Pea & Watercress Soup and some Homemade Bread

This pea and watercress soup was a vague attempt at copying what James Martin made on last week’s ‘Great British Food Revival’ (BBC2). Super quick to make (sweat onion and celery, add loads of watercress, parsley and frozen peas and enough stock to cover, cook for a few minutes until peas are just tender and blend. Serve with a blob of creme fraiche), very healthy, very cheap and exactly what I want for lunch on a sunny autumnal day. You could almost pretend it’s still summer.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making my own bread – something I do roughly once a week (in fact, I haven’t bought a loaf in the shops all year – dedicated? or perhaps I need to get out more). My first attempts at bread making yielded mixed results, as is to be expected, but nowadays I reckon I make a pretty good loaf most of the time. I think the key things are:

Good quality strong bread flour (I tend to use Marriage’s Organic and sometimes a local wholemeal flour by Gilchesters, but Doves Farm, Waitrose Organic are also good).

Don’t get too hung up on adding extra ingredients until you’ve mastered the basics – all you need for a good loaf is flour, yeast, salt, water and a little oil or butter. When making 2 loaves I use 1kg of flour, 20g salt, 15g dried fast-action yeast, 640ml water and a tablespoon or so of rapeseed oil.

Kneading is very important, but don’t feel you have to do it for hours – if you’ve got the basic technique correct then 5-15 minutes kneading is generally all you need. With white bread, once you can pull the dough out thin enough that you can see light through it then it is ready.

Give the dough the time it needs to rise. Don’t put it somewhere too warm – just leave it at room temperature and give it time – the longer it takes, the more developed the flavour will be. Once a dough has doubled in size you can deflate it and let it rise again 3 or 4 times – the flavour and texture will improve each time.

Putting a baking tray of boiling water in the oven when you bake the loaf helps to delay the forming of the crust, allowing the air pockets in the bread to expand further, giving you a lighter loaf. You can also spray water at the loaves with a gardener’s spray bottle.

Your own oven will differ to everyone else’s. Experiment with the temperature – if your loaf is too crusty turn the oven down a bit next time, if it’s too dense then your oven might not have been hot enough to begin with – put the oven up to maximum temperature for the first 10 mins then turn it down to 170-200 depending on how dark the crust looks.