Quick bread: no-rising-time soda bread recipe

Posted by louisa on Friday 7 January 2011 in cooking, recipes | 17 comments

The other week, I asked about how people manage with baking when the weather is cooler – when it’s hard to maintain a yeast-friendly heat for bread to rise (especially if you’re going for a 12-18hr slow rise bread).

In the comments, Karen M said:

In my rural living days without electricity or central heating, we ate a lot of bannock and other unleavened breads in the cold times.

A smack-the-forehead moment for me. Unleavened bread, of course!

I hadn’t heard of bannock but John loves its Irish cousin, soda bread so I decided to give that a go. After trying his first slice of my first soda bread, John declared we’re never buying shop-bought bread again. We will, of course, but I liked his sentiment ;) I’ve made it a few times now and it’s been a hit each time.

Soda bread is super quick to make. Most bread relies on yeast “breathing” to create carbon dioxide bubbles but soda bread uses the chemical reaction between the alkaline bicarbonate of soda and something acidic (like vinegar, lemon juice or cream of tartar) to make the gas instead. It’s an instant reaction rather than something that has to build up over time – so no need for rising time or proving time.

And extending kneading is a no-no too – the reaction works best if it’s happening in a warm environment so it needs to be mixed, shaped and bam! straight into the oven. Super fast.

It’s a dense bread – no big yeasty air bubbles like in good yeast-based bread – but the sponge is soft and a touch sweet. Possibly because of the slight sweet milkiness or possibly because of the texture, there is something scone-like about it for me – but it’s considerably lower fat than actual scones.

Like scones though, it’s fantastic with butter and jam. Or dipped in a hearty soup.

Frozen beck, unfrozen pipes

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 December 2010 in DIY | 2 comments

I took these pictures of the beck (stream) at the bottom of our garden yesterday afternoon.

(Downstream/upstream respectively)

And I took this picture of the water pipe in our kitchen after we’d finished mopping up 3 mop buckets of water from the kitchen floor.

Sigh.

Baking bread in the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 22 December 2010 in cooking, frugal | 11 comments

We’ve got out of the swing of baking bread recently – partly due to general winter lethargy and partly due to the fact that we’d struggle to get yeast do its thing.

It would be very difficult to grow a slow rise bread – one that needs a good 12-18 hours to rise. With our woodburners in the office & living room, we get a room temperature of 16-18C (60-65F) for a few hours during the day but for the rest of the time, it is much lower than that. The kitchen is poorly insulated (it’s an addition away from the main body of the house with lots of windows and a hard-to-insulate flat roof) so has frequently been see-your-breath chilly (especially last week when the central heating was out and it was even colder than normal). Opinions differ on the ideal temperature for yeast activity but it’s typically seen as 25-35C (75-95C) – we don’t even come close to that. (Admittedly we rarely come close to that even at the height of summer but it’s warmer, and more consistently warmer, than it is now.)

I’m loathed to use the (electric) oven as a warming box – not only would it be using energy, it would need a lot of management – turning it on and off – since the temperature setting doesn’t go anywhere near low enough for the oven thermostat to manage it. And 12-18 hours of that sort of management isn’t realistic.

Lethargy aside, we would like to get back into baking bread ASAP – it would save a lot of frozen-faced walks to the shop and, of course, shops are going to be closed over the next couple of weekends anyway/out of stock because of snow issues.

We could possibly manage some shorter rise time breads when a woodburning is running – leaving them for longer to account for it still being a bit cool – or even, if I had to do it, in the oven. That’s not out of the question, I’m just a sucker for slow rise bread: I haven’t perfected a non-slow rise loaf recipe yet and I suspect now might not be the time to work on one!

Are you still baking bread at the moment? How are you managing? Have you got any suggestions for things I could try? Or got a fool proof pretty-quick-rising loaf recipe?

Frozen egg

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 December 2010 in chickens | 2 comments

Like Frugaldom & her quail eggs, there was a frozen egg waiting for me in the nest box this morning.

I suspect it was laid later yesterday, after my collection run, so was in there overnight.

Needless to say, I felt the pathological need to crack it open (albeit after it had been sat in the house for about 15mins). It was like frozen jelly inside.

Chickens in winter – still rewarding but so much more work

Posted by louisa on Friday 3 December 2010 in chickens | 11 comments

Sorry if this blog as got a bit one note of late – all winter! winter! winter! It’s partly because I’m reluctant to post any recipes at the moment (I’ve got a few I want to write up but I think our oven thermostat is broken so I want to check that because saying “bake this at 230 for 30 minutes”, when really it needs 10 minutes at 180) and partly because the weather is a little … in our faces at the moment.

We’re not used to this. Even after our “once in 20 years” bad winter last year, we weren’t really ready for this – and especially not starting so early. I know a lot of people in north America and mainland Europe have it far, far worse for far longer but if I lived in Canada or Sweden, I’d expect it and be prepared for it but we’re just not used to it here. It was a balmy -6C/20F outside at noon today – it had been much, much colder overnight. I grew up on the sea-warmed coast (sunny sunny Southport) – we didn’t have either hills or snow there so trudging up and down the first in 8ins of the second is a very new experience to me.

We’re also not used to waking up to find these outside our kitchen window in the morning:

The in-need-of-filling bird feeder looks like wax has been poured on it.

It also makes me slightly regret how much I’ve been urging people to get chickens because they’re so easy to look after. My chicken-related workload has shot up over the last week – many many times more involved, although I guess that’s because they were so little effort before.

Last weekend’s big coop clean took a good three times as long – having to scrap the frozen poo off the floor – but that’s not so bad – it’s the daily tasks that are more time consuming.

In the morning, I have to defrost their drinkers as soon as I wake up. Sometimes that involves just using boiling water to melt the ice and top up the water levels (so it’s lukewarm for them to drink). Other mornings it means carrying the drinkers back up to the house (up three flights of icy steps) to defrost the solid water and refill. And some mornings, like today, it means carrying the drinkers up to the house, defrosting them, refilling them, carrying them back down, flipping them over to hang them up, the bottom coming off, the lukewarm water going everywhere over the run floor and having to start all over again, with a nice ice rink in the run to meet me when I return – and the floor of the run was already too cold for two feet as it was.