For my birthday in April Mrs Blog gave me the wonderfully thoughtful present of a bread-making class. The date of the class was Sunday 3rd June and the two of us trogged up to Edinburgh to "Jo-Jo's Bakery and Cafe". Mrs Blog went off shopping and smiling.
I introduced myself to Jo-Jo the mad lady baker from Denmark and Welynn Garden City. She in turn introduced me to her brand new assistant Alessandra from Immola in Italy. We started with a dark bread using rye flour, spelt and four seed mix from Tesco (this is the UK shop and not a Danish Baking word).
Jo-Jo managed to run out of baking parchment at this point which was to prove problematic later with two more loaves still to be baked.
Whilst the first loaf was proving we started on the second loaf with Alessandra. In went 500g of flour, four "turns" of the olive oil bottle and an unspecified amount of water. A "turn" is a "swoosh" where the bottle is tipped up and when the oil is flowing you make four turns round the bowl. There was no instruction so I went for clock-wise just to be safe.
Having assembled these ingredients we went for the hand mix method and started to get messy.
Now, I should "fess-up" that I have made bread before and learned, mainly from trial and error, that if you want bread and not a biscuit it is best to put yeast in.
Alessandra was warned by a fellow class-mate that there was no yeast in the mix before suggesting that now would be a good time to add it, when the dough was already formed. No easy task I can tell you.
We went on to our final loaf and used the same mix as before but with yeast in at the same time as the flour. This, we then ruined by putting sun-dried tomatoes and olives in it. Yuk!
After a coffee we then assembled our loaves and put them in to bake. Jo-Jo managed to slip and burn her hand on the oven. The lack of baking parchment meant that we went for plan B and coated the baking trays with flour, (most of which ended up on me and the rest left a yucky flour coating on the bottom of every loaf we made).
We shaped our Italian dough without the yeast into long sausage shapes that we then turned into snail shapes by rolling them up. My attempts all looked like the shape of joke dog-poo.
After four hours of trying not to laugh, I left Jo-Jo's with a bag of bread which I have no intention of eating. But all in all an excellent birthday present!
I introduced myself to Jo-Jo the mad lady baker from Denmark and Welynn Garden City. She in turn introduced me to her brand new assistant Alessandra from Immola in Italy. We started with a dark bread using rye flour, spelt and four seed mix from Tesco (this is the UK shop and not a Danish Baking word).
Jo-Jo managed to run out of baking parchment at this point which was to prove problematic later with two more loaves still to be baked.
Whilst the first loaf was proving we started on the second loaf with Alessandra. In went 500g of flour, four "turns" of the olive oil bottle and an unspecified amount of water. A "turn" is a "swoosh" where the bottle is tipped up and when the oil is flowing you make four turns round the bowl. There was no instruction so I went for clock-wise just to be safe.
Having assembled these ingredients we went for the hand mix method and started to get messy.
Now, I should "fess-up" that I have made bread before and learned, mainly from trial and error, that if you want bread and not a biscuit it is best to put yeast in.
Alessandra was warned by a fellow class-mate that there was no yeast in the mix before suggesting that now would be a good time to add it, when the dough was already formed. No easy task I can tell you.
We went on to our final loaf and used the same mix as before but with yeast in at the same time as the flour. This, we then ruined by putting sun-dried tomatoes and olives in it. Yuk!
After a coffee we then assembled our loaves and put them in to bake. Jo-Jo managed to slip and burn her hand on the oven. The lack of baking parchment meant that we went for plan B and coated the baking trays with flour, (most of which ended up on me and the rest left a yucky flour coating on the bottom of every loaf we made).
We shaped our Italian dough without the yeast into long sausage shapes that we then turned into snail shapes by rolling them up. My attempts all looked like the shape of joke dog-poo.
After four hours of trying not to laugh, I left Jo-Jo's with a bag of bread which I have no intention of eating. But all in all an excellent birthday present!
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