Babka Zana 01

A few posts back (Halot,etc) I told you about finding the bread book of Babka Zana, the Parisian jewish bakery, when we were in Bordeaux back in May. Since then I’ve been working on their savoury breads. So we start off with Hallah of which they have three variations, La Hallah or Pain de Shabbat, […]

Authentic Mongrel Pizza

This all started on Saturday (it’s now Thursday). Sue cooked a 1.5K joint of pork from Moro Easy – the meat marinated overnight in orange juice and cumin and then braised slowly in the oven for about 3 hours. Very delicious. On Sunday, with some of the remains, I cooked Arroz com Porco (or at […]

Occupied Territories

Funny the places baking can take you. You might have seen that I am currently exploring Babka Zana, the book of the Parisian Jewish bakery of the same name. The owners, Sarah Amouyal and Emmanuel Murat, have a modern approach to Jewish food traditions of the Mediterranean particularly North Africa and Israel. So, in addition […]

Those Baguettes

Been baking 200g baguettes for ever. The French would probably say they aren’t proper baguettes which usually start around 300g but they’re a lot better than the stuff we’ve bought in France in recent years, sad to say. Now that I’m only baking for the two of us, I’ve settled down to turning them out […]

Hallot, etC.

In France in May we made our annual pilgrimage to Mollat, Bordeaux ‘s great bookshop and, as usual, headed straight to the cookery section and homed in on the bread books. This is what was available this year. Right at the moment they seem to be going in for massive volumes of the Complete Book […]

Deep pan Moussaka?

Why not? Have left-over lamb from Sunday lunch, obos in need of using, pizza dough in the fridge. Seems obvious … Peter Reinhart method. Press out dough in baking tray, sprinkle with little chunks of cheese (cheddar). Prove for about three hours during which time make a tomato sauce, saute obo cut in smallish cubes, […]

My Tai

MY TAI A drink concocted to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the death of my niece Tai, killed by a drunk and drugged driver in New Zealand. (The name is obviously stolen from the famous cocktail Mai Tai – rum, Curaçao liqueur, orgeat syrup, and lime juice – but then everything about this drink has […]

Burnt Rump Pizza

Been messing around with Peter Reinhart’s Perfect Pan Pizza book for a good couple of years now so I’ve reached that nice stage where I don’t have to to think too much about the basics. Mix a batch of my 80% hydration dough a day or two before baking and ferment in the fridge. 400g […]

Start with the soda bread …

This is how you do it: Black Velvet in one hand, big, 1 kilo slab of soda bread in the other. Bubbling pan of Guinness Beef Stew on the stove, spuds and cabbage ready for the Colcannon. The bread started life as Waterford Soda Bread in Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf published 20 years ago. […]

The Unintended Focaccia

I have lots of experience of dealing with my own mistakes. I was mixing dough for a pizza and, despite using my trusty spreadsheet calculator, ended up with nearly two and a half times the intended amount – spreadsheets are only trusty if you put the right numbers in. What should have been 5 x […]