Revolutionary baking inspiration
SINCE lockdown we have located the family exercise bike in our dining room, where it offers an unhindered view of a TV screen. So, while you pedal away fast and furiously, you can ease the tedium of endlessly rotating your feet by watching a show.
I find quiz shows, history documentaries and football matches are all good to cycle along with.
Although, if you can, do try to synchronise the effort of burning off some calories while watching one of the many waistline-bursting cookery shows daily dotted across the TV channels. It’s a great way of savouring the irony of your exercise actions. Which, in a very circuitous way, is how I came to find myself up to my eyes in flour dust this week.
I had watched the Hairy Bikers in Italy and James Martin cooking somewhere on the continent recently while doing my pedalling, and both shows happened to home in on how to make bread dough.
There is, in my opinion, nothing to beat the smell of freshly-baked bread (French bakeries are always outstanding on that score) but my imagination was fired up by these chefs and a desire to try to emulate them by making that popular Italian tear-and-share bread, focaccia. I would, temporarily, become a real-life Happy Families version of Mr Bun the Baker
In the run-up to this culinary adventure, I had recently produced a reasonably decent shortcrust apple pie and concocted some chapatis for a curry night when we discovered late on that Mrs Davey’s lockdown larder was right out of its stock of ready-made naan breads. To be honest, the chapatis, a mean version of a naan, were not as successful as the pie, although later in the week my wife said our feathered friends couldn’t get enough of the uneaten ones she placed on the bird table.
So, a few days ahead of my plan to turn the kitchen into a temporary bakehouse and with the need of some crucial ingredients, I interrupted my wife in the middle of her creating a lemon drizzle cake to ask if she had any yeast to hand. And olive oil.
Now, she’s always been very grudging and over-protective about the latter, accusing me of just “sloshing it on” things and her stance has become more severe during these Covid days. I swear she would use a ration book if she could.
Anyway, content to let me fill my usually idle hours by making a floury mess in the kitchen, she unearthed a new bottle of oil and a sachet of yeast, while I chopped up some black olives and reduced some of our home-grown rosemary to shreds. I was then all set for some serious kneading. Ten minutes, the recipe said. It was rather therapeutic but, sadly, didn’t count as a daily exercise on my Fitbit. You then have to cover it up and walk away for an hour, come back, discover it has ballooned in size, knead again, cover it up again, walk away again for half an hour, before popping it into the oven. A piece of cake, really. What could go wrong?
Well, to my novice astonishment, absolutely nothing.
It emerged from the oven looking pretty much the same as the images accompanying the recipe I used. I was impressed. My wife was impressed.
As I said, focaccia’s a tear-and-share experience, so I split it asunder and then – and only then – it dawned on me that there was only my wife to share what was a rather substantial loaf which needs to be consumed sooner rather than later.
We ate two pieces of it. The rest is currently under foil wrap on the kitchen worktop.
Soon, I suspect, it will find its way to the garden bird table to replace the chapatis.