Tag Archives: recipe

Heston Blumenthal at Home

Modern cook books are a puzzle, some of them are excellent, while others, or more accurately, most, are very very poor. Cook books aren’t about cooking or learning skills, they’re about life style, selling the gastro dream of perfect manicured food every time you eat. These books are recipe after recipe, with accompanying perfectly lit glossy photographs, and on the whole they are completely useless. In the words of Michael Booth “Don’t worry, it’s not you. Recipes don’t work” there are so many permutations to a simple recipe, type of pan, heat of oven, quality of produce, age of produces etc etc, that no real recipe will ever work without a fundamental range of skills to back them up. So, as I’ve written before, I look for cook books that talk about technique and skills rather than recipes; my final list of favourite books is quite short. Continue reading →

Ricotta Gnocchi

“Whether they are made of potatoes, semolina flour or spinach

and ricotta… the essential characteristic of well made gnocchi is

that they be fluffy and light.” Marcella Hazan

Finished Gnocchi

I had some fairly good gnocchi recently, it was pre prepared, but it was good enough and made a nice dish. This got me thinking, potato gnocchi, when homemade, is superb, but also quite fiddly, the dough gets sticky and difficult to handle if you don’t make it correctly or leave it lying around too long. Thus, I’ve made a few time before, gnocchi using ricotta cheese rather than potato. Continue reading →

Rich loaf

Here is an enriched loaf I’ve baked today, it’s made using the recipe from Richard Bertinet in his book Dough, I write about it here. This bread is soft and slightly sweet, and needs to be quite dark once baked. My plan is for croque monsieur, made with some good Comte cheese. This is really a great recipe and would encourage you to give it a go, its really versatile being either sweet of savoury, I think it would make a great bread and butter pudding or just great toasted with plenty of butter.

500g strong White flour
250ml whole milk
60g butter
10g salt
10 g yeast
40g caster sugar
2 eggs

  • Put the butter and milk in a small pan and warm, untill butter has melted, do not let it boil or get too hot. Just enough hear to melt the butter should be about 40 degrees
  • Put all dry ingredients into bowl and mix together.
  • Add eggs and warm butter and milk and mix into a dough
  • Kneed for 10 minutes until smooth, then rest for 1 hour.
  • Shape and prove for 40 mins
  • Brush with beaten egg then make parallel line of scissor snips on each side of loaf.
  • Bake in preheated oven gas 7 for 15-20 minutes.

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Adventures in Bread

I love Bread.

Plain and simple, its fun to make and once you get into it a little its very interesting. I won’t claim to be the worlds best baker, but I’m not bad and bake fresh bread about 4 to 5 times a week. Here is toady’s bread some Fougasse from Richard Bertinet’s book Doug, a fantastic book for learning to make bread. I would also recommend Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley if you want something more in-depth and technical.

Taken from "Doug" by Richard Bertinet

Bread is great and I would urge you all to try baking your own, for those completely new try this recipe, by Paul Hollywood, a great first time bread.

As for Liverpool, since the closing of Chalkins (about 8 years ago now), there hasn’t been a bakery that I really like, Sandra Dee’s baker on picton road is nice, but I’d rather just bake my own. Does anyone else know of a good baker in Liverpool? Are the days of really great fresh bread gone for good?

Sid.