Cardamom Fruit and Nut Loaf

I ran out of bread this morning and quickly made a batch of dough for baking in the evening. I made up a formula with 70% white and 30% whole-wheat flour. Using the regular amount of yeast and salt, I thought it might be better if I raised the hydration to 80%. For a kick, I threw in a teaspoon of cardamom and a teaspoon of organic molasses.

Despite the ridiculous increase in the price of bread flour, it is still more convenient and cheaper to bake bread at home. Bread is my daily staple but I do not mind eating some other type of food for breakfast. Unfortunately good breakfast food served outside is hard to find. One of the rare gems is Yong's Teochew Kueh. It is still made with integrity and sincerity and the quality speaks for itself. The kueh that they make have a fragrant clean taste with abundant filling. It's truly Artisan Kueh!

Update: I had some of the bread this morning and I have to say I loved it. My main mistake was the uneven distribution of the fruit and seeds. Need to do this better the next time round. This bread is definitely worth revisiting.

Flour test - Kamut

I was given a bag of Kamut by a friend to test. I have read good things about Kamut and needless to say, I was very eager to see how it will turn out. As I was in the process of refreshing my sourdough starter, I decided to do some sourdough loaves with it. I did not follow any specific recipe of the masters but just made up one using my generic method. That was probably not very wise and to aggravate that, my wife announced that she had a dental appointment and that I had to send my daughter for a class. OMG.

Initially I wanted to make a rye starter since I had some leftovers taking up valuable freezer space. The initial build was with rye flour but I decided against using rye for the second build because I was afraid that it will compromise the evaluation of the Kamut. I ended up with a starter which was one-third rye at 100% hydration.

The main dough consisted of 25% Kamut with the rest consisting of Prima's Clover flour. I have always had problems with this flour and the recent batch that I got seemed to be at the higher end of the protein range. I keep telling myself that this was the last time that I was using this flour and I hope I remember this the next time I am at the distributor.

The Kamut had a pleasant nutty smell and it was relatively easy to handle the dough which was at 75%. The bread was baked at 220 deg for around 10 mins with the rest of the bake at 190 deg. The loaves smelt fantastic when they came out of the oven. As luck would have it, my friend happened to be on an errand near where I live and I was able to present two loaves to her.

The flavor of the bread was good although the crumb was a little moist when I first cut it a couple of hours later. However, this was characteristic of sourdough as this type of bread needs a day to set. The crumb was a little better when I ate it the next day. Unfortunately, I forgot to tell my friend about this and I guess I'd have to do better the next time. On the whole, the bread could have been a little better had I followed a proper recipe instead of making one up on the spot.

Kalamata Olive Bread

A friend once said that she baked on borrowed time and I am beginning to feel the same. There seems to be a thousand and one things to take care of. This is even more so with baking in a beehive oven.

I was itching to bake and eat bread again. I don't think I'll be eating scones for some time to come. That's the problem of having a big oven. Everything has to be done on an industrial scale. The advantage is that I get to eat my fill of my favorite goodies. Unfortunately there is also a tendency to get tired of them after a while. This is especially true for the sweet stuffs. I don't seem to get the feeling when eating bread.

Since the weather seem to be holding, I decided to chance it and fired the oven for lunch and for making bread. My wife bought some Kalamata olives which she used for her pasta the day before. Since my daughter loved the olives, I decided to make Kalamata olive bread. I made up a 40 oz formula with 10% semolina flour, 20% wholewheat and 70% bread flour. The hydration was 75% with about 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

Lunch was pizza, my favorite banana leaf otah and roasted Japanese sweet potatos. The pizza came out horrible. It was a mistake baking it on a tray. I should've done it direct on the oven floor. The bread came out not too bad although it was a little pale at the top. Ideally, the beehive should be fired with larger logs but I was firing the oven with small pieces of charcoal which did not heat the roof sufficiently.

My garden in its former glory

Tumeric and Thai Basil

Sage

My Passion fruit plants grown from seeds. I was thrilled by the growing tendrills.

Pandan

Mint

Lemon grass

Laksa leaf for making my favorite Laksa pesto.

Ginger

Dill

Curry leaf

Sweet Basil

Rosemary grown from a sprig bought in the supermarket.

Rosemary

Herbs

The weather has not been favorable for baking and cooking outdoors recently. Most of my baking had been done indoors and this morning I enjoyed myself with a breakfast of scones made from a recipe from Michel Suas new book on Advanced Bread and Pastry.

After breakfast, we headed down to Oh's farm to get a few herbs for the garden. With my limited floor space and not so green thumb, the herbs that I grow are clearly insufficient for my regular use. Instead, they are used only in contingencies to make up for my recalcitrant lack of planning. The herbs would be laid bald if I were to use them in daily cooking. They are very useful to have around when you suddenly find yourself needing a sprig of a herb called for in a recipe.

I had taken a renewed interest in gardening following my discovery of a wonderful website featured in the local papers. The website(greenculturesg.com) has a forum with a food sub-section and populated by individuals who seem quite competent in baking bread also. The forum is also an indispensable resource for finding out the wrong things that you have been doing with your plants.

A few years ago, I had a very nice garden simply because I had learnt to place plants in their natural habitat. From a management point of view, it seems people are also like plants. They have to be deployed in roles suitable to their temperament. I had learnt that some plants neeed partial shade while others love full sunshine. Before this realization, I was doing it all wrong and was guilty of burning and killing many of my beloved plants through excessive sun exposure. After I realized this simple fact, my garden began to thrive.

More recently, I was thrilled that my passion fruit seedlings have been thriving well in the pot, sending out tendrills. I would have to make a trellis for them soon. The Rosemary which I had grown from a sprig bought in the Supermarket has been growing very well too. I attribute this to the ash from my Beehive oven.

A good first attempt

Today was my first attempt at free form loaves in the Beehive. It was a very hot sunny day and it did not look like it was going to rain. At 2pm, I fired up the oven and tried out the Otah recipe from Mrs Leong Yee Soo's cookbook. It was so hot in the oven that the banana leaves singed in a couple of minutes. When I opened the banana leaf wrapping, it was moist as if it was steamed in the leaf. I would have love it a little more dry but it looked as if the leaf was going to give way soon. The one in the steel tray was a little more to my liking but we forgot to line the tray with banana leaf. It would have been perfect with the aroma of the leaf.

I decided to repeat a foccacia as the oven was not big enough to accomodate 3 loaves on the hearth. This time round, the foccacia baked in a steel roaster did a lot better.

Next came the finale. By then, the sky had turned ominously dark and I was really afraid that I'd have to shove out the coals and cover the oven. This would have been a disaster as I was not sure if the plastic canvas can stand the heat of the oven. Fortunately the sky brightened up again.

The charcoals were shoved out, followed by a good brushing of the hearth to clear away the remaining dust. Next, a wet rag was used to mop the oven to clear away any remaining ash. I was a little apprehensive that the hearth will crack but all I could see was the little bit of moisture evaporating in the high heat. The loaves were loaded into the oven on the back of a tray.

The oven spring in the beehive was tremendous. It was much greater than those baked in my other ovens. My only disappointment was that the crust was only golden brown. I would have loved them a little redder and glossier.

Foccacia

Today was the big day for baking with my new toy. The main objective was to try out foccacia and I selected the basic foccacia recipe from Carol Field's book on Foccacia. I used Gold Medal Unbleached AP Flour. It is a waste of charcoal to fire up the oven just to make bread. We decided to cook lunch with the oven. My wife decided on a lemon garlic recipe from Williams' Sonoma Essentials of Roasting which I had borrowed from the library the day before. After sending my daughter for her classes, it was a mad rush to the supermarket to get all the required ingredients. By the time I came back, I was faced with the task of setting up the fire, preparing the dough and the topping. However, this had to wait because breakfast must come first!!

After my daily dose of newspaper and coffee was sated, I swung into action by starting the fire in a flower pot outside the house. This was the only time where smoke is generated from the firestarter which contains wax. After transferring the smouldering charcoal into the oven, I plied on some more and started fanning the oven like a satay-man. I used an old aluminum tray, fanning the oven in a vertical motion which looks as if I am offering incense from the side view. My wife and I thought that the oven made our house look like a temple and now with my fanning action, I certainly look like I was worshipping a deity.

I had read from Hamelman that the ancient Romans worshiped Fornax, the goddess of the hearth or fireplace. (If you look up Wikipedia, Fornax was the goddess of bread and baking). It is interesting that bread is inextricably linked to life. The oven is linked to fertility and today we have phrases like 'a bun in the oven' for example. Even in anatomy of the womb, parts of it is named Fornix which is from the Goddess of the Hearth again.

After the fire was big enough, I pushed out the coals to the the back of the oven in a semi-circular arc. The foccacia was topped with my favorite laksa pesto and bell peppers. I used the 3 terracotta roasters that came with the oven and made the mistake of putting all 3 into the oven at the same time. I faced some difficulty adjusting their placement inside the oven and as a result, some parts of the breads were burnt at the bottom. In retrospect, I should not have baked such a large quantity.

The chicken could have been better had it been marinaded a little longer. The roasted tomatoes with Sumac was delightful. I was introduced to this dish when I was invited to lunch at my friend's house. It was a spice that I have not heard of before so I was very happy to learn something new that day.

Today's bake showed that I have a long way to go before I can orchestrate the kind of cooking session that my friend executed. There are so many factors to watch out for. Next time, I'd definitely have to be more diligent in my planning.

Animal magnet

This is a little off topic from my usual theme but I was delighted by the emerging of a large number of Painted Jezebel butterflies on a Wrightia Religiosa(Shui Mei) bush in front of my house. This is the latest in a string of wonderful visits by some unusual guests. They seem to want to share in my little abode of peace. For the last couple of weeks, that bush was invaded by an army of hairy caterpillars. They disappeared suddenly but one Saturday while pruning the bush, I saw a huge number of chrysalises on the underside of the leaves. This morning they emerged eventually just after I returned from breakfast with my wife. The burst of color was so delightful to watch. I was glad that I had left them alone.

One week after I moved in many years ago, a cat gave birth to a litter of kittens in my garden. They were inconspicuously hidden under some shrubs and nobody would have known of their existence had they not mewed when their mother was not around. Although I grew up in a countryside setting, I had never looked after a pet directly. In those days, there was no shortage of wildlife and in the family compound, there was a talking mynah, parakeets and even a monkey from goodness knows where. Not knowing what to do with the cats, I called the SPCA.

My neighbor's runaway pets also had a penchant of ending up in my house too. I had a Chinchilla hiding under my Christmas tree once. The Chinchilla even dropped me a few black pellets as a Christmas present. This was followed by a visit by her white mouse and rabbit.

Even though my house is not at the edge of any forest, I had a visit from an Iguana in my backyard. I was not there to greet him as I was at work. However, my wife came face to face with him while hanging out the clothes to dry in the backyard. I had to do some homework that evening to seal up the backyard grating to prevent him from getting trapped in my backyard.

The most memorable visit must be from a pair of Olive-backed Sunbirds who built their nest right in front of my sliding door. For the next couple of months, my sliding door stayed shut as I did not want to be an inconsiderate neighbor. I tried my best to respect their privacy. I guess nobody likes to have busybodies peering in while passing by. The wife finally laid an egg which hatched eventually. From then on, dad and mum were busy flying in and out feeding and cleaning up baby. When I had to change my babies' diapers, I had hands but for these bird parents, clearing up after baby involved baby raising its rear to the nest opening. Daddy bird, perched at the entrance, grabbed the white dollop of poo in its beak and proceeded to the nearest tree to wipe off on a twig. It was just fascinating.

A new toy

Do dreams come true in real life? Perhaps only the Divine knows the answer and sometimes they do come true. Unfortunately for most of us, we do not know what is really good for us. I was told that if the Divine gave us everything we wished for, there would be an excess of firemen, bus-drivers or any occupation that a kid think is 'cool'.

Ever since I started baking, I have always dreamt of doing it the traditional way in a wood fired oven. After reading Dan Wing and Kiko Denzer, the idea of baking in a wood fired oven was so enticing that I even toyed with the idea of flying to Australia to take a course in baking bread in wood fired ovens just for the experience. However, this remained a dream with my limited resources.

One day, out of the blue, I received an email from a fellow baker who bake breads out of a wood fired beehive oven. Needless to say, I accepted the invitation to see the oven in action without hesitation. The foccacias and bread that came out from the oven was exceptional. It was the kind of bread that I'd have loved to bake and eat. I was amazed by my friend's passion in baking bread and culinary talents which exceeded mine in all counts.

My friend told me that there was still one more oven left sitting in the warehouse. After almost half a year later, the oven is finally sitting in my front yard. The months were spent on indecision, procrastination and anxiety about whether the oven will survive the move. Finally, I opted for the lowest cost solution in siting and housing my oven. Instead of getting a contractor to do up a lean-to extension in my backyard, I opted for a wrought iron stand and a parasol. I will be fabricating an aluminum cover to keep the oven out of the rain. The canvass cover that came with the oven was clearly insufficient for our climate.

This weekend, I finally got to fire up the oven. This was neccessary to season the oven and drive out the moisture in the walls. I got a lot of advice from my kindly friend. The week before, I went down to Temple Street and picked up an ash scraper, a pair of charcoal tongs, a brush for clearing the ash. It was exciting firing up the oven. My wife took the opportunity to pop in chicken to roast since she was in the process of preparing lunch. I couldn't wait for next week to bake some foccacias and pizzas.