Rich, and delicious, Walnut Bread is a perfect bread to serve with cheese at a casual lunch. Or as part of a dinner party meal. Savoury yet sweet it’s very moreish and is just as good lightly toasted and served with butter.
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Soda Breads are so easy to make at home. Everybody loves making bread, it’s so satisfying and rewarding why not give it a try. I know what you are thinking, I can’t make bread. It takes too long. Too much kneading involved. I don’t have time. It’s too difficult. I don’t have a stand mixer, or I can’t be bothered.
Well apart from the last one, I can help you. Soda bread is actually easier than making a scone, it’s pretty much a bung it in recipe, no special equipment needed.
I’ve given you two recipes here, plain white and a wholemeal version. I like to include some seeds, black pepper, and rosemary in the wholemeal version. But these can be left out if you wish. The method of making each bread is identical. The trick is to handle the dough as little as possible and then let it rest.
A mixing bowl
Scales
Measuring jug
Baking tray
Makes one loaf.
225g plain Flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
¼ tsp cream of tartar
¼ tsp baking powder
200ml buttermilk
½ tsp Salt
If buttermilk is unobtainable, use 160ml of plain yoghurt (not Greek style) mixed with 60ml of milk. Aim for a consistency like single cream.
Bake 200˚c (180˚c Fan) for 20 to 25 minutes.
Makes one loaf.
175g wholemeal Flour
175g plain Flour
35g pumpkin seeds
35g sunflower seeds
¼ tsp (heaped) baking powder
½ tsp (heaped) bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp chopped fresh rosemary leaves
½ tsp (heaped) salt
12 turns black mill pepper
250ml buttermilk
Pinhead oatmeal to sprinkle on top.
If buttermilk is unobtainable, use 200ml of plain yoghurt (not Greek style) mixed with 90ml of milk. Aim for a consistency like single cream.
Bake 200˚c (180˚c Fan) for 25 to 30 minutes.
Place all the flour/s into a bowl large enough to get your hands into. Add the raising agents, seeds/herbs if using, and salt then mix into the flour.
Make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the buttermilk. Working from the middle outwards begin to mix the flour into the liquid with the spatula. Don’t beat the mixture, just fold together to make a damp dough. Keep a little buttermilk back until you are sure you need it all. This will depend on how thick your brand of buttermilk is.
When the mix is almost combined, tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured worksurface. Then bring the dough together with your hands. The dough should be tacky and soft. Too dry and the bread won’t rise, it’s better to add a little more liquid if you’re not sure.
Resist the temptation to knead the dough, just pat it out with the palm of your hand to form a disc 3-4 cm thick. Transfer the dough to a lined baking sheet and using a scotch scraper cut across the dough to a depth of 4mm. Then turn the bread repeat the cut to mark out four or six wedges.
Now this is where I get into one of my personal theories. It’s not general practice, but I think it makes sense.
If I am dealing with a self-supporting mix like scones and bread using raising agents. I always leave them to sit for at least ten minutes before baking. The logic is to give a little time for the gasses to build up in the dough and lighten the dough before setting the loaf in the oven. It a little bit like leaving a yeast dough to rise before cooking. Don’t try this with a light cake mix or sponge. They will collapse if not baked at once.
Dust lightly with flour then bake at 200˚c for about 25 mins. When cooked, the bread should have a heavy hollow sound when the base is tapped firmly. Lift the bread onto a cooling wire and eat barely warm with butter or good cheese.
N.B. Some supermarkets sell cultured buttermilk. This is different to true buttermilk been thicker which will make your dough too dry. Add a little milk if needed to bring the consistency down to single cream.
This may be the only bread you ever need to make. It really is worth the effort, perfect for a picnic, light lunch or to show off at a dinner party.
Enjoy Life !
John.
Hi, my name is John Webber, award winning chef and tutor, now retired to the west coast of Scotland. Welcome to our blog focusing on food, cooking, and countryside. My aim is to pass on my years of skills and knowledge together with an appreciation of the countryside.
Join us to experience the beauty of the west coast, cook some great food and be at ease in the kitchen.
If you enjoyed your visit with us, please subscribe up to our newsletter to receive regular updates of what’s new and upcoming at The Westcoaster. Subscribe Here
©John Webber. 2023
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Make your own ghee at home. It’s easy to do and very versatile. The homemade version has a more neutral buttery flavour that has several uses. Making a curry, producing French emulsified sauces, in bakery goods or high-temperature frying.
To get the best from your curry creations do read our posts on, – Make your own Garam Masala, – How to make Indian onion pastes, and Make your own Indian flavouring Pastes .
Have you ever wondered what’s in that tin of ghee you religiously buy to make your curry as authentic as possible? Well, its butter, yes just butter. It’s not exactly identical as the butter on your toast. It has been cooked to remove the milky part of the butter and extend its shelf life.
Now if you’re into French classic cookery you may have come across clarified butter. Well, it’s basically the same thing. For the Indian version the base butter is different, and it cooked slightly longer to change the flavour.
But for all practical purposes we can make our own ghee to use for a curry or a hollandaise sauce as we wish. You can store the butter for up to a month and a half in the fridge. Or as I do freeze it in ice cube trays to have handy blocks ready when I need them.
1x 250g block of unsalted butter
Small saucepan
Small ladle or soup spoon
Fine heatproof sieve
Heatproof bowl (pyrex is ideal)
A good result needs a good start and that’s the butter. You don’t need to buy the most expensive, but it must be unsalted. If you use salted butter for this, you will have a briny deposit in the pan that can spoil the finished product. As the butter cooks the milky part will rise to the surface and the solids will fall to the bottom of the pan.
Place the block of butter into the pan and pop onto a medium heat. Don’t use a lid as we need to keep an eye on the butter cooking
As the butter melts, foam will appear around the edge of the pan. Don’t worry that’s normal but we don’t want the butter to be rapidly boiling, just a gentle simmer.
When the foam covers the surface of the pan begin to skim it off the surface of the butter. You will see the liquid butter below becoming clearer. Listen to the pan it will be making a noise a little bit like a deep fat fryer after cooking chips. A kind of crackle as the last of the moisture in the oil evaporates. The butter in the pan is doing the same thing.
It’s very important you do not leave the pan at this point. Not only will you spoil the butter, but you will have the same danger as a deep fat fryer. If the fat becomes too hot it will burn and eventually ignite.
Keep a close eye on the pan and you will see the butter stop moving around. The sound coming from the pan will also all but stop. Both indicators tell you the butter is ready for straining. Don’t hesitate, strain it into the bowl at once.
The pan will have a deposit on the bottom, this should be a light brown and not welded to the pan. If it’s dark and smells a bit nutty, you have over cooked it a bit. You will have made what the French refer to as Burre Noisette (nut brown butter). It should be ok for a curry, but no good for hollandaise etc.
Let the ghee cool in the bowl and ether transfer to a lidded container or pour into ice cube trays and freeze. Once frozen tip out the cubes and store in a sealed plastic bag or box back in the freezer. NOTE, If the ghee is not stored in a sealed container, it will absorb the flavour of anything store close to it. In the fridge it will be good for six weeks, in the freezer up to three months.
When you go shopping, look out for unsalted butter that has been discounted as its close to its use by date. Take it home and cook it straight away, you will give the butter a new lease of life and save the waste of it been discarded.
As you can see it’s not difficult and only take a few minutes to do, give it a try.
Enjoy Life,
John.
Hi, my name is John Webber, award winning chef and tutor, now retired to the west coast of Scotland. Welcome to our blog focusing on food, cooking, and countryside. My aim is to pass on my years of skills and knowledge together with an appreciation of the countryside.
Join us to experience the beauty of the west coast, cook some great food and be at ease in the kitchen.
If you enjoyed your visit with us, please subscribe up to our newsletter to receive regular updates of what’s new and upcoming at The Westcoaster. Subscribe Here
©John Webber. 2023
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Demystifying perfect pastry is not as daunting as you may think. We will begin by looking at the ingredients and what they do in a dough. We can then move on to understanding how the method of making a dough and how it affects the final result. For this article we are focused on basic sweet and short pastry. Future posts and Food Files will cover more advanced doughs such as Choux, Puff, and Hot Water pastries as well as yeast doughs and breads.
The Basics.
In a nutshell pastry is a dough containing flour, fat, and liquid (water and or egg). Sugar is also used when making pastry for sweets and desserts. While this may seem limiting the variations in combining these ingredients provides us with a range of products with both sweet and savoury uses. Before we begin to dive deeper into the pastry itself, let’s get a understand the ingredients used. If you haven’t already, Look up our posts on Getting to Grips with Pastry and Blind Baking to get a deeper insight into great pastry.
Flour.
Most commonly (but not always) in terms of pastry we are discussing milled white wheat flour. The main characteristic of the wheat/flour we are interested in is its protein content and it’s important to use the correct flour for the job in hand. In kitchens we refer to cake flour, plain flour, and strong flour. This is simply a useful reference to the amount of protein in the flour.
Cake Flour. 8-9% protein. Not that easy to find now, most people use plain flour as a replacement. If you want to try it out add roughly 15-20% cornflour to plain flour and sift together, semolina or rice flour can also be used. This is quite a common technique in making shortbread.
Plain Flour, 10-12% protein. Readily available and possible the most common flour found at home. Self-raising flour is simply plain flour with chemical raising agents added.
Strong Flour, 12-16% More commonly used for bread or leavened products. We will cover this in more detail with a later post on bread making.
There are of course many other types of flour available to us including wholemeal versions of the above but rather than get into too much detail here I want to focus on the pastry itself.
For more flour facts look up https://fabflour.co.uk/
Fats.
For pastry butter, margarine, or lard can be used. They all do a similar job but in diverse ways.
Butter is best for flavour and should always be unsalted. This can seem odd when most recipes will add salt to the mix be it sweet or savoury but by using unsalted butter, we have total control over the salt content of the dough. Butter also melts at a reasonably low temperature in the region of 30˚c to 35˚c. Now this can be a pain in making the dough if rubbing in the fat, but it means that the fat will melt in the mouth during eating. Other pastry fats like lard melt at a higher temperature 36˚c + which means the fat can solidify in the mouth as if cools.
Not all butters are equal, have a look at the butters on offer where you shop. The use by dates of the salted versions will be much longer than the unsalted versions. Salt is added for flavour but also as a preservative to lengthen the life of the butter. We want our butter to be as fresh as possible with a rich cream natural flavour.
Also have a look at the fat content of the butters, but surely butter is fat? Well not all of it, the fat content will differ according to manufacture and origin. Why is this of interest, well most of the weight of the butter that’s not fat will be moisture. If you have ever melted butter, then poured it into a dish you will have discovered a layer of milky water sitting below the fat.
Now would you just add more liquid into your pastry just for the hell of it? Well, that’s what you are doing by using butter with a flow fat content. Aim to buy a butter with at least 80% fat. Preferably 83% or more if you can.
Lard
If we decide to use lard as our fat source, we don’t need to worry about the moisture content, but the flavour suffers. Also been a firmer fat then butter it’s easier to get a light crumbier pastry. Some chefs like to use half butter, half lard in savoury pastry. I do this for my Christmas mince pies. It gives just the right texture and the last thing I need it a sweet pastry shell combined with a very sweet filling.
Margarine
If using margarine, it must be a hard margarine produced for pastry making, not one of the many blended or soft margarines available. For cake making the margarine can be softer but in pastry we need the firmness of the fat to produce a light finish. This also has the advantage of a very low moisture content which is important as we will see later.
Eggs or Water?
The choice of using egg or water to bind a dough really depends on the method of making the dough and the characteristics you want the dough to have.
A large egg is made up of about 9% fat, 12% protein, and the balance been water and minerals making up the remainder.
Water is of course 100% water and has no ability to hold back gluten or bind a dough together.
The protein in egg will add structure but overdoing it will make the pastry tougher. look up our Food Files page on All you need to know about – Eggs to get a deeper insight on the egg itself.
The fat in the yolk assists the fat in the recipe to hold back the gluten and the yolk also acts as an emulsifier to help hold the water and fat in the recipe together. This in the case of beaten mixes (see my sable recipe) binds the dough together and gives volume
So, in a nutshell using egg will give a dough more structure and reduce the amount of pure water needed to bind the dough. However, the egg will also take away some of the crumbly nature of the cooked pastry. Using water will provide a crumbly texture as long as the dough is not overworked, and the gluten toughened making the pastry chewy.
For more information on eggs look up https://www.egginfo.co.uk
Sugar
Adding sugar to a rubbed in pastry will of course sweeten the dough but will also make the pastry colour more in baking. Using an unrefined sugar will also enhance the flavour of the pastry.
When making a dough by the creaming method it does both of the above and also cuts though the fat allowing it to distribute though the flour more efficiently and hold back the gluten.
Now if your still with me Well Done!
That’s a lot of info which I hope will allow you to make informed decisions when choosing or amending the pastry recipes you decide to use. Grab a cup of coffee, take a breath and we can more on. Let’s now have a look at the physical process of making the dough.
Going back to the flour information of this post I mentioned the protein content of the flour and how this defined which flour we would use for a particular job. The reason for this is that when hydrated these proteins begin to form a product known as Gluten. Think of it as an elastic bungee holding the dough together.
Gluten can be an advantage to us or a bit of a pain, it forms naturally in a dough, so all a bread dough needs to begin forming gluten is time and water. Working the gluten strengthens it and makes it more elastic. This is an advantage in doughs where we need to the dough to stretch as the gasses in the dough expand in the heat of the oven as in making bread.
With basic pastries this strength is the last thing we need. If you have ever found your pastry has shrunk back down the tin in baking, it’s a sure sign that the dough has been overworked in ether the mixing or rolling out or often in both! When rolling out your pastry, don’t just roll in one direction. Turn the dough as you are rolling to even out the stressing of the dough. If the dough springs back as you try to roll it out, its already too elastic. The best you can do is to pop it into the fridge on the rolling mat to rest for 20 minutes then have another go. Always rest a rolled dough before baking to minimise shrinkage.
So, a key thing is to handle our pastry as little and as lightly as possible. If making the dough on a machine I prefer to let the machine do any rubbing in or creaming but then bring the dough together by hand, so I am in control of the mixing.
Demystifying perfect pastry, the Creaming method.
If you haven’t already check out my Best Sweet Pastry post for a recipe to produce a versatile tart dough. The process is like making shortbread but uses icing sugar which fully incorporates into the dough and has egg for a binding. Any additional moisture needed to bring the dough together is provided by double cream. The net result of this is to use the least water possible to bring the dough together. This gives us a pastry robust enough to be cut and support a filling while not been tough.
The principle of a creamed dough is that the fat having been mixed right through the dough forms a barrier to the gluten forming long strands and toughing the pastry.
Demystifying perfect pastry, the Rubbing in method.
This is the normal procedure for producing shortcrust pastry, the ‘short’ part of the term referring to how well the pastry breaks up in the mouth. Again, controlling the gluten is important to avoid toughness but the primary factor is how we combine the fat into the dough. Temperature is important. Whereas in our creamed dough room temperature is ideal when rubbing in, we need the fat and our tools be Again, as cool as possible.
The idea is to rub the fat into the flour to form fine particles without the fat melting into the flour. Now as I said before butter melts below blood heat so unless you have nimble quick fingers there’s a chance the butter will begin melt before it totally worked in. Dicing the butter then returning it into the fridge helps and a cold mixing bowl is essential.
The easy option is to use a high melting point fat, and this is the most popular option for manufactured pastries. It may say butter on the packet, but its not butter as you know it.
Think of short pastry as a brick wall, if everything is firmly combined it has strength and toughness and is difficult to break though. Now imagine we have gaps in the mortar and the bricks are sandy. The wall is weak and will collapse easily without using a lot of effort.
This is what the fat in the pastry does, having small particles of fat in the dough prevents the gluten forming together while the dough is raw. Then when cooking the fat melts to leave weakness in the pastry which gives the finished pastry its light crumbly nature.
Dealing with pastry, best practice.
In making creamed doughs keep everything at room temperature.
In making rubbed in doughs keep everything cool and use a pastry knife to cut in the fat.
Rest the dough after making and before rolling to give the dough time to bind and relax
When rolling a dough cool the work surface and rolling pin if it’s a warm day. A polypropylene rolling pin is the best option.
Don’t overdo the amount of four used when rolling out, just a dusting should be enough. Too much flour will embed itself into the dough and spoil the pastry when baked.
Work quickly but carefully, turn the dough during rolling to even out the stress of stretching the dough out.
Always rest the rolled dough before baking.
Have the oven preheated to a slightly higher temperature that needed to cook the pastry. Place the goods into the oven then turn down the heat to the cooking temperature. This will help counteract the loss of heat when opening the oven door.
I hope all that information hasn’t overwhelmed you, take a little time to work through it all. Practice makes perfect so give it a go and remember to enjoy your cooking.
Enjoy life!
John.
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