Arctic Cloudberry: starter

Rye sourdough pizza and US election addiction

12:27

Pizza, that great American invention, at least according to an Ohioan exchange student who stayed with us when I was in my teens. I tried to say something about Italy, but she'd have none of it. Probably thought it was a neighbourhood in New York City. She also said there is a letter R in the word wash. Excruciatingly she forced me, a very unlikely cheerleader, to wear a little skirt and shake some pom poms in an awkward high school parade when I visited her in turn. We lost touch over the years and judging by her bible wielding FB comments, which I just spied on, and her stance against BLM and same sex marriage, that's probably a good thing.

Anyway, always interested in US news because I have travelled there a lot and we have good American friends, husband and I got completely hooked on the US presidential elections. We are not big Trump fans, to put it mildly so we followed a lot of the coverage in the run up to the big night. And then on and after the election day it got a bit out of hand. We would stay glued to CNN, sometimes flicking over to BBC or Sky and then back. I tried switching to Fox a couple of times, but on both occasions they were interviewing some kukluxclanny Trump super-fans, so altogether I think we managed about 55 seconds of Fox.

In one of the debates Trump said to Joe Biden condescendingly, when Joe was trying to answer a question: "Come on Joe, you can do it". We took that as our rallying cry and throughout the run-up to the election day and all through the vote counting, one of us would shout "Come on Joe!" and the other would continue "You can do it!".

On the election night things were looking bleak. I went to bed at some point because I had early Teams calls the next day. But husband stayed to watch and had been very upset when Trump walked on to the stage to the tune of Hail to the Chief and did his embarrassing, premature victory speech. Husband had started to bargain with God, you know how you sometimes promise all sorts of things if God grants you a wish. I was a bit doubtful that that's really the way God operates, but it seems to have worked, because on Wednesday Biden started to catch up on Trump.

So by the weekend Joe Biden was announced the winner, we celebrated with a bottle of sparkling wine, but we also started to panic a little bit about what we would do with ourselves now. "Isn't anyone showing the vote count", husband asked forlornly flicking through the channels. We were both missing the magic wall where they touch the states to turn them red or blue and the electoral vote bars go up and down together with your emotions.

My little notebook with vote count development from Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada and calculations of how much of the remaining vote Joe would need to beat Trump, sat abandoned on the sofa table.

But then all this week there has been the finalisation of some of the states, there is recounting happening, the magic wall has been up again and it's all been quite exciting. I understand we need to eventually find something else to do and for the sake of America and American people I hope that this whole episode and their current toddler in chief can be put to bed soon and the country can move on.

I am hopeful I will rediscover my purpose in life with the help of the new MasterChef Professionals which is now airing and all the Christmas cooking programs. Maybe husband will find his salvation in all the football that's going on at the moment.

I can't think of a smooth segue back to the pizza topic, so I just clumsily finish by saying that this version of my earlier blogged wheat sourdough pizza base is even tastier. The addition of rye starter and rye flour adds flavour, but if you don't have a rye starter you can do with 100% wheat starter. This base is somehow a bit more substantial and filling than a wheat one, so it makes sense to keep it quite thin.

Rye sourdough pizza base

(this recipe makes 2 x 12 inch round thin crust bases, for a rectangular sheet pan version I make half a portion, here is the original wheat based recipe)

1/2 cup wheat sourdough starter, unfed/discard

1/2 cup rye sourdough starter, unfed/discard
3/4 cup lukewarm water
2 1/2 cups flour - I did about one third rye flour and the rest wheat (all purpose or strong bread) flour

1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dry yeast

Mix the starters, water, flour, salt and yeast together. Add a bit of water if the mixture seems dry, rye flour needs a bit more water than wheat. Knead for about 7-10 minutes either in a mixer or by hand until you have a nice elastic ball of dough.

Cover and leave to rise until almost doubled. This will take between 2 and 4 hours. For a faster rise, place the dough in a warm spot, or double the yeast.

For two thin-crust pizzas, divide the dough in half, and shape each into a flattened disk. Drizzle two 12 inch round pizza pans with olive oil, and brush to coat the bottom. Place the dough in the pans, cover, and let rest for 15 minutes. After this rest, gently press the dough toward the edges of the pans.

Fill with your favourite fillings and bake in as hot as your oven goes (or if your oven goes very hot, somewhere around 250C should do) until the toppings get a nice colour and the edges of the crust look crisp and browned, about 15 minutes.

baking

Traditional Finnish rye sourdough starter and bread recipe - lockdown baking

13:02

Psychologists and anthropologists will have a lot to analyse around all the peculiar COVID-19 lockdown behaviours in the coming months and years. Apart from insane beard growing and hoarding behaviours, the general urge to bake might be one area they want to look into. Pictures of no-knead overnight pot-loaves have replaced pedicured feet on sandy beaches. People who never dreamed of baking are now posting amazing images of sourdough loaves with wheat ear motifs. If you belong to a Finns abroad group and haven't at least once baked the fiddly Karelian pasties they will remove you from the group. So it's not just the toiletpaper and pasta shelves that are empty, now it's impossible to find yeast or flour in many shops.

The traditional Karelian pie or pasty, Rye dough filled with rice.

This phenomenon is a bit surprising, since there has been no shortage of bread in shops. Or at least I think not, I actually haven't bought any bread since the beginning of lockdown because I fell into the baking trap on day one. I don't know why. It is partly to do with the fact that I now have time, because I don't have to commute or travel, but I think it probably is mainly because there is something fundamentally grounding and comforting in making your own bread. It's maybe a bit like growing your own veg. I just spoke to a colleague who was a bit baffled herself to find that she had felt the need to start growing beetroot as soon as she heard that her husband would be furloughed.

With all the baking I've been doing in the recent months I have even come to quite like kneading and I know that this in itself warrants a visit to a psychologist or some sort of therapy source. But something has happened to my hands, dough doesn't stick to my fingers anymore like it used to, I can actually produce springy elastic balls of dough which turn into loaves and buns and flatbreads that look and taste the way they were supposed to. The pitta-breads I baked the other night couldn't wait to obediently puff up into perfect little balls with pockets to stuff all sorts of nice Greek inspired things into.

There's a plump little pitta bread just waiting to be stuffed!

Sometimes the texture has maybe been a bit denser than I aimed for and there was the occasion I moulded the slightly fussy Finnish rye sourdough into perfect wheel shapes and then realised I forgot the salt. So calmly and with just a few swearwords from the lighter end of the generous Finnish swearword repertoire I scooped it all back to the bowl, added the salt and shaped it back into perfect wheels.

And on another occasion for some reason the dough wouldn't rise with the power of the starter alone. After a couple of hours of patient waiting, I added some dried yeast to the mixture and they ended up being the most fantastic rye sourdough bread I have made so far.

The shortage of flour momentarily threatened my home-baking zeal, but thank God for eBay. I managed to procure some dry yeast from Bulgaria, rye flour from Poland and strong bread flour from a local bakery.

I have always thought that sourdough baking sounds like such a palaver because in the beginning you have to feed the starters daily or even a few times a day, and they sound temperamental and difficult to handle either exploding everywhere or producing foul smelling liquids. But actually it's like with puppies, they are more hassle early on, they eat shoes and cigarette butts, pee and poo everywhere, destroy the furniture and have to be fed all the time, but then, well actually dogs are a lot of work always, you can't just put them in the fridge and feed once a week.

So anyway I created my own sourdough starters in March. I made a wheat starter for French style rustic boules and batards using this recipe, there are lots of good recipes and instructions online. I also made a Finnish rye starter for my favourite kind of dark sourdough bread which you can't find in UK shops. And don't even mention the German pumpernickel stuff.

You are supposed to name your starters, they are living things after all, so I called my wheat starter Jean-Pierre after this French guy I know who wears a beret, a stripy T-shirt and a string of garlic around his neck. He travels around on a bike with the basket full of sourdough baguettes. My rye starter is called Tellervo after the beautiful maiden in our national epic Kalevala, and also a beloved ex-first lady of Finland who is also a bit on the sour and sarcastic side so the name is fitting to this pungent and biting little number.

Jean-Pierre and Tellervo buddying up on my chimney ledge

With Tellervo I make the traditional whole rye wheel shaped flat round breads with a hole in the middle. In Finland we call them hole breads. After the hole you see, we are not complicated people. The breads were traditionally stored by inserting a wooden pole through the holes and then hung up near the ceiling to dry. I just put them in a plastic bag and store in a fridge. I find that a more practical approach.

A friend of mine saw my rye sourdough efforts in Facebook quite early on and sent me an envelope of dried 100 year old starter. This was hands down the best lockdown present anyone could ever give me apart maybe from the pack of toilet paper that a friend brought me in the early days.

The starter my friend sent me might be even much more than 100 years old. It comes from a farm that has belonged to the same family since 1300s, but they haven't been able to trace back the origins of the starter beyond sometime in the late 19th century. So I added some of this to Tellervo and have been baking with it ever since.

One of the best things ever to pop through my letterbox

With Jean-Pierre I have produced several pretty boules getting better with the decoration and the structure as well as taste. I haven't got a proper lame, so a clumsy kitchen knife has had to do so far. I'm not much of a visual artist but I will try some different patterns just for the fun of it. And only recently I realised that the scoring is key to an airy structure as well as the starter itself, because it breaks the glutein of the surface and allows the loaf to expand. Logical!

It's kind of the reverse of me insisting to keep on wearing my skinny jeans for my lockdown office days instead of a pair of stretchy home pants in the hope that they will stop me from expanding. So far it's been more uncomfortable than successful.

Don't you just want to poke your finger in it!

I'm more proud of the air holes in the bread than the bread surrounding the holes.

I have also used the starter in bases for pizza and garlic bread. I've kept mine in room temperature, so it needs feeding daily and rather than throwing away the extra starter I've used it for these purposes. In these times of shortage it is only prudent, so we've had quite a lot of pizza and cheesy garlic bread.

So here are the instructions for creating your own starter from scratch, much easier and more straight forward that you'd think. And also the recipe for best rye sourdough bread in the world. Best eaten fresh from the oven, but also great when reheated in the toaster. Finns eat it cold also, but I like the added crunch of toasting.

Never eat this bread with jam or honey. Ever. I'm still traumatised visiting an eastern European country with an English colleague of mine more than 15 years ago and recommending she try the excellent local sourdough rye bread at the hotel breakfast. She did and before I could say anything she'd spread the bread with strawberry jam and then said it wasn't really for her. Oh really?

Yeah I also don't like fish and chips with vanilla ice-cream.

This bread needs butter on top to begin with. Then top with gravadlax or smoked salmon, or cheese and cold cuts like smoked meats. Smoked reindeer would obviously be awesome. And a slice of tomato or cucumber for your perfect open sandwich the Finnish way.

Finnish open rye sourdough sandwich with smoked salmon

Easy Finnish rye sourdough starter

Days 1 & 2

Mix 100ml of warm water (about 30C degrees) and 125ml of rye flour in a bowl. Mix until smooth. Cover losely with a lid or tea towel. Place in a warm and draftless place, for instace sauna (!?!), unheated oven or microwave for 24 hours. (I just keep on a shelf on top of the cooker, because we keep our house quite warm.)
On day 2 the mix has started to ferment and already has a mildly sour smell. Add the same amount of water and flour as day one. Mix well and continue to store in your warm place for another 24 hours.

Days 3 & 4

On day three you can see bubbles in the mix and it has a stronger smell. Add the same amounts of flour and water and return to the warm place.
On day 4 it should have bubbled properly. Now you start feeding the starter.
Mix the starter and take 30g in a clean glass jar. Disgard rest of the starter. Feed the starter with 75ml of 30C water and 100ml of flour.

Days 5 & 6

Repeat the feed (75ml water & 100ml flour) on day 5
On day 6 the starter is light and bubbly and ready for baking.

Finnish sourdough rye bread (original recipe in Finnish)

Recipe makes 2 large loafs or 4 wheel shaped breads - I usually make with 500ml water and it makes enough for our small household, but this bread also freezes well)

900ml water

100ml rye sourdough starter

2-3 tsp salt
2kg rye flour (you won't need all, but the amount will depend on the type of flour)

Mix the lukewarm water and the starter well. Add enough rye flour to create a thickish slurry. Cover with a tea towel and leave in a warm place, ideally around 25-30C for 24 – 48 hours. During the time mix a few times adding a little flour. Make sure your bowl is large enough, the mixture will bubble a lot.

Before you are ready to bake take some of the starter mixture and either store in the fridge if you bake often or in the freezer. Then go on to use the rest to make your dough. Add salt and enough rye flower to make the dough thick enough. Add flour little by little because they absorb water with a bit of delay and you don’t want the dough to get too thick and dry.

Keep mixing with your hand until the dough just starts to separate from the edges of the bowl. It will not become elastic like a wheat dough and it will keep sticking to your fingers. Here’s a good Youtube video to understand what you are looking for in terms of thickness of the dough as well as shaping the breads. Unfortunately it is in Finnish, but you'll get the idea. You want to leave the dough a bit on the wet side, it will be more difficult to shape but will make better bread.

Once you are happy with your dough, smooth the surface and sprinkle with flower. With the side of your palm press a cross-shaped indent in the surface. This was traditionally done to "bless" the bread, but also to help determine when it was ready to shape. Leave covered in a warm draftless place to rise for 1-2 hours.

Once the cross has disappeared or almost disappeared depending on how deep you made the indent, the dough is ready to be shaped into breads. If you forgot to save some of the starter mixture, you can now take some of the dough (200ml) and keep this for the next time you want to bake. Again you can keep this starter in the fridge for up to one week, of you can freeze or dry it to keep it for up to several years.

Tip the dough onto a floured surface. A well-risen dough is airy, soft and sponge-like. Bring the dough together with both hands. Shape it into 2 round cone shaped loaves or 4 discs creating a hole in the middle with a small round glass or cookie cutter. Again the video gives you a better idea of how they should look.

Traditional wheel shaped Finnish rye bread with a hole

You can also make individual portion sized breads by rolling the dough into small balls and then flattening them to about flat about 1-1.5cm discs.

Place the breads on baking trays that you have sprinkled with flour. I prefer not to use baking paper, because it will burn in the oven and make the fire alarm go off when I open the oven door. These breads won't rise anywhere as much as a wheat bread, but leave a bit of space between them particularly if you are baking loaves. Cover with tea towels and leave to rise for about an hour. Prick with a fork before baking.

Heat the oven to 225 - 250 °C. If you are baking loaves bake in 225-250C for about 20 minutes and then lower the temperature to 180 - 190C. Continue baking for another 40 minutes. Disc shaped thinner breads should be baked in 225 - 250C for 20 - 30 min, and individual small discs in 225-250C for about 20 minutes. Bread is done when they make a hollow sound when you tap the bottom. Leave to cool covered with tea towels.

But don't leave to cool for too long, it's best eaten warm while crust is still crunchy with butter on top.

Ayam Zaman

Best silky smooth hummus

18:28

Hummus - a levantine chickpea and tahini dip

I have been making hummus for years, all kinds of different variations, roasted pepper, lime and coriander, beetroot, even cauliflower, I'm sad to say. But I always come back to the classic version. Mostly I just quickly chuck everything together with supermarket tinned chickpeas and it will be absolutely fine. But I used to make a more refined version, which I had quite forgotten about.

I was inspired by our dinner at a Shepherd's Bush Syrian restaurant Ayam Zaman last weekend. We'd been out showing London to some of husband's family who were visiting and as a thank you for our tour guide services they wanted to take us to dinner. I remembered a friend recommending this little restaurant and we decided to give it a go since it was kind of on our way from Richmond Park back into Central London.

Ayam Zaman Shepherd's Bush restaurant, hummus and tabbouleh

Ayam Zaman hummus behind the tabbouleh - I didn't realise how awesome it would be, otherwise I would have snapped some close-ups.

All of the food was really good, but the star of the show was the humble hummus. I was surprised to see husband shovelling it in, he hasn't seemed so keen before. I concluded it meant that my hummus just wasn't up to scratch. A shock! But it made sense, because even I who love my own hummus thought this is almost a different dish. Just so gorgeously smooth and creamy and light. Mine all of a sudden felt brown and coarse and somehow just less dignified.

I'd become complacent in my levantine dip confidence and forgotten the true art of hummus. So the next morning I rushed to my nearest Middle-Eastern shop where I go often. They have the best fresh herbs, great fruit and veg and just more interesting stuff than the main supermarkets, like lamb heads. They call me sister, which never happens at Morrisons. So I bought a glass jar or chickpeas, I'm not sure if this really was going to make a big difference, but I wasn't going to risk anything and thought maybe these are a bit better than the tinned ones.

I didn't have time or patience for overnight soaking and boiling dried chickpeas - I have tried that before and I'm not sure if that makes such a big difference in the end, but I stand to be corrected. I still probably will continue buying these jars and tins, because when I want hummus I need it immediately. Like a haircut. You go on quite happily for months, and then one day you wake up and your hair won't do anything you want it to and you know you need to get an appointment within the next 24 hours or you might never be able to leave the house again.

What I believe ultimately is the key to a beautifully yellow, silky smooth and delicate hummus is peeling the chickpeas, which is not a massive faff, but takes a bit of time. But then, what's the rush, husband would ask, and right he would be. The other secret to the best and most creamy hummus is adding enough tahini, I think I may have become a bit stingy with my tahini without realising. I also had a fresh jar of tahini, so it was still runny and oily and not that all-too-familiar cement-like lump desperately clinging to the bottom of the jar. And the third change to my normal hummus is that I left out garlic altogether and didn't even add any cumin or extra oil other that what was in the tahini.

And as so often simplicity is the way to go. It very often is not the way I choose to go though, I'm not a naturally a less-is-more kind of a girl, I believe generally more is more, but I will have to try and remember to sometimes restrain myself a little. Patience and simplicity, my new mantra. Good luck to me.

The hummus turned out absolutely beautiful. I could have just eaten all of it directly from the blender, but I only ate about half because I wanted to obviously get husbands approval and admiration. That was after all the point of the exercise. That and the fact that I do love hummus in all its possible incarnations (even the cauliflower - if you have to eat cauliflower this is the way) and promise to respect it more in future.

Look how smooth - can you see?

Silky smooth and creamy hummus

Half a glass jar (200g drained) chickpeas

Juice of half a lemon

3-4 tbsp chickpea liquid

3-4 tbsp tahini

Salt

Peel the chickpeas. Add all ingredients in a blender and mix until smooth. Check the taste and adjust as necessary, add liquid if too thick. If you like an even stronger taste of tahini, add another spoon or two!

Spread on a plate with some care, decorate with a drizzle of good quality olive oil, paprika, chopped parsley and a few whole chickpeas.

crawfish

Moreish Crayfish Skagen or Skagenröra - a Nordic Bank Holiday lunch

22:07

appetisers

Elegant appetiser cups with reindeer and goat cheese and other fillings

11:49

This time I am just sharing a quick and easy, but tasty and elegant hors d'oeuvres idea to serve with a glass of bubbly. These were a prelude to a big Saturday BBQ dinner of Greek chicken and lamb souvlaki served with roast new potatoes and my rice and orzo pilaf, tsatziki, asparagus and a Greek salad last weekend. An old colleague of husband's was visiting and we had a fun night of lots of food and quite a few glasses of cava and rose.

We'd spent the day with husband on an NHS diabetes education course and I had retrogressed to the annoying swot I was in school and turned into Hermione Granger with my hand up in the air for another comment or question when everyone else was ready for a break with tea and biscuits.

With diabetes they shouldn't really have been having biscuits, but first on the queue was a 6 foot 5 and 20 stone biker looking dude so I didn't want to make a big deal but gently whispered to husband my concerns about biscuits. Husband just pretended he didn't hear me and completely ignored me tugging at his sleeve. He glued himself to the biker and had two very large biscuits with his cup of tea.

After the fun afternoon foot care / amputations session the traffic at the biscuit tin seemed to go down a little.

I got the idea for these appetisers from myself, actually. I did similar nibbles a few weeks ago when we were staying at my parents little island in Finland. My parents deposited me, husband and his younger son (older son was getting drunk and losing his possessions in various places in Europe, also called interrailing) on the island the previous afternoon and came the next day with my brother and his wife. I had prepared three kinds of little crispy rye bread cups to serve with a welcome toast of sparkling wine. The cups were spread with a rocket and pesto cream cheese and then filled with either smoked lamb or gravadlax and dill or mozzarella and pesto.

I set all this on a little table outside and reminisced about a similar occasion some years ago when I had prepared glasses of Pimms and some nibbles on that same garden table ready to welcome my cousin and his husband to the island. My parents' effervescent labrador got completely overexcited by these totally amazing people coming to see her and quite possibly to rub her belly or oh my gosh maybe even throw the ball on this very best of days. She was always very bouncy in a Tigger kind of way and now bouncing around the yard she managed somehow to place one of her bounces directly under the table and sent the whole thing flying, Pimms and all. She then ran to hide in the clover field behind the cabin realising she'd messed up. No one was even angry with her really- you couldn't be, there was not a bad bone in that ebullient, chubby little body now happily bouncing on the eternal clover fields of heaven.

This time I didn't have these excellent rye cups, but I had a pack of Swedish Rahms mini croustades cups from a little delicatessen in Notting Hill - I think Waitrose sell them too. I did smoked reindeer (substitute with any other smoked or cured meat like bresaola) with goat cheese and parsley, mozzarella with homemade pesto and basil and soft blue cheese with roasted cherry tomatoes. But you can fill these with anything, my smoked salmon mousse / spread would do beautifully.