These nourish jags come periodically: I think it’s they’re probably related to the the baking jags I go on from time to time.  When I have a baking jag, I make apple cakes, chocolate biscuits, lemon butter — and then promptly find people to give them away to, usually unsuspecting coworkers.  The baking jags are in no way related to wanting to eat, merely the impulse to cook. I think it stems from a need to be creative, but without having the mental energies to devote to being creative in a knitting/writing/musical way, but I could be overthinking the matter. I usually do.  A nourish jag is much more body-oriented: I seek ways to make myself feel nurtured and fed and nested, in a healthy and wholesome way.  (By curious coincidence, it tends to involve cooking things that are really hard to attractively photograph.)

Nourish Item One:

Yesterday I baked bran, carrot and sultana muffins, which are delicious, moist, chewy and not too sweet.  I like cakes that have a bit more oomphalo-boomph to them: nothing foamy and white-sugared for me, thankyou, I prefer nuts, fruit, vegetables and wholemeal flour.  (This makes me a delight at high tea, as you can imagine.)

Holy cow: my camera has a "food" setting!

This recipe rocks: you mix a cup of unprocessed bran, a cup of milk, a cup of brown sugar and a cup of your flavouring stuff (chopped dried fruit, chopped nuts, stewed fruit, mashed pumpkin, whatever) plus any spices you want and leave to sit for an hour or two to soften it all up.  Then stir in a cup of self-raising flour and you’re good to go: it makes a loaf or a dozen smallish muffins.  Bake at 180°C, an hour for a loaf or twenty minutes or so for muffins. Despite how easy this recipe is, circumstances demanded some alterations. I used only half a cup of sugar, and a cup of homemade yoghurt (about which more shortly) in place of milk, plus a little extra water: since I used sultanas, I knew they’d suck up a bit of the moisture that I wanted the bran to take on, so I compensated.  I also gave the mix a few hours more than it really needed, because we had to go out for a while, but I think that only makes it moister.  Mmmmm, muffins for breakfast.

Nourish Item Two:

The day before yesterday I rediscovered my yoghurt maker, with much greater success than previously, despite — or perhaps because of — losing the instructions and forgetting how to use it.  You’re supposed to scald the milk, then cool it and mix in some live-culture yoghurt and pop it in a jar and then pop the jar in the yoghurt maker to ferment.  Realising that (a) I had broken the jar; and (b) the yoghurt maker was the real hero here and the jar was just an extra, unnecessary layer; I filled the yoghurt maker with my proto-yoghurt and forgot about it for a day or so.  The result was quite thin and lacked the tang I like so much in yoghurt, but it was definitely a vast improvement over previous endeavours in this field which have yielded, uh, sour milk.  The yoghurt maker is basically a squat, glorified thermos flask, which maintains a nice warm, moist environment for the yoghurt culture to do its tangy thang.  The result was, as I say, not perfect, but it was ideal for the muffins I made and it encouraged me to keep trying.  The batch that is currently fermenting used some of the first batch for its starter culture: chain yoghurt making, yo!  That will be the real test: if this batch of yoghurt doesn’t ferment properly, it would suggest that the first batch didn’t really have enough live culture in it, which suggests I need to go back to yoghurt-making school (good grief).  I’m going to give it 24-hours no-touchy time before I check.  I am certainly not going to photograph it.  Imagine warm milk in a thermos and, well, there you go.  You could probably even have a look on Flickr and find something much better than I could come up with if I tried photographing what I’ve got happening.  Go on, I’ll wait.

Nourish Item Three:

Welcome back, Pongo. Pongo, my robust sourdough starter, is alive and well and has completely forgiven me for forgetting about him and leaving him to starve in the back of the fridge.  Even if your starter is in the fridge, sleepy and dormant, you’re still supposed to feed the poor blighter every so often, to keep it going. I’m not a good parent.  I got distracted by a soul-crushing quest to find the perfect pencil sharpener and forgot all about my funky little friend in the pickle jar at the back of the fridge.  I recalled him shortly before we moved house and, with a sense of foreboding, gave him a feed of flour and water and let him sit on the bench for a few hours.  Holy cow, that is one virile starter I’ve got in that pickle jar!  He began foaming up in an hour or two, clearly ready to go and ready to be breadmaking.  There’s a huge batch of 50/50 white/rye bread dough currently rising, fortified with Pongo, as I type.  Later today I’m going to try and transform this dough into some sandwich bread and lunch rolls.  Even though I’ve had a couple of dud batches come out (through no fault of Pongo’s, I emphasise, but my own), I love using sourdough starter.  I love the taste it imparts, but I am also not immune to the smugness that comes from making something completely from scratch.  It’s like magic!  Or maths, which is also magic.  [(flour + water = sourdough starter) + (flour + water + salt + yoghurt/milk/butter = dough)] + time + heat = bread! (Eventually.  This is slow magic.)

This is not an attractive photograph.

This is what my dough currently looks like.  Nourishing is not always a pretty process.

Well, in addition to slow-roasted vegetables which were turned into slow-simmered soup, I was doing some other slow-moving cookery.  Namely, I woke up my sourdough starter, Pongo, and fired him up.  There are two cooking streams feeding into this:

Firstly: Since we’ve been living in a share house with some family, I’ve kept Pongo in the fridge, which drastically slows the rate of yeast development in the starter and slows the need for feeding.  So yesterday I pulled Pongo out of the fridge and fed him up, developing the foam and robustness that indicates a healthy yeast colony. He responded really quickly, indicating that the yeasts were alive, awake, and rearing to make bread (or beer, I suppose).

Secondly: M and I have been talking about dispensing with our electric bread-maker.  We use it for kneading and rising, and M pointed out that if we could do those things by hand, we could get rid of yet another unnecessary Thing in our lives. To that end, he’s been developing some pretty l33t sk1llz in kneading and shaping by hand (rising just tends to happen naturally).  I learned from the best, and he showed me how best to knead a Pongo-based bread, teaching me how a hand-kneaded dough feels and responds when it comes together and the glutens start to develop.  So before breakfast, this was underway:

A hand-kneaded, wholemeal sourdough dough.  The ingredients: wholemeal flour, warm water, sourdough starter (i.e. Pongo) and a pinch of salt. A little elbow-grease was followed by a lot of waiting. I mean, nearly all day. Sourdough starters are much slower to get going than dried yeast, which is how the sour flavour develops through the dough.  In fact, this dough was sluggish enough that I worried it wasn’t going to come together at all.  I shouldn’t have doubted Pongo: the last two or three hours of rising saw an exponential BOOM in volume, as the dough suddenly swelled up in that way that excites all home bread-makers. Into the pre-heated, cast iron pot it went.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, I have never had a Pongo loaf come out this fantastic. I can hardly believe how richly-flavoured and delicious this stuff is. This is a really good picture: it accurately shows off the crumb and the thickness of the crust.  What it doesn’t show is the divinely rich, mature, tangy flavour of the wholemeal bread.  I am seriously in love with this stuff, and expect it will make up a significant part of my diet over the week.  I had fond hopes that this dough would come through for me: I didn’t realise it would come out this good.  And it is very, very good (needs a hint more salt). I’m so happy. Pongo is on the rebound, having been fed and responding with a rush of fermentation and growth: he’s happy too.  We might just make some more bread later this week.  Depends how far this one gets us…

I am not sure if it’s some kind of reverse virus, but I am bursting with cookery energy this weekend.  I dipped into Pongo, my sourdough starter, and got some bread dough rising, and while that was doing its yeasty thang, I toasted a batch of muesli and finished sewing my new skirt — it only needed a hem, but it still counts.

After a lengthy lunch with family, I finished my first Watermelon sock:

…and cast on the second.

I let the sourdough rise slowly overnight, and the next day put it on to bake before brunch with some friends.

Although it looks a bit like Jupiter, I’m very proud.  I did some experimenting with the dough, too:

Look! Little breadsticks!

This spotty fellow was dusted with polenta before cooking, and with a slightly different approach to cooking time.  Looks good.

I also made some frozen yoghurt, because why not?, and a batch of fresh home-made yoghurt, both using recipes from 101 Cookbooks, and both of which turned out pretty damn fine.  The frozen yoghurt is a little sweeter than I think I want it, but I can improve on it later.  Now I’m itching to try a frozen yoghurt whipped with stewed fruit or berries. I don’t have an ice cream machine, so I just had to be vigilant and take it out of the freezer for a stir every thirty minutes, but it wasn’t labour-intensive or challenging in any way.  However, I did get bored towards the end and quit early so we could go out for drinks with friends.  Still, seems okay!  No photos of my dairy adventures, sadly, but I do have photos of the other field I fiddle-faddled with:

English muffins! I love English muffins.  So making my own seemed like a pretty natural extension of the whole make-it-yourself kick I’m on.  Got the recipe through Wild Yeast’s YeastSpotting feature from last week, and I’ve got to say: it’s a winner.  I made teensy-weensy ones, since I didn’t have an English muffin-sized cutter-outer and just used an egg ring instead.  But the texture is perfect.  I think next time I’ll add less polenta (cornmeal) and more oats, because I really noticed the presence of the polenta, and I want to try them without.  But still, it is a winning recipe.  Next time I will also make proper-sized ones.  (But these are a good size to snack on.)

I don’t know what has gotten into me, and I have no idea how long it will last, but this orgy of baking and cooking has been an utter delight.  I’m rockin’ out.

I honestly didn’t expect my mini loaf to come out as anything but kind of amusing and dense.  But this!  This is bread!  I made bread!  I used my starter, Pongo, who is going to be rewarded with some sultanas to keep him active and bread-a-licious, and flour, water and salt.  That’s it!  I am so excited.  The Wild Yeast Blog has been my guiding star, and I used the Norwich Sourdough recipe.  I only made a quarter batch, because I didn’t want any failure to be on a big scale, and it is lovely.  It’s got a really fine, crispy crust, which is apparently attributable to baking the dough cold, and the crumb is light and open and tasty.  It’s pleasantly tangy without being pungent, springy without being fluffy, and it’s mine mine mine!  There’s definitely room for improvement: there’s a little denseness just in the middle bottom of the loaf, which could be due to accidentally creasing the dough when I plopped it into our cast-iron bread-making pot (which I preheat for an hour or so before baking, as a substitute for a baking stone), but it may also be due to the starter still being a little immature.  And I’m still at the dizzy beginner’s stage, where each batch of dough is a total gamble and may end up craptacular — I look forward to being more surprised by failure than by success.

But I made bread! Holy cow!

Look at that! Right there!  Bread!  Bread that I made!

I don’t believe that I would be blowing my own horn too much to say that I’m a pretty good cook.  I can follow a recipe to perfection, but I can also make things up as I go and I generally have a pretty good feel for how to make something look or taste the way I want it to (we will not speak of the 2007 Christmas Pavlova Incident).  Breadmaking was something I came to relatively late: M did a lot of experimenting and figuring out and then I followed his established guidelines for a few things, which gave me the experience to start trying new stuff, like pull-apart bread and bagels and baos.  But now sourdough…well, it’s a whole new ball game.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with sourdough starters here’s a quick version: over the course of a week or two, you keep a mix of water and flour warm, refreshing it twice a day with fresh water and flour (that’s the mysterious feeding you hear mentioned).  The wild yeast, dormant in flour, wakes up and begins to eat and breed, producing gas and a low degree of fermentation (which is what ultimately gives sourdough its titular characteristic).  A mature starter is one where the yeast is roaring along and the mix doubles in volume every 12 hours.  Mine (which I’ve affectionately named Pongo) doesn’t do that yet.

For a start, we have a chilly house.  We have great heaters, but they’re only on when we’re home and only in whatever room we want heated.  There is bupkiss insulation in the house, so when we’re out, it gets damned cold there.  I know this because I’ve stayed home during the day and forgot to put the heating on.  And overnight, the house becomes positively frigid—especially the kitchen, which has no heating at all.  I may be attempting to cultivate a sourdough starter in what could be the worst environment possible, apart from underwater.  So the starter is sluggish and snoozy and when I tried to start a sponge (the next step in breadmaking: this is the aggressive fermentation of a sample of starter, with the intention of introducing it as a raising agent to a dough), it just kind of blooped at me.  I tried everything: warmed its bowl with heated wheatbags, sat the bowl in a sink of hot water, but it cooled so quickly that I had trouble keeping up with it.  With a strange degree of teeth-gritted optimism and pig-headedness, I mixed it into a batch of bread dough, and was unsurprised when it absolutely failed to rise.

The problem with learning anything new is that you’re coming from a place of competence: you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be incompetent at something, especially if it’s similar to what you’re already doing.  I have a feeling this is why people choose to learn less and less as they get older.  They’re increasingly out of habit of feeling incompetent at something. And I don’t want that. So I will cherish this learing curve, persevere with Pongo and, in time, I will have sourdough.