Companion

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by Sophie James in Bread, Uncategorized

Tags

Baking, Bread, Lockdown, Sourdough, Stories

“A companion is literally ‘a person who you eat bread with’. The word comes from Old French compaignon.” The Oxford Dictionary of Origin Words, Julia Cresswell

This is not where I live. The light is different. This light comes from a north-facing window, with the edge of a neglected plant poking into the frame. Can you tell it’s by the sea? I know by the shape of the loaf that it is some loaves back, when I was using lots of seeds, soaking them for hours; sesame, both black and white and pumpkin seeds. There will be some stoneground flour in there but it is before my Ancient Grains period. It looks like a good-enough loaf; a batard. I make two at a time – a boule and then this one. I have to decide who would benefit from which shape. I have decided my mum prefers the batard for ease of cutting.

I make them to give away. Our kitchen has become a tiny bakery, producing two loaves every couple of days or so. Sometimes, we have a loaf left over or an urge to hold on to one overtakes me and it hangs in a (cotton!) bag at the back of the kitchen door. I have become wedded to the smell of rising dough, hot but not quite baked, and the turn around when the lid is removed from the oven 20 minutes in. The fact that it is a process measured out in minutes, a stop watch handy so I can get on with something else in the meantime. I have moved beyond just sitting there staring at the blackened window of the oven.

I like the clank of clay, the different vessels I use for the purpose. The oily fist of flour (einkorn does this best – gathers itself into silky clumps). The best bit is when the bread is baked and it makes minute sounds, bubbling and popping in the ear, like a tiny river of lava. Also, there are the bronzed sesame seeds on the loaf itself and how the bread has torn in the oven, torn and risen and the ‘ear’ has scorched.

But mostly it is the smell. I always wish my mum could receive the bread still hot; the feel of warm bread in her hands, turned out of its pot, parchment paper ripped off, the bottom rapped to check for a healthy hollowness. As a potter she will know the feeling. I sometimes can’t bear that it will go cold – will ‘die’ in some way – and in those moments I might give it to a startled neighbour. I sometimes cycle it over to a friend’s house and leave it among the pots outside or sitting on the mat.

But it has been mostly bundled into a jiffy bag along with a book (Elisabeth Luard at the moment), and sent down to Sussex to my mum, where it might arrive the next day or it might not. From the beginning of lockdown, I took the parcel to my local post office, and before dropping it into the mail sack, the postmaster would cradle the package in his arms. He would lift it to his face, and rock the bread back and forth, smiling. He did this every time; stand in silence with the fragrant parcel held in his arms like a baby, smelling the warmth while I tried to smile through my mask. I imagined the bread slowly cooling until it arrived stone cold on my mum’s doorstep. He got the best part.

There are some good einkorn bread recipes here at The Perfect Loaf as well as really good beginner loaves. I have yet to feel sufficiently ‘proper’ in the sourdough stakes to include my own formula here. Maybe one day.

Thank you, Pippa, for the info about the origins of the word ‘companion’.

a quiet loaf

20 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by Sophie James in Bread, Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Bread, Home, Sourdough, Walking, Writing

I like the way the parchment paper is hugging the loaf and how it has moulded to its shape during baking. This is a sourdough boule. I decided to embrace all the cliches and start my own starter and once I got going, it’s hard to resist the jiggly, bubbly mass of it and the pub-like aroma. I have welts and fissures on my hands to show for the effort and the heat from the pot it cooks in is as ferocious as anything on bonfire night.

What I enjoyed is that it tied in well with my evening walk. After the folding, the dough needs to fill the bowl quietly and this takes a while, so I would take myself off, do a circle, look into people’s living rooms as the dusk crept in and overtook the day, and the lights went on. It was intoxicating, seeing people. They became seductive, instructive, and if a window was filled with a rainbow, then it was a family house, and sometimes the family would advertise itself more thoroughly; with cuddly toys stacked up, or a notice pleading for me not to eat beef.

On one there is a notice on the gate with the sharp instruction to “please DO add a ribbon to our rainbow fence”. The fence is festooned with ribbons tied into bows, and the tree towering over it is trailing them, long and glossy and just at head height. Each time I approach I try to pull a ribbon off a branch, so I can tie it to the fence, and am left standing there, yanking at a ribbon that refuses to come loose. Is this what I am supposed to be doing? I walk on.

As it is a suburban street in a quiet, residential area on the outskirts of a Greater London suburb, the changes have been so subtle as to be almost non-existent. Slowly, by stealth, it has become slightly louder recently, inching its way back to normality. Which is not very loud. I have longed sometimes for the quiet of an urban street, to luxuriate in the silence, the shock of its stillness. To walk for miles during the night through empty streets and stand in front of St. Paul’s. Or go back to a time when I used to walk home at night because I needed to remember all the details of an evening in a way that only feet can do.

So when I let myself in, at 10 sometimes 10.30, my skin flushed from night summer air, and begin to dust a surface with flour, I am carrying with me all the remnants of those walks I have taken and forgotten about. Evening walks with my dad in West Somerset, with views of the brown Bristol sea. Night walks I took in Sydney as a teenager, chatting and walking into spiders’ webs. Walking along the promenade in Sitges after a long day’s teaching, my friend Jonny carrying my bags, and watching the ink-black sea crawl up the sand.

The quiet brings it up, loud and insistent, it tells me what I care about and what I miss. I then have to shape the boule, which is my favourite part, dragging the dough closer to me, over and over, creating surface tension, the dome of it tight and jiggly and ready for the fridge.

This is the sourdough recipe I have been using. The Perfect Loaf is also really helpful.

Walnut bread

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Baking, Bread, Childhood, Devon, Food, Ingredients, Marmalade, Nuts, Recipes

God, I miss bread. I don’t eat it much anymore. Maybe it’s because so much of it is that pre-sliced, flaccid, crustless variety sweating into its plastic bag. But the real thing is always worth it no matter how much you long for sleep afterwards, your legs leaden and your eyes drooping like a bloodhound. We don’t eat as much bread as we once did, perhaps because we’re not going down the pit anymore, or walking up mountains on a regular basis. So we forget what sustenance it provides. And good bread is real food, a meal in itself.

I have a memory of bread, toasted. It was homemade. It came in a mound, brown and slightly dusty. It filled the room with the most extraordinary fragrance. The bread belonged to our new neighbours in Exeter. They were a family of five: two boys and a girl. She was my age. The fact they lived next door meant there was some sort of unspoken rule that their daughter should accompany me to school. I was about seven and I was new to the area, my parents freshly divorced. So I would hover in the doorway to the kitchen while they finished up their breakfast. And what a breakfast! I was still digesting my porridge, but I could have sat down and started all over again in this new place.

The smell of hot, cakey bread, the dark husks still evident on their plates, and jellied spoonfuls of the bitterest marmalade sliding over the top of creamy, salted butter – the combination almost brought me to my knees. It still does.

Freya – for that was her name – was given the task of ‘walking me’ (like a dog) along the back lanes to school. She lasted all of a day doing this. But still she went through the charade of leaving the house with me, walking to the end of the street and then when the coast was clear leaving me there. Every day at the allotted time though, I hovered and inhaled. I think there were seeds in the bread; it smelled nutty. A kind of charcoal splendour drifted daily from the toaster. I felt weak with longing.

They had a cat called Orlando who was an orange ball of hatred and bile. Like the rest of the family he carried about him an unmistakable aura of status. Our cat, Smudge, never stood a chance. They fought daily, one paw resting on the fence for balance, the other taking slightly camp swipes at the other’s face. It was obvious who would win.

Freya when the time came went on to her posh, all-girls school and I went to the local comprehensive. I never saw her again. Not properly. We did occasionally bump into the family. Freya’s mum did contemporary dance as a hobby (her dance group were on the local news!). Freya’s dad – an orthodontist – fitted me and my brother with braces. What a start though every day to eat homemade bread, toasted and smothered in some gorgeous preserve. The five of them sat there like warriors. How could you ever be miserable when you had a family like that?

Walnut Bread

Adapted from Rick Stein’s Food Heroes

1 tbs dried yeast

1 tbs dark soft brown sugar

450 ml (15 fl oz) lukewarm water

600g (1 lb 6 oz) wholemeal/whole wheat stone-ground flour

2 teaspoons of salt

20 g (¾ oz) butter, melted

40 g (1½ oz) walnut pieces

2 tsp sesame seeds or sunflower seeds

1 egg, beaten

To make a ferment or ‘sponge’, whisk the yeast and 1 teaspoon of sugar in 150 ml (5 fl oz) of the lukewarm water. The temperature is important; too hot and it will kill the yeast, but too cold and the yeast won’t activate. It needs to be ‘finger hot.’ The best way to achieve this is to measure two-thirds cold tap water, pour into a jug and top up with one-third boiling water.

Leave the yeast to bubble in a warm place until the surface has about 2 cm (¾ in) of froth on it. It will take about 15 minutes. It should begin bubbling after about 5 minutes – if it doesn’t, the chances are the yeast won’t work. Put the flour, remaining sugar and salt in a large bowl. Pour on the yeast ferment, the remaining water and the melted butter, and mix together until you have a soft, sloppy dough. Knead for about 5 minutes, adding the walnuts right at the end. You can toast the walnuts lightly in a dry pan beforehand if you would like to accentuate their richness in the bread, and also throw in a few more if you like abundance.

Cut the dough in half and form 2 fat sausage shapes. Put them into 2 buttered 450 g (1 lb) loaf tins. Cover each with cling film/plastic wrap or put in a large plastic bag and leave in a warm place for about 45 minutes, until the dough has risen to the top.

Preheat the oven to 230C/450F. Wash the tops of the loaves gently with egg (the dough can easily deflate) and sprinkle with the seeds. Bake in the centre of the oven for 25-30 minutes. Remove the loaves from their tins and return them to the oven for a further 5 minutes to crisp up. Leave to cool on a wire rack. Wrap in cling film/plastic wrap and freeze if you are not going to eat them right away.

Walnuts and flour

Walnuts admittedly belong to the quieter, fall months. I hope you will forgive this seasonal lapse – I wrote this during a white-hot, muggy spell in LA when it felt as if the earth would crack and we would be showered with all our possessions. The smell of autumn – hot bread, wet grass and cool cheeks – seemed preferable.

Now to flour – I know it seems obvious, but you can’t make good bread with the substandard stuff. Fresh, stone-ground whole wheat flour will transform a loaf from okay to unforgettable. Because stones grind the flour more finely than metal cylinders, there are more bran particles in the bread, which gives it a more pronounced flavour and texture (that lovely crunch). The germ is also more present, enhancing the flour’s nutritional value. The bread doesn’t last as long, though, because of the high oil content, so you have to eat it quickly (shame).