Bread and butter pickles

I have been predicting for some time now that the fad for hipster pickles will cross the Atlantic, and it’s started. I was expecting to find some bearded guys turning up at the farmers’ markets with tub of brine, but it has come from an entirely different, more prosaic direction.

You can now get Brooklyn Brine pickles at Marks & Spencers. Brooklyn is supposedly a small New York operation, though I wonder how small they can be if they are able to supply a grocery chain with hundreds of stores on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Brooklyn pickles are nice pickles but quite pricey at £4.99 a jar – for comparison, M&S’ own brand sell for less than half that (though it is fair to say that Brooklyn Brine are not cheap in the US either). I decided to make some of my own. I’d been meaning to do this for some time anyway.

The hardest part was finding a greengrocers that sells the right kind of little knobbly cucumbers. Through a tip-off from a friend, I eventually found them at Polish Taste in Partick. Total cost £3.70 for cucumbers and dill, plus a few pennies’ worth of garlic, vinegar, salt and peppercorns.

For half the batch, I made a solution of about 30% malt vinegar and 70% water with some salt. The other half just gets a 4% salt brine and will get to ferment naturally. Two jars were kept as close to each other as possible so I can check out the difference when they are ready.

A new loaf for Strathbungo

It’s quite ironic that one of the reason I started baking my own bread is that when I moved to my current abode on the South Side it was quite inconvenient to buy anything decent on the way home from work. The closest I could get was at the southern edge of Queens Park where the greengrocer Stalks & Stems stocked the bread from the Bavarian Bakehouse, but that involved a diversion that I couldn’t always be bothered with.

Times have changed now. In the last few years small specialist enterprises have sprung up along Pollokshaws Road with the highest concentration around Nithsdale Road. The Glad Cafe, Tapa, Gusto & Relish, Cookie and the new, bigger Locavore shop.

The more coffee-centric outlets don’t see too much of me, because I live so close by that I can just go (or stay) home and make some coffee if I want it. But I can now wander along to Cookie and get Bavarian Bakehouse bread, and since this morning Locavore is selling bread from a new bakery, bakery47.

The bakery has been established (as far as I can tell) for just a few months and has been supplying the nearby Glad Cafe with a custom loaf, the “Crossmyloaf” named after the Crossmyloof area of town. Now Locavore is also getting its house bread.

The shop says “Up until now we have been unable to source bread which meets Locavore standards as most loafs contain flour grown on other continents. The loaf is made using rare-breed, organic, stone-ground flour which is grown and milled just across the border in Northumberland using renewable energy, which is produced on site. For us this is the most sustainable loaf and ticks all our boxes.”

I’m not as purist as that about sourcing flour but I went to grab a loaf anyway.

It’s a tin loaf, topped with oat flakes, with a richly chestnut-coloured, soft crust. The crumb is soft, airy and fluffy and ever so slightly damp. The most distinctive thing for me is the aroma. My own sourdough bread smells a bit milky, like mild cream cheese. The Locavore loaf has an amazing, seasidey aroma, like oyster shells and sea spray. No idea where that comes from – the bread just smells really fresh.

Seems quite low in salt. Wheaty sweetness and some chewy grains to munch on, and there’s an unusual, somewhat bitter finish. On the whole there’s an awful lot of flavour going on in this bread. 8/10.

I still think Glasgow is very under-bakeried, but things seem to be moving slowly. Perhaps we will see someone snap up a few of the shops of the sadly collapsed Bradfords chain, making good bread a bit more accessible.

Two year old homebrew

Over two years ago I brewed a pale mild to a 1950s recipe. I didn’t like it much at the time, as it was very honeyish and a bit sickly. Visiting my mum last week I came across a left over bottle of the stuff.

Opened it up, fearing it would gush, but it didn’t. Whew, I calculated my priming sugar all right then. It was a bit spritzy, but not over-carbonated. It had the strong Ribena aroma of heavily oxidised homebrew, which I was expecting. It also had a very nice head, and is bright orange, which I wasn’t expecting.

Tasting it, it’s bone dry and rather reminiscent of Orval. Not as good as Orval, obviously, but in the same kind of style.  At the time my house yeast was Worthington White Shield yeast, which dries every beer out, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.

I still poured most of it away, but it was interesting to see the effect of time on a beer.

Oat ale demonstration

I will be at Locavore, a new hippie food shop on the south side, on Thursday 30th September, giving a brewing demonstration.

I have never done one of these on my own before so it’s likely to be fairly chaotic. I am trying to minimise the chaos by only making a small batch of about a gallon. This will also mean less waiting around for wort to come to the boil, etc. and I can do the boil in a jelly pan on the stove.

As it’s part of a series of events involving oats, I have to include oats in the beer somehow. Rather than do an oatmeal stout, which doesn’t really show off the oatiness (well, it does, but it’s overshadowed by the general stoutiness), I am thinking of a pale beer:

50% pale barley malt
20% oat malt
30% porridge oats

I will be using a grain bag, so am not concerned about the potential  stickiness of the mash. Dunno about hopping yet. I have some Hallertau and Bobek in the freezer. Yeast, well, I should probably get a starter going.

Unprocessed Day 2

Breakfast: wholemeal bread with butter and salted salmon, coffee. The bread is baked, the salmon cured, the coffee roasted, but it all counts as unprocessed, bizarrely.

Snack: More of the bread with some cheese and a pint of homebrewed stout. The bread was heavy and dense and smelt of malty bran flakes, but it’s quite good with savoury things like the cheese and salmon.

Dinner: mushroom curry with polished white basmati rice. I guess the rice counts as processed, but I don't care.

#Unprocessed Day 1

A bit difficult today as I spent the night at my mum’s.

Breakfast: fried bread, eggs, bacon. Maple syrup and brown sauce (not unprocessed). Coffee.

Dinner (at cafe): wrap with lamb kobba, salad, baba ghanousch. Processed tortilla chips on the side which I gave to my friend.

When I came home I had a few slices of salted salmon and made bread dough to be baked in the morning.

#Unprocessed

I’ve been humming and hawing, trying to decide whether or not to take part in #Unprocessed. It’s a virtual event designed to enable people to feel smug about their diets by eating nothing “processed” for the whole month of October.

The name is a misnomer, of course, as many foods are processed in some way: bread and beer are some of the oldest processed foods. But in this case a very liberal notion of “unprocessed” applies.

But can I do without Nutella for a month?

I eat (or think I do, at any rate) relatively little “processed” (in the sense of October Unprocessed) food anyway, so it will be interesting to see what difficulties I encounter. What I don’t make from scratch passes the “kitchen test” in most cases: bacon, jam, pasta ... things I could make in my kitchen if I really wanted to.

So while I have my reservations about the concept and am aware there are likely to be a lot of food faddists on board of the sugar-is-poison school, eating more whole grains and fewer things packed in plastic can’t be bad.

I have already slipped this morning and had brown sauce on my bacon and eggs. So I’m not going to be a purist and will be guided more by common sense than someone else’s criteria. I’ll still choose a home-baked white loaf over a wholemeal one from a supermarket.

At the moment I’m thinking of what to do with the box of mushrooms in my fridge. I would make risotto, but I don’t have any stock, and stock cubes are out of bounds. When you make risotto with stock cubes it just tastes like packet soup anyway, so perhaps #unprocessed is doing me a favour.

London Review of Bread (reprise)

Down in That London last week, I am now able to confidently go into bakers’ shops and say “Is it alright if I take some pictures of your bread, as I’m a bread nerd?”

Cut loaves on sale at a branch of Gail’s in Crouch End.

I love huge loaves cut into halves or quarters.

This is the one I bought, white sourdough. But it looks better than it tastes.

Good looking baguettes in a café in Brockley, made “somewhere in Tottenham”

Beigel in Brick Lane, seen here with a salt beef filling

Breakfast bread

I’m quite happy with the way this loaf has turned out. Rather thick crust on it so best eaten as fresh as possible.

Call for homebrewers

After last year’s Glasgow Beer and Pub Project, a group of drinkers was inspired enough to get together to organise the first Glasgow Beer Week. Homebrewers are wanted to come along to a night of the homebrewers next Friday and produce beer for a pop-up pub during Beer Week. You can sign up here.

Imagine …

What appears to be the contents of the shop window is actually a big display graphic. The whole thing is evidently intended to encourage someone to rent this disused shop.

I can't help thinking that if the shop had really looked like this when it was open, it might still be in business.

Some bakery pictures

Old skool in Falkirk. Though they seem to be concentrating on cakes these days.

New wave, in Edinburgh. The bread here was fantastic.

Ayr. I love the idea that the name was once something to boast about.

45 minutes

The “sharing tables”

Cutting up the bread.

… is roughly how long it took for my four 1.5kg loaves to be demolished. I was terrified that the bread was going to turn out damp and claggy, but it was fine. I should have made more.

They can’t wait for someone to come over with a knife and are just ripping chunks off the remaining loaves!

Bread to share

Today is Glasgow Harvest and I made some bread to take along. Everyone likes bread apart from anti-yeast nutters, so I'm hoping it will go down well. Making it also gave me practice in making larger batches of bread — I usually just do one or two loaves at a time, which is not really the most efficient way of using an oven. I decided to make a few light rye breads with a bit of rye flavour, but enough white wheat flour that the dough stays easy to work with.

As sourdough takes a long time, I had to start a while in advance. On Thursday I took the starter from the fridge where it had been languishing for a while, and refreshed it:

50g starter
200g rye flour
200g water

Then late on Thursday I stepped it up with more flour and water:

1000g rye flour
1000g water
450g goop from Step 1

Halp! It’s alive!

I ended up with 2300g of starter, as some inevitably gets left in the bucket, smeared on the walls, etc. It looked like a lot. Often I just make a straight dough with a small amount of starter, but didn't want to risk the finished dough not rising when it's supposed to. By Friday morning the sponge still didn't seem to be doing very much, but by the evening it was escaping onto the kitchen worktop.

Rather than calculate a particular percentage of rye, I decided just to add another 3kg of white flour to make the final dough. That meant I only had to figure out how much water and salt to add.

3000g white flour
1150g rye flour in the sponge from Step 2
=4150g flour.

For a dough of 59% hydration we thus need (4150 x 0.59) = a total of 2450g liquid in dough
1150g water already contained in the sponge
1300g liquid to be added

85g salt (2% of 4150g)

For a bit of fun, I used beer instead of water for the remaining liquid. It's only 3% and rather bitter. I wonder if anyone will notice?

As I’m of the school that believes in a minimum of kneading, 7kg of dough without a mixer isn't too bad. Just get your hands in, mix it up, let the dough itself do the work. Get it relatively smooth on the counter and it should look after itself.


Then just into the oven with it. I can’t wait to have some of this for breakfast.

Dough split up and proving

Jam making

You can buy jam for next to nothing, so why make it? Well, to use up a glut of fruit. To make jams that you can’t buy. For fun. And, well, some kinds aren’t as cheap as others. Some things like chilli jelly go for ££££ in posh delicatessens. I’m forever picking jars up, thinking “I could make this for about 15p in ingredients,” and putting them down again. Learning to make jam has thus been on my list of things to do for quite a while. Jam goes with bread, so it’s a good fit for the blog. And at the weekend I got my chance.

I wrote about Cookie on my beer blog some months ago. They do lots of cool stuff. Such as playing host to a jam making workshop last weekend. “Bring yourself and some fruit,” it said on the blog. So I did.

Pollokshields, near Cookie, is full of amazing greengrocers. I dropped past one and was looking for some reduced fruit. I struck lucky and found reduced strawberries — some punnets were already mouldy, but I got four big punnets that didn’t look too damaged. The total cost was £2. For 1.6kg. When we started cleaning and stoning the fruit I was amazed how good they mostly were. You’d be extremely lucky to get strawberries this good in a supermarket at full price.

When I arrived at Cookie people were already in the prep room busily washing and stoning a mountain of plums. Hrr hrr, juicy plums, fnarr. With about eight of us around the table, all the fruit was soon ready and we carried it upstairs to the kitchen. It looked far too nice to be made into jam, really. As well as plums and strawberries we had greengages and some raspberries and brambles.

Without much of a clue of what I was doing I was shown to the stove and instructed to stir some sugar until it melted. Typically, it stuck to the bottom of the pot and I had to start again. Slowly the sugar-covered fruit became a fruit-filled syrup, then a sugary, vibrantly coloured boiling mess as the fruit broke down.

What did people do with spare fruit before sugar became so cheap? In the fruit-growing regions of Germany, they ferment and distill it to make Schnaps (proper 40% Schnaps, not the sugary peach liqueur that goes under that name here). Lovely stuff it is too. That is illegal here unfortunately.

Some of the jam will be part of the jam wall at Glasgow Harvest on Saturday. To think a year ago I was looking around for Glasgow food bloggers to add to my blogroll, and could hardly find any. Now it seems everywhere you turn there’s some sort of social food project springing up. Hurrah for that.

Under-proving

Under-proved dough is easier to slash, and doesn't collapse after slashing.


Not completely happy with the crumb though.

This is mostly white flour with a bit of chapati flour. Sourdough of course.

1955 Whitbread XXX Best Mild

I usually write my own recipes for my beer; not that I'm a genius at formulating recipes, it's just that I like to keep things simple and much of the time I barely even think of them as recipes. I can't remember why exactly but I decided to brew an old recipe instead. If you go over to Shut Up About Barclay Perkins you'll get a load of old beers excavated directly from the archives, along with a shedload of other historical information—everyone interested in beer should read this blog from start to finish.

This is one of them, a 1955 Whitbread Best Mild, aka XXX. Here's the make-up as given there:

80.6% Mild malt
4.9% Crystal malt
3.2% Invert No1 sugar
11.3% Invert No3 sugar

Like many contemporary mild ales, the XXX relies on dark brewing sugar for flavour and colour. Modern milds from microbreweries tend to use chocolate malt instead. I like both styles and if you're ever lucky enough to be in a pub that has several milds on at once, it can be fun to note the difference in flavour between an old-fashioned mild and a new-wave one.

This makes things a bit tricky because the invert sugar syrup that professional brewers use is not available to the home brewer (the stuff sold as "brewing sugar" in homebrew shops is not the same thing at all). But they are all essentially a mixture of refined sugar and unrefined sugar in different quantities, so I attempted to fake it.

As I understand it, No. 1 is a light coloured syrup and No. 3 a dark one. I substituted golden syrup for No. 1 and for No. 3 I used a combination of three parts golden syrup to one of treacle. I might have erred on the light side with the treacle because it does have a very distinctive flavour and I didn't want it turning up recognisably treacley in my beer.

So my approximation of the recipe is:

2346g Maris Otter (the original is mild ale malt)
141g crystal
93g golden syrup
330g "No. 3" (83g treacle + 247g golden syrup)

Mash 45 minutes at 67ºC; I hate sparging so stopped sooner and ended up with slightly less wort at a slightly higher gravity: 1.038 as opposed to 1.034 in the original.

Hopping: 20g East Kent Goldings (5.8%) at 60 minutes and another 10g at 30 minutes. My hops were a bit higher in alpha acid than the recipe assumes, so I dropped the quantity a little, though it should still be a tad bitterer than the original. Yeast was White Shield which has pretty much become my house yeast at the moment.

The finished beer has an aroma and palate more reminiscent of light honey than anything else. Hops barely discernable, just enough to stop it getting that weird blandness that under-hopped beer often has. As you can see from the picture, it's a light amber and not very dark at all. This matches the expected colour from the recipe, so I'm not unhappy with it. There's no treacliness though, so I might risk increasing the proportion in the next beer I make with sugar.

What's it taste like? Well, I don't expect a 1950s mild to be that exciting, and it isn't. My friends liked it more than I did, though. But look at those ingredients. Damn, this is a cheap beer to make. I wish I liked it more.

Glasgow Beer and Pub Project

Oregon artist Eric Steen is going to be doing an art project in Glasgow during April, based around the beer and pub culture of the city.

His project blog is at http://glasgowbeerandpubproject.blogspot.com/. It looks like an intensive bit of work. There will be a series of events, called Pub School, every week in April followed by an installation at the gallery. All very interesting stuff:

The Pub School will be a weekly event series in April where the general public can learn about beer, take homebrewing demos, have samplings, learn about the history of it, and possibly even do some pub-crawls. I would love to get homebrewers involved in this by leading some of these demos and workshops. Then on April 30th, I am opening the Market Gallery Pub, which will be a one night installation that looks at homebrewing as an art form. The gallery will be turned into a functioning pub and I would like to feature a large menu of homebrewed beers…

Sounds like a lot of fun. Geoff from Hop Topic will be leading a homebrewing demonstration and the Williams Bros have agreed to recreate the most popular beer at the Market Gallery Pub at their brewery.

Eric is still looking for homebrewers to supply beer for the Market Gallery Pub. If you have spare beer, let him know.

Spent grain bread

I've tried to make spent grain bread before, and I always made the mistake of using too much and ended up with a heavy, soggy brick. These days I don't use any more than a handful. It's tempting to use more, but you cannot predict the water content accurately and it always ends up being too much.

Sponge:
15g sourdough starter
100ml boiled, but unfermented hopped wort from Beata Bitter
100g rye flour
a handful of spent grain from Beata Bitter

Dough:
Sponge +
200ml water
11g salt
400g strong white bread flour

Bake at 200ºC for 30 minutes and 150ºC for another 20, or whatever suits your oven.

The bread has a very soft, slightly doughy crumb. A bit too soft and fluffy. I might make the dough even drier next time, although it's already only 60% hydration. The supermarket bakeries clearly use malt a lot. It tastes fantastic, malty and sweet. No noticeable hop flavour.

Beata Bitter

The last time I bought some hops there were a variety I hadn't had before – Beata. They were very cheap so I got some and decided to use them in a golden ale to show off their flavour.

15:00 Rubber shoes, on. Circuit breaker, on. Death trap hot liquor tank made of discarded mango chutney drum and Asda kettle element, on.

15:01 Now to decide what to brew.

15.06 Look at hops in freezer. I have Magnum and Beata and East Kent Goldings. Hmm, Magnum as bittering, Beata for aroma? Beata are supposed to be good lager-type hops, and Magnum yer bog-standard clean German high-alpha bittering hops.

15.10
4 g gypsum
1100g maris otter
1910g lager malt
100 crystal malt

15.30 Move 10L mash water to mash bucket. Discover it is only 63ºC instead of 75ºC. Curse and put the kettle on.

15:41 Top up mash with approximately 2L boiling water, bucket now completely full but has reached 67ºC.

16.31 First runnings only 1.046 (unadjusted). That's 1.056 adjusted though. Guess I shouldn't sparge too much.

16.53 Batch sparging with another 10L at 78ºC, after 20 minutes: 1.010 at 47º - 1.019 adjusted.

17.10 Boiler coming up to boil, time for a beer and a sandwich.

17.30 Rolling boil, 15g Magnum in, 75 mins starts here.

18.10 Wallpaper hasn't peeled off the walls yet. Another half hour to go!

18.30 Late hops - 15g Beata. 15 minutes more!

00.00 I don't have a wort chiller. Bastard wort is still at 35ºC. When I make a cup of tea it's stone cold within twenty minutes. What gives?

00.10+1 Final OG is 1.046, collected about 15L of wort including trub.

03.30+1 Down to 24º. Pitched yeast.

15.16+1 Still no visible activity.

00.10+2 Tiny bubbles. Start worrying and make another yeast starter.

08.00+2 Foam! Don't need second starter after all. Yay!