What a joy, when a like minded food lover not only brings her enthusiastic personality but also the most fragrant and freshest cheese, figs, herbs and roses to your door!
Thank you Anya of Godful Food for sharing food and thoughts with us.

We could offer some raspberry chocolate tart in return (recipe by Mr. Roux) a ‘cloud’ of coffee and of course a live demonstration of our Rofco oven and Haussler mixer resulting in some home made bread in the shape of a pain rustique and sourdough loaf. A good way to spend a humid Saturday!

We survived the chicken pox, we got our new spiral mixer and started baking again! The first two batches where two loaves of Pain Rustique which is our favourite recipe for a white yeast bread (see Jeffrey Hamelman and his excellent book Bread). With the second batch we made two loaves of sourdough using a rye starter. Both batches of bread came out beautifully. Our new Haussler Alpha mixer kneads the dough much better and fluffier in a shorter time than our KitchenAid mixer.

How to make a Pain Rustique based on the Hamelman recipe, adapted for the use of European flour; This bread is made in two stages, the first stage is the making of a poolish which is water and flour fermenting together for about 12 hours. The second stage is the actual making of the loaf.

1. Stir together in a bowl (stainless steel or plastic) the ingredients of ‘Fase 1′ for 45 seconds, until you get a wet kind of paste and all the flour and water has been combined. And yes the amount of 0,2 grams of yeast is correct! Cover the bowl with cling film and let it rest on your kitchen table for about 12 hours. I normally do this in the evening so the next day the poolish is ready to be used. The poolish gives the bread its nice full taste, a good colour and a nice crumb.

2. After 12 hours the poolish should have a lot of bubbles (perhaps even some foam on top) and has risen a lot. This is where fase 2 starts! Put the poolish in your (kitchenaid) mixer bowl together with the flour (226 grams) and water (67 grams) of fase 2. Mix for about 1 minute until all the ingredients have been combined into a shaggy mass and all the water and flour have been combined (do not yet put in the salt and the yeast!). Cover the bowl and let the dough rest for about 25 minutes (this is called the autolyse fase).

Our new spiral mixer – a Haussler Alpha mixer with a 6 kilo dough capacity and removable dough hook and removable bowl

3. After the 25 minute autolyse fase, sprinkle over the yeast and the salt evenly and knead the dough for 3 minutes until the dough is fairly well developed and feels supple and moderately loose. The dough is still a bit sticky at this stage. Put the dough in a big bowl and cover with cling film. The next fase (bulk fermentation) is 70 minutes and consist of a few steps.

4. After 25 minutes you need to stretch and fold the dough. Try to keep most of the air in the dough during the folding. This is how you stretch and fold; Sprinkle a little flour evenly on your work top. Put all the dough onto your work top and carefully stretch the dough into all direction so you get a flatter and rectangular shaped piece of dough. Do this quick, forceful and strict without being careless and tough for the dough. This was the stretch part. Now fold the dough back into a ball. First you fold a third of the dough rectangle (post letter style) from ’south to north’, secondly fold the remaining third of the dough over your first fold from ‘north to south’ and do the same from ‘west to east’ and from ‘east to west’. Put the dough ‘ball’ back into your bowl and cover with cling film. This whole stretch and fold business should take about 30 seconds once you have got some experience with it.

Our new spiral mixer – a close up of the spiral

5. After another 25 minutes you need to stretch and fold the dough for the second time.

6. After 20 minutes the dough is ready to be shaped and put in a well floured banneton to prevent sticking. I normally shape my dough into a batard (a kind of torpedo shape) and use an oval banneton for the final proofing. Try to keep all of the air in the dough during shaping. Do not press the dough down, you want big irregular holes in the crumb of the bread. Cover the bannetons with cling film.

7. After a 25 minute of final proofing in the bannetons turn over the bannetons on a peel covered with baking paper. Slash the dough length wise at a 30 degree angle (like you want to cut a slap of dough) with a sharp knife or a lame (kind of bread razor or bread scoring knife) to about 1 cm depth to give it room for expansion.

8. Bake in an oven (preferably on a stone surface) at about 235 degrees Celsius for about 35 to 40 minutes and lightly presteam your oven.

Pain Levain – a sourdough bread with a little bit rye flour

Terrible chicken pox came to visit Ed last week. Never knew these little pests could make an adult so sick. So no baking in this household because we had other priorities. Mine where cooking, washing, cleaning, attending, checking, running errands, calling doctors, worrying, more checking, entertaining, distracting etcetera and Ed’s mission was and is! trying not to scratch, trying to sleep and watching and reading things that make him laugh and keep his mind of the fact that the is covered in a gazillion pox. We hope for the best and are at at least talking about baking again. We won’t let the pox get us down! And our sourdough culture is still alive and kicking.

We waited long, but it was worth it. Finally our Rofco bread oven has arrived from Belgium. Brought by the Rofco Company owner Micha himself, it came with elaborate and enthusiastic instructions. That was last Friday. And we haven’t stopped baking since! The first two breads that came out of the Rofco were, in our eyes, perfect in look and taste. Until now we have baked loafs and breads and cakes of all shapes and sizes and, apart from some misshaping of our own, we were very happy with everything that came out of the oven. Yet, I also feel a bit restless, because I keep thinking of all the things I would like to bake, preferably today. But I have to breath in and out and realise that I have to take my time. Like with good bread, time is my friend, not my enemy. So I am going to relax and stare at my starter dough.

The Rofco bakes your bread with the principle of an old style wood burning brick oven. It stores a lot of heat inside the chamotte stone floors and releases it slowly but fiercely into your bread. In comparison with a normal household oven which is made from light sheet metal the Rofco is much heavier and simpler build. It is a rvs steel casing filled with rockwool isolation with good seals to keep the warmth and the water damp inside the oven. Each floor has a heat element underneath the stone and above the stone with a simple but perfectly working mechanic thermostat. The oven needs to warm up for at least 2 hours. In the first hour the heat elements do most of the work to heat up the stones. In the second hour all this heat stabilizes and equalizes throughout the oven. The key to good bread with an open crumb structure is a lot of heat from the start of the baking which the stone floors deliver through the bottom of the bread into the dough! A household oven fails to do this because when you open the oven door to put in your bread it loses a lot of warmth. Also with the help of spraying the insides of the oven with a plant water pressure sprayer you can produce a lot of water damp (for a good oven spring) without being afraid to damage the oven. At the final stage of baking you open the tiny steam vents to release the moist from the oven so your bread crust can crisp up.

Our Rofco B20 has two venting holes through which steam can escape

Sourdough bread from our own captured culture, just out of the Rofco

We are very pleased with the open creamy crumb structure and the very light acidic taste

Can’t resist making a white ‘boulle’ because it’s so good with brown sugar and fresh dairy butter!

As new buns and cakes are in the making, we wanted to show you a few baking exercises we worked on yesterday. Great result with making a whole wheat loaf, which tasted so much better then the average blugghhh tasting factory bread with elastic ‘crust’. Also made scones and this eventful Saturday ended with pizza, made in our trusty Alfredo Bestron pizza ‘oven’. Our amazement knows no end, staring at the wonderful results you can get from a product that looks like a ‘tel sell’ item and costs less then 60 Euro. Simple and effective, it keeps us satisfied until one day we find the right spot to build a real brick oven (dream on). Another thing which really makes me happy is fresh flour. Yesterday morning we went to the Zandhaas mill in Santpoort and, with our new big Rofco oven on the brink of arrival, we boldly got 25 kilo’s of organic wheat flour (see picture)! Fresh flour has more spring in it’s step and the taste of it is not bland, but plantlike. So, on with the kneading and baking. Brace yourselfs for more bread…

It feels very grown up to buy 25 kilo of flour at ones

Look what Alfredo did!

Marieke made fresh scones, hand shaped for a more ‘rustic’ effect

Ed’s first effort at a milk loaf with our home made sour dough culture..still needs work but taste is promising!