Croissants

At last! They're here! I've been prepping these for two days now. And they are a vision :) despite being cut a little small, and a smidge overdone, I am very pleased with these - the flavour is delicate, not overpowering or too rich.

I proved the dough in the fridge for 2 days. It was supposed to only be overnight, but events kept me away from the dough. And today - college was closed as their water pipes have burst :S and flooded, so I had some time to devote to these.

The dough looked on the boundary of being overproved, but turned out good.
I found it difficult to get the dough thin enough, it was very springy and kept springing back into itself. Need to find a way of managing it better. Must make it do what I want, not what it wants.

The process is really fun. You make a dough, and leave it to prove very slowly, so the flavour is good.
Then laminate the dough with cold butter - basically making a flaky pastry with dough as the base. I never realised this was what croissants were before :)
Handling the dough was a joy - it felt light and smelled great. Then i cut it and shaped it, went for a run while it proved, then baked it off. Bit of a trial in my very onesided oven, and slightly overdone because i made them a bit small but kept the cooking time the same.
All in all - it was a full time job:
 - first prove for the dough - overnight
 - laminating - rolling, resting (30 mins), x3
 - cutting shaping
 - proving - 2 hours
 - bake - 18 mins :)
But worth it.

Roast pork sandwiches

Roast shoulder of pork, stuffed with onions, sage, apple.

It took so long to roast, that we'd eaten the potatoes and greens. So late at night, I made up some slaw, and we had it on homemade sourdough.
It was actually the best way we could have eaten it.

The slaw was:
 - romaine leaves finely shredded,
 - matchsticks of apple
 - lemon juice
 - creme fraiche
 - seasoning.

The apple freshness of the slaw was delicious with the roasted apple in the stuffing, and the meat was succulent. Eating this made my whole body relax :)

Lemon drizzle cake

3 eggs, same weight butter, sugar, SR flour. Added lemon zest. Also added baking powder. I can't really work out SR flour, and will probably stick to plain with bicarbonate of soda and baking powder added. You know what's going on then. However, this one worked very nicely - really very light sponge and I added zest of 2 lemons, so it is really zingy.
Once baked, poured over juice of the two lemons, mixed with 85g of caster sugar.
The tartness is fantastic against the soft pillowy, buttery sponge. Very fine.

Burgers!!!

Yeah. We rocked some new year burger action. On homemade sourdough, good slab of blue cheese, tomato, lettuce, burger griddled. Delicious!!

Sourdough clock

In order to work out when i had time to make sourdough, i made a clock to help me. It has all the steps - you just match up the start time to the hour, and it tells you what time the rest of the steps will happen. Simples!

Sourdough, Parfait, Cider

Chicken liver parfait, made a good 10 days ago, sourdough made today (altho the ferment started a good 2 weeks ago), cider. Just came back from a long New Year's Day walk.

The parfait flavour has improved tremendously - the garlic has mellowed to a lovely sweetness, and any bitterness of the livers has now disappeared. I didn't know if it would still be ok after all this time, and was leaving it as a test - and this is a proper delight :)

The bread has good flavour, probably helped by now having (christmas present) a set of very accurate scales to make weighing the salt more accurate. And better structure - I kept back some of the water asked for in the recipe, was firm with rolling the dough into a ball, and proved it in a steeper sided bowl.

New year's sourdough

Two beautiful sourdough loaves :) A good start to the year!