Alookar roti

Somehow despite my love of flatbreads and South Asian food, I've never made parathas. Why I decided to finally get around to it late on Sunday evening before my first full week of school and work, I'm not sure, but luckily it turns out they are really easy as well as delicious.

The recipe I used was from Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Alford & Duguid (as usual), and is particular to Rajasthan, though I am sure there are close cousins to the recipe all over North India. You make parathas using a basic chapatti dough, and aside from making the filling, they're not really more work than plain chapattis, so I predict lots of experimenting using leftover fillings from other projects. In this case I didn't have anything made, and so followed the spicy potato filling recipe (similar to the stuffing in a masala dosa).

Not having any atta flour on hand at the moment, I made my dough with a mixture of local red spring whole wheat flour and regular all-purpose. The recipe says that leaving the dough to rest for longer than the usual 30 minutes, up to 2 hours, will make it easier to handle. Luckily I was making an eggplant dish and a sprouted kala chana (black chickpea) dish at the same time, so I had plenty of resting time :P

I made the potato filling by boiling potatoes, frying the spices in a little oil and then mixing in the roughly-mashed cooked potatoes. I added some coriander and mint at the end when the mixture had had some time to cool.

Assembly was easy and fun, the kind of work that makes me love making flatbreads so much. You just divide and roll out the chapatti as usual, but spread on some filling, roll up the dough around it, flatten it, and roll it out again. I experimented with a few different ways of spreading and rolling to try to evenly cover up the filling, but even where it poked through the end results were fine.

I oiled a heated frying pan and cooked them for a few minutes a side, brushing more oil on as necessary. Et voila! They were incredible, with a crisp outer texture and soft very spicy filling.

I just ate the last ones today, a week later, and they were nearly as good as freshly made. I found that microwaving them was a bit of a waste as it destroys the textural contrast and affects the flavour a bit. However, just as with plain chapattis, panfrying them in a dry pan on each side till heated through revivifies them beautifully. 

On the first day I ate them with eggplant curry and kala chana dal, but on later eatings I spread them with some yogourt cheese I pressed myself, and some homemade bean sprouts (I have recently become completely addicted to sprouting things) and rolled up, they made an amazing light lunch.

Viva la paratha!

Sprouted flatbread

Way back in my bread heyday, circa 2005, I made this interesting bread called pitti, from the Hunza Valley in Pakistan (from an Alford and Duguid book, naturally - Flatbread and Flavours). What's so neat about it is that you don't make it from flour but instead from whole sprouted wheatberries; they are almost the only ingredient, with dried apricots and salt. They were really delicious, but I remembered them being a bit of a pain and never made them again.

Looking back with a bit more perspective, I realised that though they do take 2-3 days, there's hardly any work involved (if you have a food processor, that is), and the only thing about them that I had found annoying was having to scrape sticky wheatberries off a dishtowel over and over again while they sprouted. Being the granolaesque West Coasters that we are, in this kitchen we have sprouting trays which would remove that aspect entirely, so I've been meaning to make these since I got back from Asia.

The other day I finally got around to picking up some wheatberries at the local bulk food store and was in business! Wheatberries have nothing to do with berries - they are just whole, dried grains of wheat. You can also soak and then boil them and eat them as a grain, in salads, etc; they are featured in the Ukrainian Christmas dish kutia, mmmm. The cooked grains are also a great breakfast heated and topped with a small spoonful of maple syrup, for a Canadian adaptation.

The first step is to immerse the berries in cold water and let them sit for 18 hours. As easily done as said, except the timing part. For the past weeks I have been unaccountably busy and ended up having to let them soak for more like 22 hours. No big deal. After this, you rinse them off, and then either put them in a bowl and cover them with a towel and plate or lid, or if you have sprouting trays you just pop them in. Every 8-12 hours, you rinse and drain them again, until the sprouts are 1/3 as long as the berries themselves, at which point you're ready to make the dough.

This was a little more problematic for me, as try as I might I couldn't summon up the energy to deal with them after work on Thursday when they were already ready (I expected them to take till Friday). When I did get to them at 11pm on Friday, they had sprouted beautifully and the sprouts were now 2-3 times the length of the berries! Oops! I decided to go ahead and make the dough anyhow.

I did have to deal with one hated dishcloth manoeuvre, pouring the berries out and patting them dry, but once I can handle. Then it was into the Cuisinart, 2 cups at a time, with some dried apricots and salt. You process it until it starts moving around the bowl as one lump of dough. The grains are mostly ground up though some unevenness remains. At that point you need to let the dough rest for at least an hour - or, like me, pop it in the fridge, clean up the sticky mess, and collapse gratefully in bed.

This morning I brought the dough back to room temperature and preheated the oven. Then it was time to divide up the dough and on a floured surface roll out little round flatbreads about 1/4 inch thick. They rest on a baking tray, then bake until firm but still flexible. The result is a dense, chewy bread with soft apricot patches and chewier pockets of grain. When toasted and spread with goat cheese, it makes a fabulous breakfast.

The raw dough smelled sharper and greener for the over-enthusiastic sprouting, but there's not much flavour difference in the baked breads. And they are indeed rather delicious - I might not wait 5 years to make them again this time.

Brunch date: Birthday feast à deux

Last Saturday was Maman's birthday and as it's also her wedding anniversary, we decided to have a special brunch together rather than dinner. I wanted to make it a multicourse feast nonetheless.

The first course consisted of scrambled eggs with fresh cheese, tomatoes, and mint, served with sauteed rainbow swiss chard, and a dollop of the tomato-ginger chutney leftover from the dumpling experiment.

But the real treat was the pain viennois, which I had started at quarter to eight that morning and which baked to a golden sheen just in time for us to eat at 11:30. We had it with fresh rhubarb compote, and a foretaste of the cake to come later that weekend: lemon-chocolate ganache. The bread, while pretty and tasty, was not all I hoped it would be - I think I'll have to go all the way and make brioche next time. But the accompaniments were fabulous - the compote very tart, a soft rich pink that melted into the rich bread. And the ganache was probably the best one I have ever made, so exquisitely bitter with lemon zest that you nearly forgot it was sweet until the chocolate melted on your tongue like honey.

It was a cold grey day, but the table was brightened with vast dark red peonies, and we sat with our coffees dipping baguette points into the little pots and chatting the morning away. Happy birthday Maman!

Stages of another levain experiment

First ferment: Here the reserved dough from the previous week's baking has just been taken out of the fridge, to come to room temperature and be combined with water and some more flour (refreshed), and left to reactivate overnight.

Second ferment: The morning after. My little buckwheat poolish (batter of flour, water, and leavening agent left to sit at least 12 hours, in order to develop the flavour and texture of the once and future bread) is ready to be turned into dough.

After only a few hours, the dough has risen to fill the bowl and push insistently at the plastic wrap covering. If anything, it's a bit overrisen here - when I pull back the wrap, the dough collapses into long strings of gluten pictured a few days ago on the blog.

Baking a flatbread. This small piece of dough was rolled out, brushed with olive oil and left to rise a short time, before being bedecked with fresh rosemary and queso fresco and popped into the brick oven. I would have been better off crumbling the queso as it didn't melt like I expected it to (the oven temperature was pretty uneven for this baking).

On the plus side, I didn't burn any loaves! Close up of the post-baking texture.

Textures: Inside a flatbread

And some of the baked result of the levain...

(baked in the brick oven, quite successfully)

Textures: A second week in levain

Look at the strands of gluten in this buckwheat dough! Week 2 of my levain experiment, which sadly only made it to week 3 before I forgot to reserve some dough to keep it going. Never fear, I've already started a second batch...

Breadmaking update: Brick ovens, kabocha, and very unscientific levain!

It might be the fact that I have absolutely no breadmaking agenda these days, but for whatever reason I have been baking pretty much nonstop. So much that I forgot to write down whatever I did to produce the rather awesome experimental espresso-spelt bread, though hopefully I'll be able to more or less reproduce it. Yesterday I actually had a reason to bake though - we were firing up the brick oven again, and wanted to have some loaves to show for it.

I stirred together a regular spelt poolish the night before, and planned to put the leftover roasted squash from that morning's waffles to use in it in some way. It was only Sunday morning that I remember the little lump of dough languishing in the fridge hoping to become my first attempt at the levain method someday. So I decided to go for two separate doughs, figuring that the levain might be a total failure, but even if it succeeded, the 14 people attending that night's dinner would probably be able to keep up with the eating.

Of course, I only thought about the levain when I got home from yoga at about 12:30. After a quick perusal of our cookbooks and some online sources, it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to be able even to approach orthodox levain methods since at the very latest I should have started to reactivate it the night before. Instead, I just decided to take what I vaguely remembered having read about levain some years before, and just run with it. What could happen?

It wouldn't have been your purist's levain in the best of timings. Levain is a wild-yeast method akin to sourdough. The classic French countryside technique, it involves keeping back some of the preceding week's batch of dough to start the next. Originally it would of course have been kept at room temperature, there not being any other temperature. All that fermentation gives you plenty to work with, keeps the wild yeasts alive in your kitchen. What appeals to me about levain over sourdough is that you don't have to keep refreshing the starter in a way that has always seemed rather wasteful to me (I should state upfront that I have never made proper sourdough yet, though I will get around to it eventually). Instead, you just take your preserved lump of dough, now incredibly stringy with gluten and very wet from all the reactions that have gone on during its resting time, and combine it fully into the new dough. Then before baking, you keep back a new piece, child of the current batch, for use next week.

That much I remember from my prior reading. Anyhow, now I was faced with a cold, stringy little lump of dough, which itself had been started with yeast, albeit slow-started with only a 1/4 teaspoon and left to itself to develop into a fully-raised dough. Nothing purist here, but in for a penny. I decided to help myself out a little, and make this dough in the same bowl I'd had the poolish for the squash dough in, so that the levain could get a little boost from the recent yeast activity still clinging to the sides of the unwashed bowl. I poured in a little water, and started to break up the levain in it with my fingers.

I had to start giggling for a bit, as it seemed like rather than levain, I was ending up with something else I had read about but never made - seitan (wheat gluten, the stuff Asian fake meat is often made of). You make it by developing strands of gluten and gradually washing the starch out of it till you're just left with pure strands of gluten. And that's what I had - stretchy strings of gluten that wouldn't dissolve but kept recoalescing in the water under my fingers. At least they were resilient!

After awhile it seemed I'd done all I could do, so I started stirring all purpose flour into the bowl, and made a little sponge that I left to activate for a bit, just to see whether anything was really going to happen at all in the midst of all this unorthodoxy.

While it was resting I made the dough for the squash bread. I mashed roasted kabocha squash into some yogourt, then stirred in the poolish and a bit more water, then some rye flour. All things considered, I would have liked to have given that sponge a few hours to get acquainted with itself, but instead I just gave it a few minutes and then stirred in all purpose flour until it was ready to be kneaded. After being dubious at first, I have become a total convert to Richard Bertinet's kneading method, described in detail in his book DOUGH: Simple Contemporary Bread. It's got great recipes and the design is lovely, but the best part is this method totally unlike any other I've seen described. The crucial parts are, don't flour the work surface, and rather than pressing and folding the dough over itself, you pull it away and toss it forward, so that you are always stretching the dough and encouraging its growth. There are moments where the dough seems impossibly sticky, but it has always come together for me in the end. I am sure I have been saved from many otherwise unforgivable bread mistakes by the way this knead builds cohesion and resilience in the dough.

Back to the levain, and to Bertinet's kneading again. The bubbles in the sponge showed that SOMETHING was working, and the kneading transformed my little brown blob into something that was clearly leavened bread dough. The gluten strands were short with a tendency to break at first, and the dough was definitely a bit stiffer than what I usually produce, but by the end of the kneading it was a creditable effort. Just a couple of hours to rise, and my lunchbreak.

By this time the fire was roaring, and the dough was ready for shaping. My squash dough became three loaves and 8 pizzette, the levain one loaf, 7 pizzette, and one little lump of dough back in the fridge to wait for next week's levain experiment. A la le Fromentier, beloved Montreal bakery, the squash dough was adorned with black sesame seeds, and one of the loaves got studded with pumpkin seeds. The levain stayed plain, and all the loaves were hidden under double layers of kitchen towel to rise.

Maman had requested pizzette to go along with the olives and other antipasti when everyone arrived, and overall I prefer pizza bianca so that's what we had. I plucked a handful of nearly everything in the herb garden (rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, oregano - I left out the lavender; and some basil), chopped them and stirred them into olive oil, then rubbed the tops of the rolled out rounds of flatbread that had already risen for 30 minutes. I had intended to serve them with feta, but it had gone off, so it was just veggies. Some I made with cherry tomato halves, others with the rest of the roasted kabocha, and some with both.

We've lit the brick oven a few times, and I have made dough for it before but not actually presided over the baking. It was slightly stressful but also really fun, spinning the disks of dough about right next to the burning logs so as to brown them evenly, learning the best in-the-absence-of-a-peel technique, and leaping madly on the errant tomato halves that tried to bake solo. A few more sessions and I think I'll have it down.

I was a bit less successful with the loaves - I only managed to bake one in there around the roast pork, huge trays of roasted vegetables, whole kabocha squashes (for an amazing goat cheese, arugula and mint warm salad) and the tray of baked pears for dessert (served with the now-legendary homemade honey-thyme ice cream). That one loaf ended up with a carbonised exterior that I had to peel off. The bread inside was quite delicious though - moist, airy, well-structured, a lovely tan colour shot through with bright orange from the squash. We passed it around picking off pieces and the whole thing vanished before supper was properly begun. I baked the other three in the conventional oven, by which time they were a little overrisen and not at their best. The crust is more hard than crisp, but the dough structure in the levain is fantastic - well aerated and spongy. The taste is subtle but good - I'll have to see if later experiments can yield a more sourdoughy flavour. The squash bread is softer and a little sweeter and cries out to be made into a grilled sandwich.

All in all a good day's breadmaking - and with 14 of our extended family sitting down together outside in the obliging evening sunshine, with the wild gymnastic displays by my boy-cousins, my nieces' kindness in sharing their dinner with my recycled My Little Ponies and the poor, pork-smeared stuffed emu; with reading some books in the glider before dessert, and fighting my toddler niece for control of our shared dessert spoon (and saving the emu from chocolatey smears to match the pork ones) - a perfect Sunday evening.

Khachapuri

Lest it be thought that I'm neglecting to bake in the midst of all this noodlery, let it be said that I've made bread three times since I've been back (and also two layer cakes!). This is one of my favourite recipes from Alford and Duguid's Flatbreads and Flavours (their first cookbook).

I had an intense craving for them right after I woke up one morning, and because they're not yeasted, making them for breakfast was entirely plausible. You just stir together some cheese and an egg to make a filling, then knead flour mixed with yogourt as the liquid, to make a moist stretchy dough. I always put too little flour in the dough and end up with sticky, unmanageable messes - yet they always taste fantastic anyway.

Khachapuri are a Georgian cheese bread that come in many styles - but I love this one, with just a hint of cheese, a crisp exterior and soft inside. And the smell, so rich and complex from the yogourt. This time it drew my mom down from upstairs and we snacked on the first batch just as it came out of the oven, hardly waiting for it to cool. We have an ongoing debate about whether they taste better fresh from the oven, or toasted the next day, when the outside gets really crisp and the inside seems softer than ever. Since they disappear almost instantly, it doesn't take long to be ready to make another batch...

Banh mi

The bread in Vietnam is absolutely delicious. French colonialism brought the baguette to the region, and the locals improved upon it to make it their own, adding some rice flour to the wheat, adjusting the recipe to the local climate.

We ate banh mi for breakfast on many of our Saigon mornings, often with op la! (exclamation mark all mine), a name that makes me happy just to hear it. It means fried egg, and is another legacy from the French 'au plat'.

Our amazing host also taught us the secret Vietnamese way to toast banh mi, when it needs a bit of a lift or just when you want it to be extra crisp. Most Viet homes don't have ovens, since grilling and frying are much more pleasant and practical in the heat and humidity. And even if you had a toaster, you can't really fit a baguette into one, especially the fat round Viet variety.

So instead you toast it on the stovetop - in a pot. Sounds crazy, but it made the most delicious crisp crust with a soft, warm inside, as if it had just come out of the oven.

To make it, you put a large pot over medium-high heat, then put the baguette in on a plate, then put on a tight-fitting lid. You're basically steaming it without water. Apparently leaving it there for 10-15 minutes gives the best results, but even 5 minutes made it really tasty. We are anxious to get home and experiment to see what this method does to other kinds of bread!