#robinne

Oh boy, do I ever!

One of the things I appreciate since moving to the UK is self-raising flour. What a lovely shortcut! It doesn’t work for every recipe that needs a chemical leavener, but it does work for a lot of things.

I still have sense memory flashbacks to this godawful Jamie Oliver scone recipe (like, scones are Baking 101 in this country, JAMIE) and there was absolutely too much bicarb in them because they tasted bitter and soapy. Awful. Someone please revoke Jamie Oliver’s food empire and give at least parts of it to me for having to eat those bad scones.

Also, I recently learned that baked goods brown better if they’re more alkaline - that’s why giving your pretzels a lye bath (or bicarb if you’re terrified of using lye, like I am) gives them that gloriously deep-brown crust.

Also! You know? I like a yeast-leavened cake! They’re not super common these days, but it just RAMS EVEN MORE FLAVOUR IN THERE in a really nice way.

I wish I could embrace sourdough! It’s cool and I think generally better for you than commercial yeast, but I really hate the idea that every day you have to discard a pretty decent portion of your starter to keep it alive and happy. This is fine if you use that starter to bake bread every day, but I will never be a bakes-bread-every-day person, which means I’ll just be throwing away perfectly good ingredients every day. It feels wasteful to do, and every time I don’t use my sourdough discard I’ll just feel guilty, which will probably mean I’ll overburden myself with the activity of trying to bake bread more often than I actually have time for. So I love it in theory, but it isn’t for me right now. (Also I tried to make a really small sourdough starter once and it died when I had to leave it in the fridge unattended for 5 days when I travelled to LA)

Robinne

Robinne