The macadamias are just getting cured enough to start using now, and the pumpkin stack on the verandah shows no signs of going down. This recipe makes 10.  That many is easy to make and they are at their best fresh.  And they are a bit too good.  If you make more everyone will just eat them, and unless you have a big household you really can’t call 20 in a day Witches Kitchen healthy.  Can you now.

The Recipe:

The pumpkin brioche:

It starts with a cup of fed, frothy sourdough starter, so I start the night before by feeding the sourdough culture with a cup of 50/50 by volume bakers flour and water. Then I leave a cup of the fed starter in a mixing bowl with a clean cloth over the top on the kitchen bench overnight.

To the frothy starter, blend together and add:

• ¾ cup pumpkin puree
• 1 egg
• a dessertspoon of soft butter
• a dessertspoon of brown sugar
• a scant teaspoon salt

(I like roast pumpkin better for puree because it is a little bit drier and more intense, but it isn’t worth putting the oven on for just that.  I put a tray in with the dinner the night before, but you could also use steamed pumpkin).

Then add enough baker’s flour to make a sticky dough – around 2 cups but it will vary depending on the pumpkin and the size of your egg and how generous you are with the butter.  Let that sit for half an hour or so, then scrape it out onto a floured benchtop, sprinkle flour on top, and knead briefly.  You will find that half an hour makes a big difference – the dough will still be soft but more springy than sticky and you should be able to knead it into a smooth ball.

Oil a large bowl with melted butter or a nice, mild flavoured oil like macadamia oil.  Swirl the dough ball around in it to coat, cover the bowl with a clean cloth, and leave out on the benchtop to prove. If the day is warm this should take around 6 hours but sourdough has its own temperament.

The macadamia filling:

Blend together

• ½ cup macadamias
• 1 egg
• 1 dessertspoon butter
• 1 desserspoon brown sugar
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon

My stick blender will handle macadamias, but you could also just use a mortar and pestle.  You want it the texture of crunchy peanut butter.

Assembling:

On a well floured benchtop, knead the pumpkin dough briefly then roll it out into a rectangle 1 cm thick , 40 cm long and about 25 cm wide.

Spread thinly with the filling leaving 2 cm at the end for sealing the scrolls.

Starting from the short side, roll up the 40 cm to form a log. Wet the end and press to stick.

Cut into 2.5 cm thick slices, and arrange the slices in an oiled baking tin so they are just touching.

Leave to prove for another couple of hours till the scrolls are about double in height.

Bake in a moderate oven for around half an hour till they are just browning and sound a bit hollow when tapped.

We’ve been away for a week visiting our daughter and grandson. Such fun being a grandma!

And I took my sourdough culture with me, and fed it and experimented a bit with Ethiopian flatbread (ingera) (more on that in another post), but for the first time in many years now, we bought bread.

And it struck me that, for several years now through busy times and camping holidays and all the inevitable ordinary routine-breakers of life, baking our own bread has made the cut – something worth doing even when time is the most precious commodity going and a zillion other things are barking for attention. Which is a bit intriguing. Bread baking has the image of being something only hardcore homesteaders do routinely. Yet, while the housework is undone and the pile of washing grows, while my poor garden is sometimes sadly neglected and any resolution to do daily yoga has no hope, the bread gets baked.

Maybe I’m lucky to have a really reliable and resilient sourdough culture, but for me it’s a happy nexus of two things: baking sourdough is a whole heap cheaper and easier than any other option, and baking sourdough gives me bread that is  so much tastier and feels so much healthier than any other option.

I have a nice little routine going. Two or three nights a week I take the sourdough culture out of the fridge and feed it. It takes just a minute or so to mix one and a half cups of baker’s flour with one and a half cups of water, mix in the sourdough culture, put half back in the fridge for next time and leave half in a bowl on the kitchen bench, covered with a clean tea towel, for the night.

I use unbleached white baker’s flour for this, because my experience has been that if I feed the sourdough bugs a nice high gluten flour at this point, I can add almost anything else I like and it works. In the morning I have a frothy bowl full of active starter, and I can get creative.

Sometimes I add a porridge of cooked grains – barley, millet, quinoa, oat groats. Sometimes I add dried fruit and nuts. Sometimes I add raw rolled oats, bran and ground linseeds (flax seeds). Sometimes I add rye flour, caraway seeds and a bit of cocoa powder. Sometimes I add grated pumpkin and pepitas. Sometimes I add olives and thyme. Sometimes I add a beaten egg and some yoghurt.

Always a good teaspoon of salt and enough more baker’s flour to make a kneadable dough. Sometimes it turns out memorably wonderful and becomes a favourite. Sometimes not so much. But always it seems to turn out edible.

There’s a feel to kneading bread, and it’s hard to describe. I knead only for a couple of minutes, never the ten minutes in some of the old recipes. Just until the dough is smooth and elastic and has lost its stickiness. I have learned to regard the kneading as my regular “Nana arms” avoidance exercise. If I don’t even have time to do that, I’ve learned I can get away with a very sticky dough and a single rise to make a ciabatta type bread.

Normally though, I leave the dough on the kitchen bench in an oiled bowl covered with the tea towel again, and rush off into my day. By the time I arrive home the dough has always doubled in size. This is the only weak spot in the routine. I need to pick the days when I will be home before about 6 pm, because the bread needs to be “punched down”, or very briefly kneaded again, then put into it’s baking tin with it’s top slashed to allow rising, and left to rise again for an hour or so before baking. And I turn into a pumpkin around 8 pm.

But if I get the dough doing it’s second rise by 6 pm, and I can keep it a bit warm, by 7 pm it is ready to bake. Sometimes I bake flatbreads, rolling it out rather than putting it in a tin after the punching down. Sometimes I put a tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven to create a bit of steam. Sometimes I bake in the mellow oven of the slow combustion stove. Sometimes I put the loaf in a cold George Foreman electric oven. If it has sweetener or dried fruit in it I need to take care to keep the temperature low enough not to burn it. Usually it takes around 40 minutes for a smallish loaf to bake until the crust is golden and it sounds hollow.  If I know I won’t be home in time, I just put a fairly wet dough in a rough loaf shape on a tray in the morning and bake a ciabatta style loaf in the evening after a single rise. And none of the bread we ate while away came close to even that last resort option.

We got home last night, and first thing was to feed the starter.

I’m still on a fig roll.  Figs are in season in the southern hemisphere, and our trees all have a decent crop this year.  I made a baked fig rice pudding for a barbeque last night, but it was only ok.  I think maybe rice pudding really needs no eggs and to be served in a bowl rather than sliced.

This fig and rosemary schiacciata (or focaccia? I’m not sure of the difference) though was recipe-writing worthy.   It starts with a sourdough and a rosemary infused honey oil, for which you need almost no time for making but at least 10 hours or so for proving. So this is a magnificent weekend brunch that fits with a lazy Sunday morning, but you need to remember to start it the night before.

Step 1:

The Rosemary Oil

• Roughly chop a good handful of fresh rosemary.  Put it in a small pot and just cover with olive oil.  Add a good teaspoon of honey and a pinch of salt.
• Heat the oil till it just starts to bubble, then turn it off and let the pot sit, so that the rosemary infuses the warm oil

The Sourdough

• Take the sourdough starter out of the fridge.

• Mix 1  cup of unbleached bakers flour, 1  cup of water, and 1 cup of starter.

• Put half of it back in the fridge.  You should be left with 1 cup of fed starter, to put in a bowl covered with a clean cloth on the kitchen bench for a few hours  (depending on how lively your starter is and how warm your kitchen) to froth up and get breeding.

Stage 2:

• Mix in 1 cup of baker’s flour, a little dollop of olive oil (perhaps a tablespoonful), and half a teaspoon of salt. It will be more like a sticky batter than a dough.  Let that sit for half an hour or so and miraculously it will lose a lot of the stickiness.

• Flour the benchtop well, and tip the mix out onto it.  Sprinkle flour on top.  Knead it briefly,  kneading in just enough more flour to get a ball of soft, springy dough.  To get the open, chewy crumb you want to keep the dough as “hydrated” (as in, wet) as you can. Put a good dollop of  olive oil in a large bowl, swirl the dough ball around in it to coat, cover the bowl with a clean cloth, and leave out on the benchtop for another few hours (or overnight) to prove. It should double in size.

Stage 3:

• Turn your oven on to heat up to medium hot.
• Oil a shallow baking pan.  Mine is an oblong pan 30 cm long.  Tip the dough out onto a floured bench, knock it down, and pat and stretch it into a shape that fits the pan, then transfer it in.
• Slice half a dozen large figs into 1.5 cm slices and arrange over the top.
• Strain the rosemary honey oil and sprinkle it over the top of the figs and the crust.
• Bake for around 40 minutes until the crust is browning and the figs are caramelised.

For a spectacular taste sensation, slice off warm chunks and spread with goat’s cheese.

This post is a bit late isn’t it.  The party season is over and we’re now into lazy and carefree.  Oh well.  Parties will come round again.

Someone asked me not long ago if I make sourdough crackers.  They are so easy they are scarcely a recipe at all. Just sourdough starter, wholemeal flour, oil, salt, and perhaps some sesame or poppy seeds.

Ok, I’ll try to be a bit more specific. Because it is really worth making your own, and avoiding all those nasty transfats, as well as the ridiculous amount of packaging.

The Recipe:

Like my Seedy Sourdough Crispbread, it starts just like regular sourdough, except I make a smaller batch of starter:

Step 1:

• Take the sourdough starter out of the fridge.

• Mix 1  cup of unbleached bakers flour, 1  cup of water, and 1 cup of starter.  (I use my tank water, which has no chlorine or additives in it).

• Put half of it back in the fridge.  You should be left with 1 cup of fed starter, to put in a bowl covered with a clean cloth on the kitchen bench for about 8 hours (overnight or for the day). It should end up frothy, like the picture.

Stage 2:

• Mix in 1 cup of wholemeal flour, a little dollop of olive oil (perhaps a tablespoonful), and half a teaspoon of salt.

• You can add sesame seeds or poppy seeds too if you like.  With this batch, I mistook mustard seeds for poppy seeds, and surprisingly, the crackers are ok.  Though I think I’ll go back to poppy seeds next time.

• Flour the benchtop well,  tip the mix out onto it, and knead in enough more flour to get a ball of soft, springy dough. Put a good dollop of  olive oil in a large bowl, swirl the dough ball around in it to coat, cover the bowl with a clean cloth, and leave out on the benchtop for another 8 hours or so to prove. It should double in size, but with crackers there is a lot of leniency.