Long time, no post!

Ahhh! It’s been crazy here recently. I just seem to have so much to do and not enough time to do it! This is a quick summary of things I meant to write a proper post about but just didn’t get round to it. Hopefully soon I’ll be up to date!

I’ve been baking sourdough for nearly a month now and getting much better at it. I tried keeping Horace and Fergus in the fridge and feeding them less often but that didn’t seem to be successful. Fergus turned proteolytic leading to flat, dense bread as the gluten in the dough was broken down. I took them out of the fridge and am now feeding them twice a day which they seem to be much happier about.

Evidence of a proteolytic starter – the gluten is breaking down resulting in a loss of elasticity in the dough

Result – once released from the proving basket, the loaf flattens and splits producing a dense bread with lots of surface splits

Feeding Horace and Fergus twice a day results in a lot of starter to discard. We’ve experimented with different ways to quickly use up excess so it’s not wasted. Crumpets and flatbreads were lovely but very time consuming to cook. Now we’ve settled on pancakes, which are quick and easy to make and also excellent for eating cold or reheated. Even as sandwich bread for packed lunches!

Making sourdough pancakes

I’ve also had the pizza oven fired up recently, making sourdough pizza and attempting to bake a loaf in there. Limited success on both counts but I intend to practice a lot more over the summer!

Making sourdough pizza

First attempt at baking sourdough in the pizza oven

I’ve now started making a much wetter dough which produces nice big air bubbles, although it is harder to handle initially. I’m also adding olive oil to the dough which makes the bread a bit more tender. I’m so pleased with my experiments so far and have invested in a couple of proper proving baskets to try out a different loaf shape too!

In other baking news, I recently made a cake for a local ringing event.

A bell-shaped cake… it got painted gold shortly after this photo was taken (I.e. in the frantic 5 minutes before my lift arrived when I decided it needed something more)

So far, so ordinary.

BUT LOOK WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE INSIDE!!!

Best thing I have ever made!!

It’s a bell-shaped battenberg cake, and it actually worked!! So pleased. Can you tell?

I’ve also made a lot of strawberry jam recently. What with it now approaching peak strawberry season at the market, we occasionally have left-overs, especially if the weather has not been great. I’ve had over 5 kg of strawbs so far and made a lot of strawberry and redcurrant and strawberry and rhubarb jam. Both lovely and delicious with hot buttered sourdough toast!

Well, I think that’s a successful tour of my recent foodie experiments. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep more up-to-date from now on!

Sunny days are here again!

Spring blossom in a sunny garden

These last few days have been glorious and it’s been lovely to spend a bit more time in the garden. I’ve put a first coating of a lime render on the pizza oven to protect it from the weather and it looks much smarter already!

Before rendering

After rendering

It’ll be interesting to see though how the oven stands up to heating again. It might expand and crack the surface as it did when I used it before. I don’t know how the render will react to heat so fingers crossed nothing disastrous happens when I lit the first fires this year!

I’ve also been doing a bit more sewing. I downloaded the free Polly Top pattern from By Hand London. I daringly decided to attempt it using a combination of a navy coloured light cotton jersey and a floral drapey viscose-y woven fabric.

Some more beautiful fabric

The top in progress is shown below. I’ve nearly finished now but I was right in thinking my fabric choice would cause me trouble! I’ve stretched the armholes and neckline while applying the binding to the edge. It doesn’t look too bad though so I’m looking forward to finishing it off soon.

A work in progress :)

It’ll be interesting to use this pattern again using more well behaved fabrics to see how much of a difference it makes. Hopefully getting a bit more practice as applying bias binding will help too so I can attempt it again on a knit fabric.

I’m still knitting away at various WIPs whenever I have time but I have to say, it doesn’t compare with sewing when it comes to instant gratification… or maybe I’m knitting the wrong things! I do have a couple of more simple summery sweater projects planned so might cast on to have a quicker knit when I fancy a break from the more mentally taxing cables of my bellringing jumper!

Well protected

All right British spring, you can rain as much as you blooming well want now!

Thanks to Pa, the pizza oven hat is finished. The oven is safe from the ravages of English weather and I’m looking forward to lighting a few fires to dry it out and get ready for pizza season :)

In other news, I’m still knitting away at my blue raspberry socks and getting stuck in to the second sleeve of my bellringing jumper. Darling Sister Two is home for the holidays now so there is a lot of sisterly sewing action going on too. More on that to come!

Pizza oven rescue!

The lovely spring weather we’re starting to have means that our thoughts are turning once again to pizza cooked outside in the wood fired oven. All winter, the oven has been sheltering under a plastic sheet, intended to keep it from being washed away by rain. As you can see in the photos below, this wasn’t entirely successful. On a few windy occasions the sheet was blown off and the oven was exposed leading to some of the surface being eroded.

That wooden frame though is the  beginnings of a proper shelter for the oven. Pa is masterminding the design. That is to say he is making it up as he goes along which means I don’t really know what it’s supposed to look like. The idea though is to have it in 5 removable pieces – the base (pictured), 4 walls and a roof.

I’m also planning to get some hydraulic lime and do a surface render to pretty the oven up and give it a bit more protection from the weather.

In the meantime though it’s enjoying the sun and drying out again. I’ll light a few little fires in the coming days and hopefully we’ll be able to have some pizza when Darling Sister Two comes home for the holidays :D

Pizza: take two.

Pizza with my new tools!

This time I made 2 batches of dough – 1 for pizza and 1 for a trial loaf of bread to bake after the oven has cooled down from the ridiculously high temperature needed to cook the pizzas.The oven was fired up with a massive fire, causing some of the cracks to get a bit bigger :S Checking the temperature… I managed to rather singe the door…

But the garlic bread cooked perfectly! No photos of the loaf of bread I made unfortunately – It turned out surprisingly well though!

Pizza oven accessories

After singeing all the hairs on my arm after the first pizza making trial I decided that I really needed to make some tools that were fit for purpose.

 

First up – a peel. Using an old stair spindle and a piece of hardwood and a bit of sawing and filing I managed to make a pretty nice one, just the right size for my oven doorway.Then, a longer handle on my brush. I bought a brush from the local hardware shop for sweeping the oven floor clean of ashes before cooking and also for cleaning out the ash when the fire had burnt out. But with the temperatures inside the oven reaching up to 450°C sticking my arm in to do this wasn’t ideal. Although basic, this fix means that if the bristles on my current brush get burnt out, I can just buy another and attach it easily to the extended handle.Finally, I had already made a door for the oven out of old bits of 2-by-4  with some batons and handles to hold the thing together. I also bought a thermometer that will hopefully allow me to gauge the internal temperature of the oven more accurately and made a hole in the centre of the door to insert the probe.

The first pizza!

The most massive fire so far, a few cracks and pizza!   

Pizza oven flatbreads

The next step in pizza oven cookery – flatbreads.

I used Hugh’s recipe, which I love as a quick and easy flatbread, perfect for testing the temperature and effectiveness of my new oven!I was worried that the oven seemed to be cooling pretty rapidly – the later flatbreads were taking a noticably longer time to cook than the first and not browning as nicely.

Ah well, we’ll see – next stop pizza!

 

First firing

After 3 weeks of drying  out, I finally lit the first fire in the pizza oven. A little twiggy fire to start drying out the oven properly.A couple of days later a slightly larger fire …And a first attempt at “cooking” something in the ovenResulting in warmish garlic bread with a very crispy bottom…

Clay, sand, bricks, blocks and slabs

The next step was to source all my other materials and to decide on the building of a base for the oven.

A local ball clay company very generously offered me four 25 kg bags of high quality powdered clay absolutely free and for everything else we went to a local builders yard.

The story of the pizza oven construction is shown in the pictures below: