It’s already bake off week three and this time it’s bread.
When I first started to bake the thought of making bread was daunting and not something that I tried for quite some time. Eventually I plucked up the courage to have a go and now it’s probably second only to cake in the things that I make most often. If you haven’t baked some already I promise that it will only need one time of the wonderful scent that bread just out of the oven brings to your kitchen to convert you.
If you are feeling a bit tentative about bread baking I would suggest that you start with a Soda Bread. There is no yeast in these and no requirement to knead the dough. It really is just a case of mixing ingredients together, putting them into a tin and then into the oven. There’s a link below to a recipe that is a very good starting point.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-soda-bread
There always seems to be an extra frisson to the Bake Off tent on bread week. Paul Hollywood is a bread maker by trade and this is the episode where the contestants always look that little bit more cowered and nervous.
This weeks challenges were a filled tear and share bread for the signature bake, floury baps, otherwise known as burger buns, for the technical and a display of scored decorative bread for the show stopper.
To be honest I was a bit underwhelmed by the technical challenge but as I said at the start of the series that I was going to try and make them every week I didn’t want to fail at only the third hurdle.
One of the joys of bread making is that unless it’s a particularly exotic loaf the ingredients are always likely to be found in a well stocked kitchen. Of course that might not be the case for the fillings of some of the tear and share breads made this week. The one ingredient required in floury baps that did throw me was shortening. Not necessarily because we hadn’t got any, more a case that I wasn’t sure what it was. A quick google told me it was a solid fat and that butter, lard or margarine would do.
The main thing that you have to consider when planning bread baking is how long it takes.The actual hands on time is not a great deal, but once you have factored in the proving and oven times bread making can becomes quite an undertaking. The trick is to set a timer to remind yourself and then walk away and get on with something else during the dough proving stages. If you reach the point of making sourdough bread this gets even more important as you have to do some work the night beforehand to get the sourdough starter under way.
For these floury baps the proving times were not too bad, an hour after the dough had first been made and then another forty five minutes once the dough had been split into the eight balls required.
Once you’ve left the dough for that final prove the recipe tells you to flatten the dough balls with a rolling pin before you put them in the oven to bake. I was a bit worried that I might have over done this as they looked like discuss on the baking tray.
There wasn’t long to wait though as the bake time is only ten minutes and what came out of the oven were eight raised, slightly golden soft bread roll.
An additional part of the technical challenge on the show was for the contestants to make veggie burgers to go into the rolls. I didn’t do that bit, however we did did stick to the vegetarian theme and had ours with some quorn sausages.
Lessons learned from Bake Off week three
- I now know what shortening is.
- Even an underwhelming recipe can produce quite a satisfying bake in the end
If anyone fancies having a go at making these the link to the recipe I used is below.
Next time it’s dairy week and I’m really not quite sure what to expect with that.
David in the kitchen. 