rossnroller's blog

You know those drying butt-ends of sourdough bread from the previous bake that you leave sitting in a bag, in danger of being forgotten until it's too late? I hate wasting bread, so am always on the lookout for ways to use those leftover bits.

Cubed leftover bread makes great croutons, and of course you can keep yourself in good supply of bread crumbs using a food processor. I keep a bag of frozen bread crumbs in the freezer door, which I often top up.

I mostly prefer straight breads, but had some ricotta that was left over and in danger of souring, so decided on a whim to add it to a bread dough I've been baking a lot lately, along with some fried onion. The result knocked my socks off!

There's a bumper crop of Swiss chard in the backyard. Love spanakopita, saag etc, and a lot of the harvest has gone on those dishes, but a couple of weeks ago 'calzone' began to beat an insistent rhythm in my head. I began to imagine a filling of Swiss chard, ricotta, feta, mushroom, ham maybe...

I bake SD pizzas weekly, so thought I should be able to wing it with calzone (haven't made it before). I adjusted the dough to be a little firmer, concocted that filling I had envisaged, and voila:

My partner is great at preserves and has recently turned her hand to olives, which were sourced from our small potted olive tree and branches overhanging fences around the neighbourhood. We see scrumping as a form of urban harvesting - the olives we took would have fallen to the street and rotted.

Last week was the big reveal. We'd waited months for the moment of tasting, so decided to make an occasion of it with a big farmhouse platter for dinner featuring the olives, an assortment of cheeses, some crudites and prosciuotto - and of course, a nice red.

Not bread, but still baked and yummo!

I've been going through a wing-it phase, experimenting with creating sourdough cakes, brownies and other goodies I'd previously only made using more conventional recipes. I wasn't intending to make chocolate sourdough bread at all, but did so on an impulse when one of my wing-it episodes landed me with a bit too much chocolate and walnut cake mixture.

My assessment ritual with new loaves (I only do SD) is as follows:

1. When the 2 hour cooling period is up, I slice an end off, spread it with a little unsalted butter, and share it with my partner.  Exchange oohs and aahs (when appropriate).

I was intending to give today's bread to someone, but the dough was too long for the peel and the end stuck to the handle as I was loading it into the oven, pulling a bit of dough away. I think I'd better keep this one for my partner and I...

Gives new meaning to the term 'bread porn'!

OTOH, it's marvellous how the perspective changes when viewed from a different angle. But I still don't feel it's appropriate to gift a bread that looks like a...

One of my experiments went awry a couple of days ago. I had some leftover buttermilk and decided to sub that for milk in my usual SD pancake mix. I've used buttermilk in traditional pancakes and it was good, but I found it wasn't prepared to socialise properly with the SD leaven. No matter how much buttermilk I added, the batter refused to thin to the consistency I like. Added milk in the end, and that made things runny, but alas - the batter refused to behave in the fry pan. While browning to a nice golden finish, it was like custard inside.