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10/03/2010

Home Made Food

What can warm the very corners of your soul more than real home made food.  You sometimes see terms like home cooked outside pubs.  Of course this means they cooked it but didn’t actually make it.  Home made food is made from start to finish in the home.  Cooking like it used to be.  If you can grow the ingredients yourself then you really have the best of the best.  No commercial food product can compete.

Lets flip that thought around and now look at the other end, fast foods and ready meals.  The problem here is that you have no say in the ingredients, how it is made, its seasoning or its nutritional benefits.  Created on an industrial scale with highly processed foodstuffs.

Sold on the basis of being convenient, the cheap ingredients are reducing nutritional benefits.  Convenience foods, cars, TV and computers are all helping to make people less active and contributing to obesity levels and poor health.

So why do we think that home made food is better?  You should think of it as the balance between gaining energy from eating food and the energy needed to get that food.  You could go back to ancient history and use the hunter gathers of the stone age.  They had to hunt by chasing or setting traps.  Perhaps walking miles.  Then the prey had to be butchered and cooked all before they could consume any energy.  If you make and cook your own food, it uses more energy than if you buy a ready meal from the supermarket.  If you grow your own veg then the digging, raking, weeding and harvesting all need energy to complete.  The cook will have to prepare, wash, chop, make pastry etc., more energy required.

Working in an office, driving about in a car, buying ready meals and eating them in front of the telly is the exact opposite of this.  You can see the remarkable difference in energy needed for the two lifestyles.  Consumption of energy tends to be the same, but the expenditure is less in the latter example.  This has promoted the rise of the gym and the huge diet industry.  

Want a better way?  Then grow your own veg, make and cook your own food.  You will be fitter, healthier and have less time to sit in front of the TV and you will discover what real food tastes like again!

Home Made Bread

One of those great smells, the aroma of a freshly baked loaf of bread.  But why bake it when you can buy it cheaply from the supermarket?  Well, you can buy cheap bread from the supermarket, but in our opinion it is made for a price, so ingredients, size and quality are all trimmed to get it at the right price.  If you are on a tight budget it can be tempting, but the old saying “you get what you pay for” holds true as always.  

Home made bread does take a little time, but once you have the routine it can be done without too much effort.  Because the process is broken into separate stages, it can be fitted in with other jobs.

It is  tempting to use a bread maker, but there really is no need.  The ingredients are simple, flour, yeast, sugar, oil or butter and some salt.  Pretty basic stuff.  Apart from the yeast, available in most kitchen cupboards.  This is the recipe we use for a basic white loaf:-

The bread can be made from strong bread flour, but we regularly make it with not just plain white flour but the supermarkets cheapest flour.  Yes there is a slight difference, the keeping quality is not so long, but as a cheap everyday loaf it’s fine.  Cost?  Well the above recipe makes a large loaf.  The flour (cheapest) cost about 20p, the yeast  about 10p, sugar only about 2p, the oil  the same (but as much as 35p if you use butter, 15p if you use cooking margarine), and 2p for the salt.

So if you do it as cheaply as possible then the cost of the ingredients for a large loaf of white bread made by your good self is 36p.  Then it has to be cooked, but if you  are cooking a meal then you can cook the bread before or after making it more efficient.  Even so for the 40 minutes it takes to cook you can over-estimate at 50p.  We are still looking  at less than 90p for fresh home made bread !

If you wish to use better quality flour or wholemeal, then the cost will rise slightly.

How we make bread

We don’t make bread any differently to anyone else, but there are many variations in ingredients and methods, all successful in their own right.  However the time it can take is important to us, and we now make bread in an evening, the quickest time being from start to finish of 2 hours.  This depends on room temperature and pressure etc.  The average is probably 3 hours.  Of course that's not 3 hours of constant work.  The process involves periods of  bread rising etc which allows you do watch your favourite TV programme or do something more useful in between.  So here’s how we do it.

We mix the dried yeast powder with  about ¾ pint (0.35 litre) warm water and sugar.  This gets the yeast off to a great start.  It will start to froth, bubble and increase in volume.  Like this:-

This takes about 15-20 minutes but this does depend upon room temperature and, we believe, air pressure.  Some days it go mad and others it struggles.  Once it has activated you are ready to use it.

While the yeast is getting going, you can prepare your work area and other ingredients.  Get a bowl and put in the flour.  Now we have given a quantity to use in the ingredients list but you tend to get a feel for how much flour to use.  But start with the figure above.  Put it in your bowl.  Add the salt and oil.  Then the yeast mixture.

Mix it all up.  This is the messy bit.  It becomes very tacky and sticky.  To get a dough suitable for making into bread, you have to work it by stretching, pulling, twisting and any other means of manipulating you can think of.  

It will be really sticky to begin with so you must sprinkle flour on your hands, work surface and the dough mixture.  As you work it more and more keep adding flour.  Eventually you will feel the texture change to a less sticky, smoother textured dough.

So work it hard, take out all your frustrations on it for about 10 minutes until it becomes smoother, less sticky and more like putty.

When you are happy it has changed into dough, it can be moved onto the proving stage.

This is now the completed dough ready to be left to prove (rise).  This is when the yeast starts to act and lifts the dough .  It needs to be kept warm and covered.

This can take an hour but it depends once again on temperature.

Once complete the dough will have doubled in size.  You now have to bash it again.

So you have mixed, kneaded and allowed the mixture to rise.  We now have to knock the air out for a short but energetic session of stress relief.  Bash, push, stretch, whichever you choose.

We then place this final dough onto a baking tray.  Made round so it looks like a loaf of bread, it can then be left for up to an hour to rise again to double its size.

Then pop it in the oven (200 deg C) and let it bake for about 30-40 mins.  Check to see if it sounds hollow when you tap on the underside.  If not pop it back in.  If OK then put it on a rack to cool so the air can get around it.

You can use strong bread flours, wholemeal flours and anything you fancy.  There may be a need for more water in some of these.  This method shown here is for an economy everyday loaf of white bread.  Costing no more than about 90p, but tasting like real bread.