Flour. Yeast. Water. Salt. These are the ingredients that real bread is made from. A drizzle of olive oil if you’re making pizza, perhaps, a handful of oats or wheatgerm for flavour, nuts and seeds or dried fruit for texture. Real bread goes from oven to table in minutes. It starts life on the kitchen counter, serves several meals then is either eaten or repurposed to thicken soup, as crumbs to coat fish, or crusts saved in the freezer. Real bread doesn’t sit on a shelf for a week, stuffed with synthetic fats, stabilisers and mould inhibitors to allow it to do so. It doesn’t live as long again in your kitchen, sliced and stodgy and sweating slightly in its plastic wrapper . Continue reading
Tag Archives: flour
Spicy Black Bean Breakfast Tostadas
‘Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast’.
I’m hoping Oscar Wilde was referencing the conversation not the cooking because I, for one, love a little bit of brilliance at breakfast time. Continue reading
Homemade Tagliatelle
Sometimes it makes sense to take shortcuts in the kitchen. Life is, as they say, too short and I’m more than happy to buy pre-prepared ingredients like all-butter puff pastry if it means a little more time with my friends and family or freedom to pay attention to the rest of a recipe.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Hummus and pesto are two major bugbears of mine, both such staple ingredients (in certain middle class sections of society anyway), perennially popular yet tasting of little more than the cheap, bland ingredients from which they are made (sunflower oil and cashews instead of olive oil and pine nuts? Yes, Sacla, I’m looking at you). Continue reading