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.

Goat racing and Vitamin C

 

The May Day weekend in Barcaldine is our biggest weekend for the town.  As Barcaldine is where the labour political party was born, Barcaldine comes alive with festivities to celebrate labour day in Australia.  This includes numerous activities across the weekend including a hoedown on Friday night, Saturday morning markets along the main street, horse races, town party, drag races, goat races, football and finally a May Day parade to finish proceedings on Monday.

So that we don't have to explain all the events every time we describe this weekend to outsiders, we call it the Tree of Knowledge festival.  Named after the Tree of Knowledge under which the Labour party came to fruition 100 something years ago.  Coincidentally, we have a sour dough loaf after the Tree of Knowledge namesake - the Dough of Knowledge.  Come in and try it, especially this weekend when we will have it baked fresh all weekend!

As you can imagine, with so much happening in Barcaldine this weekend, this becomes the bakery's biggest weekend of the year, outdoing the traditional Christmas and Easter periods.  If you want to know more about the Tree of Knowledge Festival, try this link - http://www.treeofknowledge.com.au/

During the week I also saw a TV ad from a prominent franchise bakery chain in Australia claiming they had got rid of all the additives in their bread products with E numbers.  These additives include emulsifiers and dough conditioners that have names that you might have heard of before.  Such as additive E300.  Sounds pretty scary right?  I don't know about you, but I don't want to eat something with a number attached to it.  Sounds like it was synthetically made in a laboratory, and some crazy scientist decided it would be good to put in food.

Well did you know that additive E300 is commonly known as Vitamin C?  When used in bread making, the usage is less than 0.01% to the flour.  Vitamin C is used to strengthen the gluten in the bread so that the bread can retain more gas produced by the yeast.  Did you know that capsicum has the highest naturally found percentage of Vitamin C with almost 1% Vitamin C per weight?  This is even more than oranges!

Even some artisan breads contain Vitamin C for the same purpose.  It is very hard to produce an instant dough bread characteristic of the bakery franchises bread without this important additive, and indeed, we use Vitamin C in our white bread loaves.

The only breads that don't contain Vitamin C is artisan bread such as Sourdough and Turkish bread that we sell in store. 

So how did this prominent bakery franchise banish all these additives that are so bad for you?  While I don't have any proof, I would imagine their ingredients list wouldn't include additive number E300, but instead list Vitamin C.

There is some capsicum for thought.  Don't believe everything you see on TV.

Strawberry Fields for ever

I recently spent time in Europe, and while there, learnt the techniques behind making mousse cakes.  While we made a blueberry inspired mousse cake, I recently decided to give it a go now that I'm back in Australia.  Unfortunately, I only have two cake moulds, so I cant make these cakes as a permenant feature of the bakery, however, stay tuned in the next few months as we gather the necesary equipment to start making mousse cakes full time!

This strawberry inspired mousse cake has everything that is required in modern sweets - Taste with a delicate balance between strawberry, lime, white chocolate and a hint of mint.  Texture shared between the set mousse, rubbery marshmallow and the crunchy lime and mint insert.  Colour contrast between the white mousse, pink marshmallow and green insert, and finally, 4 layers of sponge, marshmallow, lime and mint insert and mousse.

Sponge Cake

Use a standard sponge cake recipe, spreading the cake so the finished product will be about 1-2 cm thick.

Strawberry Compote

1 Litre Water
1 Kg Sugar
3-4 Punnets of strawberrys.


Take the top off the strawberrys and cut into quarters.  Bring water and sugar to boil and drop strawberrys in.  Continue to boil for 2-3 minutes.

Marshmallow, after being whipped.

Strawberry Marshmallow

Take about 500 g of Strawberry Compote and put in mixing bowl with whisk.  While whisking, add 30g Gelitan disolved in 100mL water.  Keep whisking until light, fluffy and starting to set.




Lime, mint sugar syrup.

Lime and Mint crunchy insert

Bunch of mint
150 mL Lime juice
300mL Water
300g Sugar
Rice Bubbles to suit
Couple drops of green colour


Take leaves off mint and finely chop.  Put Sugar, water, lime and mint into a pot and boil until it is almost a brown caramel.  Once this stage has been reached, add rice bubbles and green colour until they have absorbed all the syrup.  Flatten out on a tray and place in fridge.


Flatten finished crispy insert on a tray.

White Chocolate mousse

6 Egg Whites
300g sugar
200g White chocolate, melted.
200mL Hot water
30g Gelitan
200g Whipped cream



Whip the egg whites and sugar to stiff peeks.  Disolve gelitan in hot water then mix in melted white chocolate.  Add gelitan/white chocolate mix to egg whites while whisking.  Fold in whipped cream.

After all this, comes the fun part of putting it together!


Cut out two disks of sponge cake, one about 8cm and another smaller peice about 4cm.  Soak the peices of sponge using some of the left over strawberry compote and place aside.

Cut out an 8cm disk of the crispy insert and place ontop of the 8cm disk of sponge cake.
Pipe an even layer of marshmallow ontop of the crispy insert.

Layer the sponge, marshmallow and insert on top of each other

We dont have any silicone mould trays, so we used a metal tray lined with cling wrap to make sure it would come out later.  Fill the first 3rd of the mould with mousse.  Place the small disk of sponge in place, and push down. Add another layer of mousse, then place the second piece of sponge with the insert and marshmallow upside down.  The bottom of the sponge should be level with the top of the mould.  Pack the rest of the mould with mousse until it is all level with the top of the mould.




Place the mould in the freezer.

Get some sugar and add red or pink colour to it.  Spread the sugar out evenly over a tray, then pipe long strips of marshmallow.  Place in the fridge to set, these will be used for decoration later.

After at least 2 hours in the freezer, take the mousse cake out for final decoration.  We used some neutragel with the rest of the compote added to it in a blender.  Pour this over the top of the cake, and decorate as desired.  If you cant get a hold of neutragel, you could use some melted white chocolate poured over the top.

Serve and enjoy!

Ps, I promise to work on my photography!

100% Hydration? Challenge accepted!

'Wow! 100% Hydrated! Good to see that you gave the dough a drink this morning!' Is probably what you are thinking if you arent a baker. 

When bakers talk about a bread recipe, the amount of water (or hydration) compared to the amount of flour is always a talking point.  A basic white block of bread has 60% water which is a basic bench mark for a bread dough.  Any less than this, and the dough is considered dry, any more water, and the dough gets stickier and harder to work with.

The wettest dough that bakers make is a Ciabatta and Turkish dough that generally take 80% to 90% water, and this is considered VERY wet.  But when I heard about a machine that can process doughs up to 97% water, I thought 'Who the hell is crazy enough to make bread that sloppy?'

Challenge accepted.  I will make a bread dough that is 95% water, and it will be the best in the world! (insert evil laugh).  So that turned out to be easy, mixing 5kg flour and 4.75L of water.  Once I got all that water in, I thought 'It is only 5% more to make it 100%... Why not go all out?' So I did.  With carefull mixing, and being very gentle when I cut it out, I managed to make a 100% hydrated dough.

Who would be crazy enough to make bread that sloppy?  I was.