Bread pudding

Sitting down at morning tea today to tuck into bread pudding from Black Star Pastry in Newtown, Sydney, (see image below) I thought a short note to celebrate this simple but satisfying pud was due in on this blog.

Here's bits of the delightful entry on bread puddings from The Oxford Companion to Food (edited by the much missed Alan Davidson):

Bread puddings an important category...It is safe to assume that from the very distant past cooks have sometimes turned stale bread into a sweet pudding, if only by soaking it in milk, sweetening it by one means or another, and baking the result. The addition of some fat, preferably in the form of butter, and something like currants is all that is needed to move this frugal dish into the category of treats, and this is what has ensured its survival in the repertoire, even of cooks who never have stale bread on their hands...this same dish can also be made with something more exotic than plain bread, for example, brioche, pannetone, slices of plain cake etc., and can be enlivened by judicious spicing or by reinforcing the currants with plumper sultanas and mixed peel. But such elaborations must be kept under strict control, so that what is essentially a simple pudding does not lost its character under the weight of sophisticated additions.

I love his insistence on not elaborating the dish so much as to lose its simplicity. Certainly my mother, whose cooking skills focused on desserts and casseroles (one day I shall do a blog on macaroni and tuna casserole), kept hers simple, drawing no doubt on those of her youth produced by her mother and her mother's mother in the tradition of Sri Lankan Burgher women and as codified in Hilda Deutrom's Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book, first published in 1929 and never out of print since. Here is Hilda's recipe:

Bread and butter pudding
slices of bread and butter
sugar to taste
2 oz sultanas
1 pint milk
2 03 3 eggs
vanilla or almond flavouring


Butter a pie-dish, put in a layer of thin bread and butter, sprinkle sugar and sultanas, then another layer of bread and butter, sugar and sultanas, and so on until the dish is about half full. Beat up the eggs, add the milk, a little sugar or flavouring, mix well together and pour over the bread in the pie-dish. Allow the pudding to stand for about one hour until the bread is thoroughly soaked, press down the top slices so that they may get soaked too. Put into a moderate oven and bake for about 40 minutes or until nicely browned.


Mum used to use sliced white bread, crusts and all, and sultanas with a little vanilla for flavouring. She baked it in a deep, oblong, clear sided pyrex dish and I was always fascinated by the view of the brown crusted sides studded here and there with dark brown/black sultanas. We would have it hot when it was first made but there was always enough left over for a cold slice the following days. It was usually dressed with golden syrup, an elaboration that I am sure Davidson would not object to. When I make it these days I dress it with kitul, a palm sugar syrup that is a staple in a Sri Lankan cupboard.

My friend Margaret makes her bread pudding with brioche and cream. Black Star's bread base is a secret - well I could ask Chris but it's better to have some mystery to it (I suspect it is brioche). It's baked in small square cups (sort of like very mini popcorn containers) and comes with a serve of pouring cream flavoured with vanilla seeds. Again, I think these stay nicely within Davidson's prescription for simplicity.

Banh mi thit

I write today in praise of the banh mi thit, the Vietnamese pork roll, and particularly that from the Marrickville Pork Roll shop on the corner of Illawarra Rd and Marrickville Road, Marrickville, NSW Australia. I had driven past it several times of late, or at least I had driven past what I had supposed from the long line that leaked from it each time I passed was an ATM until I looked up and noticed the bright red sign advertising it as a purveyor of said rolls. I had been missing them since the shop that sold excellent rolls outside of Newtown Station had closed to make way for refurbishment of said station. So I was excited to think that the rolls from this hole-in-the-wall take out joint - no really, it is as hole in the wall as maybe two ATMs - were so prized that no matter what time of day or what day of the week I passed there was always a line up.

But perhaps you know not of what I speak. Here from Wikipedia is as clear a description as any:

Bánh mì or bánh mỳ (English pronunciation: /ˈbʌn ˌmiː/, Vietnamese pronunciation: [ɓǎɲ mî]) is a Vietnamese term for all kinds of bread. Bread, or more specifically the baguette, was introduced by the French during its colonial period. The bread most commonly found in Vietnam is single serve and resembles a torpedo, therefore the term bánh mì is synonymous with this type of bread. The bánh mì is usually more airy than its western counterpart, so as a result, has a thinner crust.

The sandwich made from bánh mì include meat and soy fillings such as steamed, pan-roasted or oven-roasted seasoned pork belly, Vietnamese sausage, grilled pork, grilled pork patties, spreadable pork liver pâté, pork floss, grilled chicken, chicken floss, canned sardines in tomato sauce, soft pork meatballs in tomato sauce, head cheese, fried eggs, and tofu. Accompanying vegetables include fresh cucumber slices, cilantro and pickled carrots and daikon in shredded form. Spicy chili sauce is normally found in bánh mì sold by vendors in Vietnam. In western countries, especially the U.S., the chili sauce has been replaced with sliced jalapeños, a type of chili pepper that is not grown and consumed in Vietnam. In southern Vietnam, homemade mayonnaise is commonly added to the sandwich. Laughing Cow cheese is also a popular filling in Vietnam.

The Marrickville shop offers four varieties of pork roll - the basic roll with pate, three varieties of sliced pressed pork and strips of barbecue pork, with grated carrot, slices of onion, thin lengths of cucumber, a mess of coriander, Vietnamese mint, tomato slices, slices of fresh ripe red chili, a thickish fish sauce, all in exploding out of a crunchy crusted torpedo bun; a version which promises pork skin, another that prioritises barbecue pork, and one with pork meatballs - of a size here that is confronting but alluring. I had the basic and it fully met my expectations. The delight of eating these rolls is both the complex mix of textures/mouth feel and flavours you get with each munch and the mess the practised and unwary alike make as flakes of crust shower bodices. laps and any eating surface while pate oozes out the ends and juices/sauces dribble down chins and fingers. It's one of those foods you have to eat leaning over and back somewhat - there's no way you and the roll can remain upright and remain clean. I ate mine in my car, sitting in the driver's seat, the plastic bag and paper bag it came in spread on the passenger seat to catch the drips and splodge. It was a rainy day so the car steamed up and I felt a kind of guilt as I hunched over shielded by the misted windows.

The Rough Guide to Easy Excellent Food Part 12

My good mates Ross and Maria Kelly brought down from Mount Wilson their first crop of jerusalem artichokes for this year. These aren't really artichokes, but the tubers of a variety of sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus) which while delicious have a tendency to be a windy veg when eaten. Still  they are well worth the investigating and when you do you might like to do so via the following soup.

You will need:
jerusalem artichokes
leek
lemon verbena or lemon thyme
vegetable stock
salt
pepper
saffron
ginger
bread
garlic

Take a goodly lot of the tubers. If they are clean and creamy yellow of skin, don't worry about peeling  them. If the skin is a firmer brown scrub it off. Slice the artichokes thinly.

Set a handful of thinly sliced leek to saute in a pan with a slosh of olive oil. When slicing the leek reserve some for garnishing.

Shred some sprigs of lemon verbena/lemon thyme, add to the pan and saute a little longer.

Add artichokes and saute a few minutes more.

Pour in enough stock to cover the artichokes plus a couple of cms more. Sprinkle in some salt, pepper and a pinch of saffron threads.

Cook on a gentle boil till the artichokes are quite soft, say 20 minutes.

Puree the contents of the pan.

Slice some garlic into matchsticks.

Slice the bread and lightly toast it. Rub each slice of toast with garlic.

Pour the soup into individual serving bowls, garnish with the reserved leek and the ginger and serve with the toasted bread on the side.

A dollop of yoghurt is superfluous but adds tang.

Gut Germs: The story continues

Two pieces in New Scientist No 2862, 28 April 2012 add to my fascination with the hidden world of my gut flora and its impact on what I eat and what happens to what I eat and what happens to me when I eat it.

We've known since 2006 that the types of gut bacteria in obese rats differed from those in non-obese rats. Now a group of whitecoats at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research  have swapped gut flora between obesity prone and non obesity resistant rats and found that the obesity resistant rats now ate more and  'put on the pounds.

Across the grey pond (a.k.a. Atlantic Ocean) whitecoats at the University of Toronto in Canada have found that the gut flora in the faces from 20 month old babies overlaps with the bacterial make-up of dust samples found in the particular baby's home. They conclude that babies and their domestic dust are are sharing a common bacterial pool (oops - almost childish pun). The extension of this is that maybe other people in the house will also share whatever health and behavioural influences these bacteria produce when in the gut.

Putting these two together, I give full warning that I will carry around those white point nose covers that are supposed to keep out things like avian flu germs and have no hesitation in putting them on should I find an obese baby in a home or restaurant I enter, particularly if someone happens to be changing the kid's nappy while I am there, or I suspect they have returned from doing so without washing their hands and are about to hand me a slice of pizza or I gloved finger wiped across their mantel shelf goes any shade less than white.

Mushroom and almond soup

Casey, my niece, went mushrooming for the first time this week in the Penrose State Forest south of Sydney. She and her fellow foragers were after saffron milk caps/pine mushrooms  - Lactarius deliciosus. a native of the Southern Pyrenees now long established in pine forests in Australia. They found plenty, it having rained recently and the weather firmly now in autumn mode (let's not get into the issues of seasonal naming in Australia). Her companions were reluctant to collect ones they thought a bit overblown; some bruising on the gills, a little ragged at the edges. But Casey was sure I would say they were perfectly all right, which of course they are, and so brought home a vast quantity.

We had them on the day of picking lightly sauteed and served with wilted spinach and a saffron risotto that Marilyn made in her zoosh new Thermomix. That still left quite a quantity. As I have been reading Sue Shephard's informative and entertaining Pickled, Potted and Canned. The Story of Food Preserving (Headline 2000) (which interestingly when I looked for a link to it I find is now listed as Pickled, Potted and Canned. How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World - have I got some weird rare copy (in my dreams!)) I immediately thought of drying them. Not being confident of doing this by the method of stringing them up and in the absence of a fireplace or dry weather to do it I turned to the oven.

Alas, I have to report failure here. The notes I hastily found online didn't lead to the hoped for result - took way too long and didn't end up dry as I had hoped even then and certainly not as pretty as the store-bought dried European mix I have on hand. Another time perhaps.

My other thought was mushroom soup. Casey being a vegan, I looked for recipes that didn't require using butter or lard as for sauteing the mushrooms or adding any dairy as a thickener. The first criteria was easy enough with olive oil being substituted, and for the second I found suggestions for using  ground almonds, a practice that has a long history but seems to have gone out of favour.

Here's what I did - imprecisely as I didn't measure things as I went, not having planned ahead to write this blog - well, who knew if it was going to be successful anyway.

I wiped the mushrooms with kitchen paper to remove pine needle and other bits of plant matter and soil that had attached itself to the caps.  I don't know where I read never to wash mushrooms but I follow that practice. I took about a dozen largish mushrooms and sliced them across the vertical (oh, say, 4 -5 mm thick) and then , as some of them were quite large, into bite size pieces. I diced half an onion quite fine (I was going to use a leek but there was half an onion left in the fridge and I am on a reduce waste kick). I put a good slosh or three of olive oil into a saucepan and when the oil was hot I tossed in the onion to soften. I threw in some Greek dried oregano (I get it in a packet still on the stem and crush it as I need) and poked it and the onions around a bit. To this I added the chopped mushrooms and gave it all a bit more of a paddle to lightly saute the mushrooms.

While this sauteing was going on I made up some vegetable stock (of course I used a cube- as I said, I have been reading Sue Shepard's book and am no longer ashamed of using cubes but see myself as part of the great tradition of preserving by concentration). I poured in enough to set the mushrooms a-swim comfortably in the stock. Casey brought back some herbed salt from her trip to Spain last year and I put in a good couple of pinches of that. Finally I added a good grind or two of pepper. I set all of this to simmer.

Now I took a good handful of almonds and ground them to a paste in my spice grinder. I added a little of the hot stock from time to time to assist the grinder.

I tipped all of this paste into the saucepan and let it cook down for 15 minutes or so. The mushrooms were fresh and thickly enough cut to remain good and firm in the broth, which was now a lovely pale orange from the mushroom juices.

Casey pronounced it delicious and I concur. There was enough to keep in the fridge for tonight as well, and I added a finely diced fresh green chili to mine as a superfluous but satisfying garnish.

D-oh

Okay, it is just possible I cannot make dough. Pie dough, that is (well bread dough to if it comes to that). I think it is because I have absolutely no understanding of what it is. I understand rice, have all my life. I understand hoppers - those yeasted batter bowl shaped pancakes (for want of a common description) and can turn them out, albeit I have to use a non-stick hopper pan so the sides aren't as frilly as they could be, but I also don't understand tempering of a pan so am unlikely to make great advances in using a trad hopper pan. I understand string hoppers, which are from a kind of dough, a rice flour paste really that has to be just the right consistency not to totally set off my arthritis as I squeeze out the noodles (some describe them as vermicelli) onto the bamboo mats for steaming, and I make them darn well. I understand pittu, that mix of rice flour and grated coconut steamed in a columnar thingy. I can turn out a damn fine coconut roti and have been known to assay a decent godamba roti (a wheat based roti on the Malaysian side of rotis). But Euro dough is another country to me. I shall persist, however, as I am determined to make a curried beef (or for my vegan and vegetarian housemates curried vegetable) pie.

Learning the game

I think I have talked before about how comfortable I mostly feel now in putting together a dish from scratch based on the years I've spent cooking and coming to understand flavours and techniques that while they may not produce cutting edge cuisine will get me through most meals whether for myself or for a hastily gathered group.

I'm not claiming for myself anything other than practice, but it feels great to take a basic bechamel and add a splash of tomato sugo, a generous pinch of herbed sea salt and an equally generous pinch of smoked paprika (one of my favourite flavourings), reduce it down to a stage where I can add a panful of lightly sauteed mixed mushrooms and simmer this down quickly to a creamy mixture that I can pour over a layer of slices of just cooked potato lining the bottom of a grapeseed oiled dish, top with another layer of potatoes sprinkled with grated parmesan, grill, and have a most satisfying wet autumn night's dinner. But to also recognise as I hoe into it that the next time presenting the dish with a side of chopped fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, marjoram and perhaps sage either solo or in combo) would take the dish just that step further. Would I go the extent of sliced kalamata olives along with the parmesan on top, absolutely, and I may even go so far as to slice up my home salted dried kalimata that have been marinating in olive oil and dried chili for a couple of years. But no more, I think. There's a fine balance to be found between the additions that enhance the basic dish and those that overwhelm its basics, in this case that combination of potatoes and mushrooms, and I think it's that balance that I get right more often than not these days (there still are disasters that are best composted).

As I think I have in my barbecued whole fish (snapper works well as does redfish). In the absence of lemon or dill one day I looked to the herbs in the garden for a tad of inspiration. What I came up with was first oiling, pepper and salting a sheet of aluminium foil, then laying on top of it a generous bunch of lemon verbena and sprigs of bay, putting the same mix inside the gutted belly of the fish, deep scoring the flesh of the fish three times, laying the fish on its side on the prepared sheet of aluminium foil, then covering the exposed side of the fish with more lemon verbena, bay, pepper, salt and oil, covering that with another sheet of foil, sealing the packet and barbecuing it at a high heat for around 10 to 15 minutes each side.