Experiments with Sourdough

One of the things I've started during this last lockdown since Christmas is the nurturing of a sourdough culture. I wasn't actually expecting great things of it, but it turned out to be easier than I expected to transform flour-and-water paste into something tasty. 

At first I was playing around with the daily discard - making pancakes with the batter, thickening it with flour to make cinnamon rolls, and tarts topped with sticky rhubarb or Mediterranean veg (an experiment to use up a frozen pack I received as a substitute for peppers, which turned out very tasty)

After a week or so the sourdough was bubbling, and ready to make my first loaf of bread. It didn't look brilliant, but tasted good - which is the most important bit.

I'd heard that it was possible to keep the mother culture almost indefinitely in the fridge, so I tried by putting half in a jar and leaving it there, but after a couple of weeks I seemed to be just left with sludge. 

The other half, in the warmth of the airing cupboard, has gone from strength to strength.

 I've managed to bake a couple of respectable-looking loaves with it, cobs and mini-baguettes, and some strange half bread/half cake concoctions like this apple sandwich, but my favourite uses are for pittas and pizza, made with discard and strong flour.

I now make these regularly, and I'm constantly amazed at how flour-and-water paste turns into anything so tasty.

 

Hunter's Chicken from Pinch of Nom

 Among the frozen ready-meals from my usual supermarket I have a favourite - Hunter's Chicken. It's spicy without being over-powering, and feels like something I could eat forever, but there's a stigma to eating ready meals everyday, and, let's face it, there's not much filling up my time these days, so I want to make some effort and find a home-made version.

 

The recipes I've found among my books and magazine clippings vary widely - Nigella's Pollo Alla Cacciatore is lovely but nothing like my shop-bought Hunter's Chicken - so I'm going to work my way through them, find a recipe that's close, and if necessary from there I'll tweak the ingredients - a little more of this, less of that - till it's just the way I like it. 

I'm starting with the version from Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone. Now essentially this is a book of weight-watching recipes, but use your regular full-fat cheese instead of the low-fat option, and add an extra dollop of potatoes plus cauliflower and french beans if you're not bothered about losing weight. I did :)

What I'd actually hoped for was a recipe that took things back to basics - tomatoes, peppers, onions, sugar etc - but as I've found before the Pinch of Nom recipes tend to call for 'prepared' ingredients, in this case BBQ seasoning and hot sauce, which all too easily vary between manufacturer, so I'm not sure I actually got the flavour they were aiming for
. Also, there's a LONG list of ingredients - balsamic vinegar, white wine vinegar, Worcester sauce, mustard powder, etc etc. Not a lot of each is needed and it's fine if you've got them in the cupboard but to buy them specially would make this far more expensive than my beloved ready meal. Get through that fussy list if ingredients, and the recipe is clear to follow. 

The final stages of cooking suddenly required a lot of plates and pans but I don't have a dishwasher and I hate the proliferation of extra pots just for the sake of styling and presentation, so I skipped a lot of fussing about at the end, just added the cheese to the casserole dish and melted it there. It probably could have benefited from an extra minute or two under the grill but the potatoes and veg were ready, so I served it as it was.

It wasn't quite what my taste buds wanted though; a little too acidic (perhaps all those various vinegars), and the base flavour of tomato was too overwhelming. It's definitely on the lines of what I'm trying to reproduce so I have a good workable starting point from which I'll tweak the ingredients.