at 180 degrees.

The next day, it is time to mix the final dough.  Put all the ingredients in the mixing bowl at the start of the mixing process.  You can use all the pumpkin skin and all.  The amount of water in the final dough will depend on the amount of water in the pumpkin.  You may need to add more flour or water as the dough mixes. 

After this, a normal sourdough bread production method is used, where the dough rises in bulk for 2 hours.  We cut the final loaves at 700g, rested them, then did a final mold in to cobbs (or boules in French!)

Once it is shaped into a boule, we cut the into the middle top with a cookie cutter, and 5 cuts around the sides of the loaf, so when it baked it would look (slightly) like a pumpkin.  Sticking to the pumpkin theme, we added pumpkin seeds to the top for a stunning effect (and tasty addition!)

But why?

I decided to make the final dough with a small amount of wholemeal flour, so that the nutty bran flavor would carry through the bread.  Using 35% pumpkin in this dough is similar to a standard(ish) industry fruit dough, where there is about 30 - 35% fruit through the dough.  I decided I didnt want the sour dough to overpower the pumpkin flavor, so I used a smaller amount of 30% (some recipes can use 50 - 60% starter or more). 

However, taking into consideration the small amount of sour dough culture and the added pumpkin to the dough, I decided the dough would probably be a bit slow to rise.  In France, sourdoughs are legally alowed to have up to 0.4% yeast in the bread before it is not considered a sourdough anymore.  So using this figure as a guideline, I used the 0.4% yeast in this dough to help it rise. 

When thinking about pumpkin, warm thick pumpkin soup comes to mind, and with that thoughts of pepper and nutmeg (well in my mind anyway!) These are traditional spices to add to pumpkin, so I decided to add them to the Pumpkin Sourdough to give a background flavor for the pumpkin to sit against.  Without actually measuring the amount I used, it would be less than 0.5% of the flour weight in the final dough.

So. There are my reasons for using this particular recipe and ingredients.  AND it turned out so well, it might just make it through to being a permanent item in my recipe book.