The Classic French Baguette + The almost-forgotten nephew

Here’s another bread recipe from the Le Cordon Bleu – Home Collection cookbook. Again, I’m very impressed of how reliable this cookbook is. 

On the surface, you might think that the baguette is just a rolled-up sausage version of the white bread. Of course, it isn’t, and professional bakers actually use a special flour that is not readily-available to the home cook. Fortunately, we can substitute that with a mixture of bread and plain flour.

Baguette – the bread, not the bag (the original recipe makes four loaves, which I’m guessing would be a little bit too excessive. I’ve halved it.)

Ingredients:

15g fresh yeast, or half a packet of self-active yeast

325g white bread flour

175g plain flour

5g salt

Instructions:

First, you sprinkle the yeast into 300ml of lukewarm water and leave it for 5 minutes before stirring it with a wooden spoon.

Sieve both flours and salt into a bowl, make a well in the centre, and pour in the yeast mixture. Stir to combine, and you should see this:

 

My dough mixture seemed a tad too dry, so I added more lukewarm water. Then comes the electric mixer fitted with dough hooks, which creates this:

It’s both smooth and elastic. Put the dough in an oiled bowl, and cover with a damp clean cloth. Now, it’s ready to be risen until doubled in size (the timing will depend on the temperate of your kitchen – mine took about 1 1/2 hours.)

Now comes the fun part, divide your dough into two. Try and twist each into a long sausage roll and place it on a baking pan sprinkled with plain flour (ensuring quite some space apart between each roll). Spray a fine mist of water and sprinkle plain flour over the dough.

Again, cover with the damp cloth and leave it to rise until doubled in size. Bake it in a preheated oven 220 degree Celsius (425F/ Gas 7) for 20 – 25 minutes, or until it’s golden brown, crisp and hollow sounding when tapped on the base. Remove from the tray and cool on a wire rack.

Final product:

It smells extremely good when it first comes out of the oven, and of course, me being me, I couldn’t resist a chunk (or two). The crust is so crunchy and and the bread is wonderfully soft and fluffy. Yummy.

For my brother: Here are some photos of the almost-forgotten nephew – Mr Lucas Yeo – and his birthday party at our house. He’s not very friendly at this moment, and he can scream pretty loud – kinda like Natasha when she was a baby. Haha.

He smiles!

 

Quite cute, la.

 

Be Kind, Rewind + White bread

Be Kind, Rewind is one of those films that nobody will watch with me (unless you are my boyfriend). It ranks along with Stranger than Fiction, Waitress and The Shawshank Redemption, where there are (mainly) no good-looking stars, no rom-com plots and basically nothing to look forward to for many potential movie-watchers willing to part with their now-risen ticket dollars.

The fact is, while I sometimes enjoy singing along to musicals, being romanticised by rom-coms, and laughing along to Will Ferrell-Ben Stiller-Anchorman-type movies, I do also appreciate that a movie respects me as a thinking individual, and exchanges my attention for a plot that shows, not tells and actors who play their characters well.

So after a long introduction, I come to the movie that does the above, and is one of the funniest films this year as yet – Be Kind, Rewind. The plot is ridiculous, really. But because it was directed and written by Michael Gondry, who also did the enchanting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the whimsy and out-of-this-world-ness somehow works. Mos Def’s straight, sweet-natured endearing Mike balances out Jack Black’s usual wacko mostly irritating psycho-nut Jerry. Also, it’s really funny – especially the “sweded” film-making parts – but doesn’t make you feel like you’ve just been dumbed out by slapstick, recycled-racial-fat-ugly jokes.  But more importantly, it makes you realise how sometimes, although a small town can never win the big guys, the corporates, the world, it can still try, and try the darndest it can to save the memories of it all.

So chim.

Okay, back to baking. Freshly-baked white bread works. Sorry, I mean the freshly-baked white bread and good butter combo works. Really, for those who haven’t tried it, please do so. Making your own bread (with or without a bread machine) is not as intimitating as it seems, and you only need yeast, bread flour, butter, water and salt (which works out to maybe S$2.00 max?). And an electric mixer with dough hooks, unless you want to get an arm workout. For me, I just let the dough hooks do the job of kneading till of springy and smooth consistency, while I watch tranny-funny Christian and gorgeously boho-chic Gillian (really really inspired to re-make my wardrobe now) on Project Runway.

I used the Le Cordon Bleu Bread cook book recipe, which has almost always produced good results for me.

White Bread – from the Le Cordon Bleu Bread Recipes

Ingredients include:

1/2 kg bread flour, 300 ml water (warm to the touch), 1 tbs dried yeast and sugar each, 30g softened good butter (I used Emborg unsalted), 1 tsp salt

Instructions:

With the yeast, you’ve got to first sprinkle it onto the water, along with the sugar. Leave it untouched for five minutes, then use a wooden spoon to dissolve it.

Then, mix the flour and salt together (sieve it to get a lighter texture, but I didn’t do that), make a well in the centre, and pour in the butter and yeast mixture.

Use the electric mixer fitted with dough hooks on medium speed for 5 minutes (and watch some TV as you go about it), or use your hands to knead the mixture for 10 minutes (and not watch some TV as you go about it).

You should see this:

It shouldn’t be sticky to the touch, and should come off your bowl easily.

Then comes the first rising. Place your dough in an oiled bowl, turn the dough over once to get it coated all over, then leave it to rise until double its size. Now, this is usually when I cheated by placing the bowl near a hot kettle, or near the heated sides of my fridge, because it was nearly 10.00pm by then and I was tired.

Then, punch the dough down and roll the dough out into a rectangle, then roll it up like a swiss roll (3 rolls in one sentence! Woo hoo!). Tuck both sides of each end into the middle, so that it looks like a really neat loaf-thing.

Maybe you should just look at this photograph:

This dough has been risen a second time. But before it does so, use your scissors to make incisions along the dough’s top surface. This is not only for aesthetic purposes, but to also give the crust an extra crunch. Finally, brush the dough with milk, and bake it in a preheated 210 degree Celsius oven for 35-40 minutes.

I wish you could have smelled the lovely aroma wafting out of the oven when the bread was almost done.

This is the lovely lovely lovely White Bread.

I wish my photo-taking skills were better, because it sure doesn’t do the delicious-ness of this bread justice. So I guess you’ve just got to try it for yourself.

Good luck!

Interviews + Bread

Today I told my interviewer that I wanted to open a cafe in future. I honestly don’t know why I was being so honest. That’s the thing I really am rather confused about interviews. Do I be all politically correct and tell them, “yes, xxx company has and always will be the place I want to work in. I see myself here FOREVER! I “heart” xxx!” Or do I act like how I did and say “I actually want to open a cafe in five years. Nope, I don’t have a concept yet, but I am passionate about baking and cooking.”? What do they want to hear? Confused I am.

Anyway, I baked 2 different types of honey wholemeal bread except I didn’t use honey.

 For the first recipe, I used the remaining maple syrup my friend got me from Canada (thanks JS!).

 

I loved this bread and I think I practically gobbled half of it before it cooled. The crust was crunchy and the bread was soft. Yup, that’s the definition of a good bread to me. Oh, and even the next day, the oaty wholemeal smell still lingered, which to me, was a plus.

The second recipe, I cheated big time and used granulated sugar. Maybe that’s why it turned out so dense.

 

If you stare at the two photographs closely, you can spot the difference. One says A-for-effort-in-punching-the-living-daylights-out-of-the-dough. The other, well, was neglected. No rewards for guessing which.

I’m planning to make fresh pasta soon (maybe my blog should be dianadoesdesserts+others). Anyway, I welcome any comments about what makes a good recipe!

PS: xiao, I don’t know if I told you already, but I’m attending Jocelyn Shu’s decorated cookie class on the 4th Nov (Sunday) 3 – 6pm. I was really kiasu and booked way early. Wanna join me? It’s not cheap ($119 for non-members plus $1.25 cos I had forgotten to place a stamp when I sent my cheque to them.. haha) but I see it as an investment that has long-term returns (haha) plus I think we get to take home some cookies. Call or message me if you want to go, okay? 

My bread tastes Medieval

When my CAT (Computer as an Analysis Tool) exam is near, I am stressed.  When I am stressed, I bake. Therefore, there are 2 recipes today.

Made foccacia using this recipe. It’s name is Easiest Foccacia Recipe. It’s main and only ingredients were flour, water, oil, yeast and salt. I can imagine these were the ingredients people back in the Medieval times used to make bread. Except I don’t think they had self-active yeast in a plastic bottle though. 

  

It looks burnt at the sides but it’s not. That’s just my poor camera skills giving this illusion. It came out a nice tanned brown, which I think would give me a crisp outer layer covering soft dough.

But, to my disappointment, the bread didn’t taste like that. Maybe I had overbaked it because I had a jaw-breaking chewing exercise trying to eat a slice. Well, in any case, I should have trusted the name – it wasn’t called Easiest Foccacia (To Eat) Recipe.

Well, on to the chocolate chip cookies. I haven’t made these cookies since five years back, but memories of them that they were deliciously buttery but not overly sweet.

 

Again, I shared the cookies with friends. Tasting it again, it hints more of butter pie crust with chocolate chips, which might be an acquired taste for some.

The next post shall be about the two loaves of honey whole wheat bread I made using different recipes.

For zee and joyce: Yes, I think we did all watch the same Oprah episode. During summer when I was bored at home, I would watch the morning and the afternoon episodes. Yes, I am that hardcore. Haha.