Tag Archives: baking

Pizzas and Open Farm Sunday

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We have built a Farmer for Open Farm Sunday so come and see us on June 7th if you can. We’ll be in the Education Tent and you can have a photo taken with your head in the hole. Thanks to our neighbour John for the painting and Shipshape Arts for the frame.

The expression says it all, doesn’t it? That’s a woman trapped in a marriage to an idiot if I ever saw one. She says much the same. However, after 25 years she also says she can’t be bothered to change me.

We have visitors tomorrow – the Mojatu Foundation are coming for a day out on the farm. It should be a good day and the pizza dough will, I’m hoping, be well received. I haven’t got round to mixing it yet, so all things are possible at the moment.

That’s about it for today – I have to go and tidy the polytunnels ready for vistors and mix dough.

Dough update – due to various factors too boring to tell, I had to do a bit of manoueuvring and reweighing. As a result we might, and I’m not admitting anything here, have one batch without olive oil and one batch with double the yeast and salt it should have. That’ll be the one trying to take over the world tomorrow morning.

Apart from that, all is fine and we should have 120 brillant pizzas tomorrow.

This picture is not, as you may think at first glance, a badly made dough map of India, but an example of the window pane test. Hoopefully the thinner areas are showing in the picture – the “window panes” that show the gluten is working properly. It’s a bit harder to demonstrate with wholemeal than it is with white flour but I thought I’d take the picture to make it seem like I knew what I was doing.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Croissants

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The community bread group was in today and they were attempting croissants. Considering that the group has only been going for eighteen months and some of them were not confident bakers when we started they have come a long way. We have diverged over that time and I mainly deal with school parties now – pizzas. soda bread and scones. The bread group is an altogether more sophisticated affair where they produce lovingly crafted continental breads, sourdoughs and, today, croissants.

I felt I just had to come along and record it with a few photographs. I wasn’t going to miss this, if there’s one thing I like better than warm croissants it’s people struggling with exotic bread recipes.

It was much quieter than a normal session as there was more concentrating to be done. I’d never thought of it, but there was more measuring to be done too. As you laminate the dough you have to work to certain sizes and then you have to use  atemplate. You don’t get that with the sort of things I do. I’d assumed that you made a shhet of dough and carved out a load of freehand triangles. That is not the case – there is no room for free spirits in the world of the croissant and my deplorable slack ways with triangular scones were not welcome here.

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We’ve always said that the secret with bread at any level is that if it doesn’t look perfect at the end you can call it rustic or artisan – a couple of catch-all terms that cover a multitude of imperfections. That’s why they call me an artisan baker – it isn’t a statement of competence, it’s because I’m lumpy and not quite symmetrical.

In the end we had plenty of croissants to show for the day and though they may not have looked like shop bought croissants there was nothing wrong with the taste and everyone went home happy.

I you want to join the group they meet on alternate Thursdays at the farm.

Sadly, by the nature of the internet, most of you reading this won’t be close enough, but if you ever find yourself in Nottinghamshire we normally have something on every week.

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Now, if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with a warm croissant.