Skip to main content

The great Portuguese bake off

I've tried and tried to make bread, it always comes out wrong. It can been too wet, too dense or rock hard and impossible to eat.   I bought Paul Hollywood's Bread book, I watched the Mary Berry masterclass and bitten my lip in jealousy as friends serve up their perfectly baked bread.

My friend Jackie from Casa Azul makes a great Focaccia which she always tells me is easy to do.  So I asked for a masterclass from her when she visited me recently.   Jackie favours the ready made bread flour recipe with easy bake yeast.  I want to go 'old school' with strong white bread flour and bakers yeast.




 Using the Paul Hollywood Focaccia  recipe we started the challenge.  Now I may favour the old school method, but kneading for 20 mins is not for me.  Not when I have a fancy new machine with fully functioning dough hook.

Yeh, it's silver too!

In the bowl both the mixtures needed longer than we though.   The old school method produced more elasticity, so much so that it reminded me of our building project (when will it ever end).  Can you spot the difference?

 Leaving the mixture for the first proving they looked the same - identical.


But when it came to taking off the cling film, we had two very different results.
Old school, full of bubbles, new school, smoother finish, had risen much more than the old school version.
The real difference was in the touch, you have to poke holes in the bread surface to pour over olive oil.  New school, while sticky, created nice holes and neatly held the olive oil.
Old school, looked like a dogs dinner.  The dough was so sticky you couldn't make indentations in it, in fact if made more bubbles come to the surface.  It didn't look good for the old school version!

You know that weird thing they do in the bake off, you know, they sit infront of the over watching it cook their showstopper.  Well we did that, then we got bored.  We forgot the oven was fan assisted, yeh, we overcooked  the new school ones a bit!  (new school on the left and old school on the right).

Disaster!


Cutting through the old school had a firmer crust.  The old school had a more traditional texture, more holes running throughout the bread.  The new school suffered from being on the top shelf of the oven and cooking too quickly and was more cakey in texture.


Now the taste test.....new school - cakey texture, slightly sweet (on fishing the packet out the bin we read that the ready mix bread has sugar in it).  It was light, salty, sweet and tasty.
Old school - much denser, a strong bready texture and you could smell the yeast coming through.  

So which is best...?   Not sure....the old school has a better texture, the new school has a good flavour. 

Both tasty, both salty, both smothered in olive oil....need I say more!






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th...

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb...

Chestnuts and Saints

St. Martinho or St. Martin of Tours, became the first non-  martyr  saint to receive official church worship and became one of the most popular saints in medieval Europe. (Source wikipedia). His feast day is 11 November, deep into autumn and the chestnut season. In Portugal, as it's chestnut season 'Magustos'are celebrated in St. Martinho's name. A magusto is a group  of friends and/or family who get together and bake and eat chestnuts.  We have our village magusto at the weekend.  Meanwhile at home I've been celebrating the chestnut instead of the saint.  This 'celebration' involves collecting the chestnut harvest, splitting, cooking and shelling hundreds of these shiny brown chestnuts. Well, there's not much else to do on a wet Monday in these hills. Now I've got a bowl full of chestnuts I'm looking for recipes.  Here's what I've tried so far: Chestnut cake.  Made by using blitzed chestnuts instead of regular flo...