Panettone - Make Your Own

Panettone is one of the most delicious Christmas treats, and it's easy to make. I've been making them every Christmas for years now, originally adapted from this excellent recipe here. 

I hate sites where you have to scroll for days to get to the ingredients, so without further ado, you will need:

• 500g white bread flour

• 250g butter (room temperature)

• 4 eggs

• 50g raisins

• 75g dried apricots

• 100g sultanas

• 100g candied peel

• 50g flaked almonds or chopped nuts

• 100ml milk

• 80g sugar

• Zest of 1 lemon & 1 orange

• 3 teaspoons of fast acting dried yeast

• 2 teaspoons of bread improver

• Half teaspoon of salt

• Quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 50ml rum

So you've gathered your ingredients, now get a tin, oil it, and line it deep, i.e. make a tall tube of baking paper and stand it inside, with a disc of paper in the bottom too. I use a cake tin with a push out base. Then oil the inside of the paper too.

Put all the fruit in a bowl (you'll need to slice up the apricots) and pour on the rum, let it soak.

Put the flour, yeast, salt, butter, sugar, lemon and orange zests, bread improver, milk, vanilla, sugar and eggs into a bread machine or a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix, kneed, make it into a soggy dough. If it doesn't look soggy put more milk in it or another egg. Leave it to rest until roughly doubled in size. In my bread machine that's 45 minutes from turning it on, but your mileage may vary according to how you kneed and raise.

Tip it out, mix in the fruit and nuts (drink the residual rum). This is best done on a well floured surface, spread the dough out with a rolling pin (look out, it's all very sticky), spread some fruit on, mix it in, spread it out again, you get the picture.

Dump it in to the lined tin, cover with a plastic bag (on top of your big paper tube) and leave it to rise, until it's well and truly doubled. Some recipes seem to assume that'll take forever, but with the bread improver powder (basically vitamin C and gluten) that's not the case, it'll be done in a couple of hours.

Brush the top with egg or milk cut a little cross in it to give it space to rise, and put it in the oven preheated to 180C for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down and give it another 40 minutes. It should be done, but if the skewer test says it isn't give it a little longer.

It's traditional to skewer them and hang them upside down to cool, but it shouldn't be necessary. Turn it out and leave it on a wire rack to cool.

And that's it, that's your panettone. As fine a Christmas cake as exists in any cuisine.

Carrot Jam, and Carrot Bread

Every week we pick up a box of scraps from the greengrocer, essentially saving some of the stuff they've got going to waste from ending up in the bin, to give to our hens to keep their diets interesting and fun. It's also great for getting good, tasty eggs with dark orange yolks, you want your hens to have lots of greens in their diets. But we get all sorts in there and sometimes we end up with an excess of something that we'll struggle to get the chickens to eat. This week it was carrots.

Carrot jam (bottom), and bread (toasted, top)

Now they will eat carrots if we cook them first, otherwise they're not fond. So I ended up filling a jam pan up with cleaned, chopped carrots and cooked them until tender, giving a huge bowl full to the girls and saving some more for us. 

I happened upon a recipe for carrot jam in the style of apricot, originally from Mrs. Beetons book of Household Management, replicated by Jane Grigson in her (wonderful) work "Good Things". I've adapted that just slightly, and I'll share that recipe below.

After making the jam I still had pulped carrots left, so I thought bugger it, and tossed it in to bread. I'm delighted I did, it's also delicious. 

Without further ado, the recipes.

Carrot Jam in the Style of Apricot

You will need:

Carrots
To every 1lb (450g) of pulped carrots allow 1lb (450g) of sugar
Juice of 2 lemons (or 1 large lemon)
Zest of 1 lemon
6 chopped almonds
2 tablespoons of brandy
1 drop of almond essence

First, kill your carrots. Scrub them clean, slice them, and cover with water in a large pan. Simmer them until they're soft - like bad school dinner soft. Strain and reserve the water, that'll be invaluable as the basis for making soup later.

Now pulp the carrots, whether by mashing them and putting them through a sieve (old school) or sticking a wand blender in, get them fully pureed. You'll have a pan full of the orangest goo you've ever seen.

Weigh your pulp and add sugar in the ratio described above in the recipe - essentially the same weight of carrot pulp as sugar. Sterilise some jars (clean them, pour boiling water in them and over the lids, pour it out and place them in an oven at 105-110C until you need them). Now boil the carrot and sugar mixture, get it to a full boil and keep stirring while you boil it for around 5 minutes. Now take it from the heat.

Add a mix containing the lemon juice, zest, brandy, chopped or ground up almonds and drop of almond extract, and stir it in fast. Pour this into your sterilised jars and seal tightly. This isn't a jam that'll last years but with the sugar, brandy and lemon it will keep for a while. Let it cool, serve as a breakfast jam or in the middle of cakes. It's quite delicious.

Carrot Bread

You will need:

3 teaspoons of instant fast acting yeast
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of bread improver or vitamin c powder (optional)
3 cups of bread flour
Approximately 2/4 cup of water
1/3 cup cooking oil
1 cup of carrot pulp (see above)
1 tablespoon of sugar

You know how to make bread dough. Add your instant yeast (or your chosen option for yeast, pre-activated if you wish) to the bread flour (I used 2 cups of malted wholegrain and 1 cup of white), with the salt, sugar (to get the yeast going), oil, carrot, bread improver (if you think your flour might need it), and water. Work it all into a dough, adjusting with more or less water as required (this is a variable, I don't know how wet your carrots are!) and kneed it for 5-10 minutes or so, until the dough is good and stretchy. Alternatively drop it all into a bread machine and put it on the dough cycle.

Let it rest until doubled in size, knock it back, and form it into loaves. Leave it to rise again until doubled in size and then bake it at 200C for 28 minutes, and it sounds hollow when tapped on the base. I cooked mine in silicone loaf moulds but it'll be fine as a bloomer or even as bread buns (then you'll have to cook them hotter, say 220C, for less time - about 12 minutes, if you make this into a dozen buns). Let it cool on a wire rack to set up what bread makers call a crumb, and you're done. 

This is a very savoury bread - with butter it's slightly carroty, it's very orange, but with the carrot jam it's quite delightful. 

Falafel and Hummus (and Falafel Burgers)

There are probably as many recipes for falafel as there are people who have written them down, and not only are they all fabulous, they're all right. There's a stall on Cambridge market with some guys from Algeria who sell falafel made the way their families cooked it, and it's quite different to the falafel I ate in a backstreet cafe in Amman in Jordan. And that's different to the falafel I've had cooked by Lebanese and Israeli friends. Indeed, having a set recipe for falafel seems almost weird. 

Crazy mad falafel burger in a bun that'll need a damn good squashing to eat 

So I'm going to share my recipe here. Not because it's authentic (whatever that even means), or because  it's better than other falafel recipes (it probably isn't), but because it's easy, simple and always just works. Think of this as a 'basic' falafel from which you can make whatever other variants you like. I'll come on to talking about some of those variants below too.

As for hummus, I'll go so far as to say what I'm going to tell you here is heresy. But, again, this is a basic hummus and it's a way of making it that's great for the purpose to which I'm putting it, in a burger bun.

Falafel

You will need:

2 cups of dry chickpeas

1/2 an onion

4 garlic cloves

1 dessertspoon of ground cumin

Squeeze of lemon juice

Salt and pepper to taste

Drizzle of olive oil

4 cloves of garlic

Oil for frying

Soak the chickpeas the night before. They do need a long soak, you want to put them on before bed to cook them the following evening.

Peel the onion and garlic and drop them into a food processor, and when they're finely chopped drop in the chickpeas, lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil and the cumin. Now whizz it up, to a fairly smooth consistency. You're not adding any other binder here, so you need it to be fine or it'll fall apart later. 

Now tip your mix out into a bowl, and warm up your deep fat fryer to 170C. If you haven't got one, add an inch of fat to the bottom of a heavy bottom pan and get it hot enough to fry. Form patties to whatever size you like, and drop them in to the fat, turning occasionally until they're evenly browned all over. Yes, you can make nice big ones and call them falafel burgers. 

Serve hot, with salad, maybe a salsa, pickles, hummus, anything you like really. And if you've got any extra you can bung it in the fridge and warm it up in the microwave for lunch tomorrow. Make extra, in fact, and save some for later.

Hummus

You will need:

250g of cooked chickpeas

2 tablespoons of tahini or chunky peanut butter*

Juice of 1 lemon

2 cloves of garlic

1 dessertspoon of cumin

3 tablespoons of olive oil 

Water to preference

Salt, pepper and paprika to taste

If you want to soak extra chickpeas and then either boil or pressure cook them until they're tender (that's my preferred approach - 12 minutes at full pressure) that's great, otherwise you can used tinned.

Slice up the garlic, drop it into the food processor with tahini, chickpeas, olive oil, lemon juice and add the cumin. If you want this to be really stiff and ideal for use in a burger, use peanut butter instead of tahini (this is probably heresy but you're eating a falafel burger so quit whining).  

Now taste it. You'll need to add salt, pepper, cumin and I suggest some paprika. Do you want it to be runnier, more of a dipping sauce? Add water, or if you want to be trendy some of the juice from a tin of chickpeas. 

Tip it into a bowl you can cover tightly, and refrigerate until you need it. 

Variations

There are all sorts of ways of changing this dish up.

I like to add fresh coriander and parsley into my falafel sometimes, it gives the dish a really fresh, zesty taste. Another variant would be to grind it a little less so it's chunkier but then to add an egg to bind it together so you get a coarser falafel. I've even added beetroot to produce a really pink, brightly coloured and sweet falafel. Essentially if you can grind it in with the chickpeas you can make it.

Hummus comes in a gazillion varieties on deli counters these days, and they're all basically just hummus with something else ground in. Roasted garlic works well, roasted red peppers, roasted carrots or sweet potatoes, etc. Give it a go, it won't go wrong. If you've got some black eyed peas cooked as well as chick peas, they can go in, likewise you can use dried peas instead of chickpeas and it's fine. The bottom line is, it's an adaptable and simple method and you can make it any way you like. 

Vegan Almond Blancmange

I started by making rice milk. And I hated it. 

I know, that's an inauspicious start to a blog post. But it turned out to be a good thing. I've been experimenting with plant milks and so far this one is by far the least milky. But I wasn't going to waste it, so I adapted it into a fairly traditional blancmange recipe, which I'll share below. And it's not at all bad.

To begin with, you need your rice milk. Then you can make your blancmange.

The Recipe

Rice Milk

For the rice milk, you will need...

1 cup of cooked rice
4 cups of water

Put the rice into a blender, add the water (or as much as will fit without spilling) and give it a damn good thrashing. Blend it as fast as you dare for three or four minutes. Then pour it out through a fine sieve (not a straining bag), and make the volume up to at 850ml (a pint and a half) with water if you haven't got that much. It'll be quite gel like, and you may need to twist the sieve around a bit to get it to go through.

The Blancmange

You will need

850ml (a pint and a half) of rice milk
4 tablespoons of sugar (more if it is to your taste)
5 heaped tablespoons of cornflour
2 tablespoons of dried coconut cream
1/2 teaspoon of almond extract*

Food colouring of your choice (I used yellow)

Put the milk in a pan and add the sugar, start with about 3 tablespoons, and stir in the almond extract. Yes, you can use a different flavouring, and yes, it's a good idea to add less rather than more. Stir it in, taste it, and sweeten more and add more flavouring if you need to. I've put a star next to the almond extract because not all extracts are created equal - with some you may require more, with others you may need less.

Now mix a little of the liquid in with the cornflour, mix it to a paste, and pour it back in to the mix while stirring. If you're using the dried coconut cream (this is common in Asian supermarkets and a really handy thing to have in) then add this with the cornflour. It's not absolutely necessary, but it'll make the dish a bit richer, and a bit more creamy. 

The word blancmange is obviously comes from the old French for "to eat white", so it can simply be a thickened milk dish. But traditionally it's coloured and often put into quite elaborate moulds, but I was boring and just went bowl shaped, and I like yellow. When you've got your mix in the pan, flavoured and with the cornflour added, mix food colouring a drop at a time until it's a colour you like. Obviously if you're trying to keep this vegan be careful about what colour you choose - cochineal might not be to your taste.

Get a bowl or a mould ready to pour the blancmange in to when it's ready.

And now cook it, stirring the whole time, until it's thickened and when you taste it the cornflour is fully cooked. It won't take long. And at that point pour it out into your mould.

And that's it, you're done. Put it aside to cool, and come back later when it's fully cool and turn it out of the mould. There's not a lot of protein in it, like a dairy milk blancmange, and it shouldn't be hard to get it out. If it is then you can always put the mould into a larger bowl of hot water for a few minutes.

Serve with whatever you want really - we're going to have ours with some left over vegan chocolate sauce that I made to go with soya ice cream. 

Soya cream, Vanilla Ice Cream and Chocolate Sauce

Continuing to broaden out my vegan repertoire I've just been making chocolate sauce to go with the vegan ice cream I made yesterday. This all starts with the soya milk I recently posted. It's surprisingly good. The proportions here will give you about 3 dishes of the size shown below (big portions!), or 4 more sensible portions.

The first thing you need to make for both parts of this, the ice cream and the chocolate sauce, is the cream. For this you need...

Ingredients for Soya Cream

2 cups of soya milk

2 dessertspoons full of cornflour

1 cup of sunflower or rapeseed oil 

Take a cup of the milk and add a little of it to the cornflour in a small pan. Mix it to a paste, and add the rest of the half-cup to the pan. Pour the other half cup in the blender for later. 

Heat the pan until the milk has thickened (it'll get really thick) and the cornflour has cooked out so it no longer tastes powdery. Let it come off the boil, let it cool for a minute and scrape it in to the blender with the rest of the milk. Get it it zipping around until it's smooth, push it all back down the sides with a spatula if it seems to be all over the place. Take the little thingy out of the middle of the blender lid, and start slowly pouring the oil in while blending at speed. This is rather like making mayonnaise, it'll thicken up to a soft peak like thick double cream.

When you're done, it should be thick and creamy

If you haven't got a blender, you can make the same recipe with an electric whisk or stand mixer. Or a hand whisk if you're really patient and willing to give it a lot of welly.

For the ice cream

Half of the soya cream (from above)

2 tablespoons of sugar (more or less if you prefer)

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract*

Mix the ingredients together, until the sugar is dissolved. Do this in the blender if you wish. I've put an asterisk by the vanilla extract there because not all vanilla extracts are equal - if yours is a really intense brand you may need a lot less than 1 teaspoon.

After blending all together, taste it. When ice cream is frozen it's always a little less intense - you need the flavour to be a little too sweet, and a little too vanilla, before it freezes. Once you've got it how you like it, pour it into a shallow container with a cover and put it into the freezer. Take it out ever 45 minutes or so, stir it vigorously to get the frozen parts mixed in, and do so until it's frozen. 

For the chocolate sauce

Half of the soya cream (from above)

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 handfull of dark (vegan) chocolate buttons*

1 splash of coffee (filter is good)

Save the remnants out of your morning coffee pot. In fact if you're making any dark chocolate sauce, vegan or dairy, save some black coffee from the morning pot. 

Put the chocolate in a pan with the cream, add the sugar, and warm it gently. Don't be afraid to keep taking it off the heat while you melt the chocolate into the cream. Add the sugar too, and when it's all melted together and the sugar dissolved, add the coffee and stir it in. The water in the soy cream will allow you to mix the coffee in to the ganache like creamy chocolate mix without it splitting. Note that like the vanilla extract in the cream, all dark chocolates are not created equal. You may need lots, you may need a little. If you don't put enough in you can always add more.

Stir it occasionally as it cools. If you've got any spare after serving it with the ice cream, put it in little pots and keep it in the fridge, it'll almost set and it'll do fine for weekday desserts. 

Soy Milk - The Best Non-Dairy Milk?

Why?

I'm not the worlds most committed carnivore, but I'll confess I've never really got on with non-dairy milks. I'd rather drink my tea black than put plant extracts in it to make it 'white'. But in an ever more complicated world in which you'll find yourself catering to vegans, cohabitants doing 'veganuary', vegetarians who don't take dairy, and people who just don't get on with cows milk its a good idea to have a non-dairy solution up your sleeve. And I don't know about you but I'd rather make it than buy it.

I've occasionally experimented with such milks and I think the best is soy milk. Almond milk is absurdly expensive to make and rather fails over sustainability, oat milk is vile, and I while I think coconut milk is delicious I think it's also too strongly flavoured for most of the uses you put milk to. Soy milk hits the sweet spot for usefulness, taste, and cost. So here's how I make it.

First, catch your beans

I would suggest that you'll do better buying soya beans from an ethnic shop than from a major retailer or 'wholefoods' shop. You'll probably have more options that way, clearer labelling, and a better price. You can usually get a bag like this for under a couple of quid. The great thing about dried beans is that they last pretty much forever, if you keep them in a tightly stoppered container in the larder. So don't worry about getting a few extra beans in, they won't go off.

The Recipe 

Dry (below) and soaked (above) beans

You will need:

175g soya beans (6oz if you're old fashioned)
1.4 litres (6 cups) of water (but measure that out later).

To begin with, soak your beans overnight. Soya beans swell a lot when soaking, so start with a nice bug bowl (you'll see why later). 

After soaking the beans swell up enormously. Now drain them, and tip your beans into a blender, and measure out your 1.4l of water (6 cups, if you like). Pour enough of this water into the blender with the beans such that you can blitz it up to make a paste. Something like 2-3 cups of the water will be needed. Once you've got a good paste, then empty the blender out into a large pan. Use a little more of the water to rinse the out your blender and pour that in too. Yes, you can use a food processor if you prefer.

Soy bean paste, ready to boil

Now add most of the rest of the water (keeping back perhaps a cup full) and cook the bean paste, bringing it to a boil while stirring. Keep it boiling for 2-3 minutes. While it's warming up put a clean tea towel into a large sieve, and stand it over the large basin you soaked the beans. Tip the pulp into the tea towel and leave it to cool, straining through the sieve. Once it has cooled enough to handle, pour the last of your water through it, and let most of it drain. Then tie it up in the towel and give it a tight squeeze to get as much juice out as you can. You've now got a towel full of soy mince (this is useful stuff, I'll cover that in another post) and you've got a bowl full of white-ish fluid that sort of smells like paint. It's not quite ready yet, you need to boil it to fully denature the soya proteins and make them digestible and, crucially, not smelling like paint. I can't stress how important this is - if you don't boil it now, if you don't denature the proteins, then it'll split when you pour it into a hot cup of tea or coffee. It's revolting. 

Clean out your pan, put the milk back in, and boil it for 5 minutes while stirring it to prevent it sticking. 

Soy milk boiling and almost ready

Give it a taste, and when you're happy with it turn the heat off, take the pan off the hot ring and put it aside to cool. The longer you boil it, the richer it gets, the 'milkier' it gets, but the less you'll have at the end. Stir it occasionally while cooling, to prevent a skin forming, and bottle it and fridge it when its cool. And that's it you've made soy milk!

Put the soy mince into a tightly sealed box and put it in the fridge. It'll keep a few days and you can use it in sauces, burgers, sausages, all sorts of things. It's a lot better than soy mince you can buy too.

Once you've mastered making soy milk, it's surprisingly easy to make soy cream, from which it is just a short step to ice cream, and tofu (which is rather like curd cheese made with soy milk). Or just use it as milk in tea, on cereal, etc.

As I've already mentioned, this isn't (in my view) as good as cow or goat milk. But it's better than the other vegan alternatives, and it's at leas a short ingredient list that you're in control of. It's low cost, easy, and healthy, and by far the best of the vegan milk alternatives.

Make Your Own Soap

There are loads of websites telling you how to make soap, hundreds of blog posts that start with massive preambles before getting down to brass tacks of how to do it. So lets do this a different way. I'm going to start with how I make soap, then I'm going to move on to why, and THEN I'm going to talk about whats actually happening.

Ok, tell me how to make soap.

For ingredients you're going to need oils (fats), lye (sodium hydroxide), water (rain water is ideal), and if you want to add some scent you'll be wanting a few drops of some essential oils (be sparing!), and perhaps dried herbs or spices. And if you really must colour it, use a crayon (take the paper off first, obviously). 

For protective equipment (AND I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOU MAKING SOAP WITHOUT PPE) you want some safety goggles and rubber gloves. You might also consider a face visor if you think you're likely to be a messy worker.

And for equipment to work with, you need a huge stainless steel pan (I use my stock pot). I mean huge. No messing about with a little one, unless you want a disastrous boil over, potentially a kitchen fire and, at very least, a god awful mess. And you need some polypropylene jugs, and the most accurate scale you have - a digital scale working down to the gram is good. You need to stir the mixture as you make it - those rubber spatulas, the silicone ones, are ideal. But get a couple, they'll get hot as you work and swapping them is good. Lastly, you need something to pack the soap into while it sets - I use silicone molds.

Firstly, weigh everything out. My basic recipe is as follows:

400g Sunflower oil (ordinary cooking stuff)

400g Olive Oil (get the cheaper extra virgin stuff)

400g Coconut Oil (again, get the cheap stuff from a Chinese supermarket)

400ml rain water 

180g sodium hydroxide

20 drops of essential oils, spices (optional)

Firstly, mix up your oils and get any other dry ingdredients ready. I often use a mix of nutmeg oil, cinnamon oil, a little pine oil, tea tree, and a hand full of coarsely ground allspice grains. Once these are ready, put them aside.

Now don your safety glasses and marigolds, and slowly pour the sodium hydroxide into the water, then stir it with one of your spatulas until it is dissolved. I've handled some of the nastiest chemicals you can imagine and some biological hazards you really don't even want to imagine, but most often its the every day chemicals that people have accidents with. Sodium hydroxide is one of them, it WILL blind you if you get it in your eyes. So don't. If it gets on your skin wash it off, and keep washing it. 

Put the oil in the big pan, and start warming it up. Use your spatula to get the last of the oil out of what you weighed it in too. And when its warming, pour your sodium hydroxide solution into it and start stirring while you continue heating, being sure you get down to the bottom of the pan and keep the soap from sticking. Very soon, you get something like this...

It'll boil up and terrify you, but keep it on a heat and keep it stirring. If your spatula gets too hot, put it in a plastic jug to cool down and get your other one. Keep stirring, and soon it'll look like apple sauce. At that point, keep stirring...

Keep going. Heat it more gently if you like, but keep going. It'll start looking like mashed potato...

And now? Keep going, it'll start getting really thick and just at the bottom, where its hottest, it'll start to look a bit dry. Its done... 

Now get it off the heat and beat in the other ingredients. This is going to be hard work. But whether thats a crumbled up crayon, spices, oils, whatever it is, beat it until its combined and then start plopping it out into your mold. For this I use the two spatulas, and occasionally I risk pushing it down into the molds with the rubber gloves...

And thats it. Let it cool just enough so you can handle it, pop it out of the molds and put it on a plastic boards to cool. When its cool and hard, its ready to use. 

You're kidding me, its that easy?

Yes. The whole process takes about, oh, I dunno, half an hour or so, maybe three quarters, until you can put the kettle on and wait for it to cool. But easy? You might find it hot, stressful, worrying, if you spill it you've got problems. But yes, its as simple and easy as that.

But why? You can buy soap...

Ok then don't. No skin off my nose. I make soap because its easy, quite fun, I can get just the soap I want with control over whats in it. Quite a rewarding thing to do. I've also always found all the kinds of soap you can buy just leave me itchy all over, this soap doesn't. 

Whats actually happening then?

The chemistry of this is simple enough. You're taking a fat, chemically breaking it up, into fatty acids, and making the salt of that. The process is called saponification, and its quite fascinating when you read up about it.

Can I change the recipe or use other fats?

Yes, you can. You'll want to hunt down the saponification value of the oils you want to use though, otherwise you'll end up making something potentially very dangerous. The internet is full of sites that will give you those values, it won't take you long. But if you're going down that route, find some more in-depth reading first. This is a primer for doing your first batch, not a guide to all forms of soap making.

Is there a safer, lower stress way?

Yes. The process I've described above is hot processing. There is also a method called cold process with is easier and safer, but can take weeks of waiting. There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, but you do need to be able to put something aside somewhere safe and forget about it. Lots of advice about how to do that online, and its a common beginners way in. Maybe start here.