Long Crichel Bakery

I'm very hit and miss when it comes to making bread. It's something I feel I should be able to do, something I should be good at. Once in a while I will knock up a beautiful light loaf that fills the flat with that most comforting of aromas. The smell of freshly baked bread wafting into the hall outside for all my neighbours to smell too. These instances don't happen often though, and on many attempts it all goes terribly wrong. The beautiful smell is there but the dough has been underworked, over-kneeded, didn't rise, was too stodgy. Whenever anyone has eaten my bread and commented how good it might be, the truth is that it is most likely a fluke. I have only ever made a small hand full of edible bread, with the other loaves cast off in great chunks for the birds to struggle through on the lawn. Sourdough was one area I managed to do fairly well, but even then it never tasted quite as I'd hoped. Some people go crazy for bread, oggling dimly lit photos and writing passages on the methods that are more akin to a Mills & Boone novel than some food literature. Bread porn is something that spurs on great debates and many descriptive discussions. How some people can lust over such a humble food seems almost perverse and up until recently I had never quite had the adoration.



Long Crichel Bakery has changed my mind though. Feeling a little lost and like we were in the opening scene of a bad horror movie we rolled up to Long Crichel at around 11am with dark clouds and hammering rain overhead. From the outside, the renovated 18th century stable block looks like any other but on opening the door a familiar bakers smell drew us in like lambs to the slaughter. I like the cute little bakery, it's simple and to the point. Baskets of root veg, some farmhouse butter, cheeses and other select food products are on the few shelves whilst the counter is bustling with croissants, pain au chocolat, alsace tartes, simnel cakes and sausage rolls. The shelves of bread, the reason we made such a drive to come and try, were full of warm loaves all in varying shapes, sizes and colour. Set against the white washed stone walls I was beginning to understand what those bread pervs were on about now. The kind lady let me loose through the labrynthine rooms of the bakery to see the ovens and starters and trolleys full of sticky topped hot cross buns and take a few pictures. As I crossed the threshold behind the till and into the main area of the bakery I almost knocked over a whole tray of the aforementioned shiny hot cross buns. Luckily my wife has reactions like a superhero and, as per usual, saved me from terrible embarrassment.



Long Crichel Bakery is completely organic and biodynamic where available. They have perfected their craft out there in the sticks and it seems every loaf has a crunchy crust with a soft and moist inside. The bakery uses freshly milled flour from a nearby mill,  milk and butter from a Dorset dairy farm and all the bread is baked in wood fired ovens fed from a local, sustainable forest. After being shown around and taking hundreds of photos of hot cross buns I left with one for the drive home along with a five-seed sourdough loaf. The hot cross bun was still warm with the outside all sticky and crunchy with a soft fluffy inside which tasted a million miles away from any I have ever had before. The five-seed loaf has now become my best friend. I don't want it to end. It's fantastic and over the past few days we have just been eating it with nothing but butter or some cream cheese. As we near the end of the loaf and my eyes start to fill up, my wife tells me to pull myself together and stop being a dick.

Turns out the Green Deli in Ashley Cross sells Long Crichel Breads and has two deliveries a week which will save such a pilgrimage next time I fancy a decent loaf.

Below are the details of Long Crichel Bakery and The Green deli in Ashley Cross. I'd go for the five-seed sourdough myself.

Long Crichel Bakery
Long Crichel
Wimborne
Dorset BH21 5JU
01258 830852
info@longcrichelbakery.co.uk
http://www.longcrichelbakery.co.uk/

The Green
24 Station Road
Ashley Cross
Poole
Dorset, BH14 8UB
01202 914656
info@the-green.co.uk
http://www.the-green.co.uk/

Sourdough

I went through a phase of buying sourdough loaves quite a lot last summer. For crostini, which we use as a base for a lot of our summer suppers, it has a quality unrivaled by any other toasted bread. We have a habit of toasting slices of it drizzled in olive oil and then spread with sun-dried tomato puree as a quick snack after work before we head to the beach. I quickly became aware of the long-winded process of making sourdough and the effort involved seemed more akin to owning a dog, at least the dog would fetch.

At the beginning of January I had decided it was time. The idea that my sourdough starter would stay with me indefinitely sounded kind of nice, like a girlfriend that doesn't nag. I had sought out some advice and Food Urchin, a fellow food blogger, had steered me in the direction of Moro's sourdough starter recipe along with a few encouraging words, not least forewarning me of the gut wrenching smell it omits. I played a preemptive strike by putting the starter in a sealed tupperware box up on a shelf out of sight. In a preventative exercise to diminish any chance of the wife castrating me in my sleep due to the foul stench I may have saturated our flat in. Feeding often became a difficult time in our household, especially when I remembered to feed it just as she was making a cup of tea. (The blistered skin from the scolding has only just healed)

A month later, Clarence, as I call my starter, is at what looks like the desired consistency. A bit bubbly and fizzy to the taste. The evening before I baked the loaves I mixed 250g of Clarence with 700ml of cold water and 450g of plain flour in a bowl, covered with a tea towel and left in a warm corner of the kitchen over night for the first phase of the proving process.





Today I added 3 tsp salt and another 450g of plain flour and brought together to form a bowl full of stretchy wet dough that I worked with my fingertips for five minutes. It came to a similar consistency of that gunge you used to be able to buy circa '89. Ectoplasm I think the Ghostbusters version was called. The Moro recipe calls for the use of a tin but I like rustic looking loaves and so opted to do one of them straight on a baking sheet. Thirty minutes at gas mark eight then remove from baking tray and tin before another fifteen minutes in the oven.

It turned out ok, not enough big air bubbles and a little too moist on the inside for my liking. I think I may have over worked the gluten in the dough or my starter hasn't got enough oompf yet. Either way, batch number one is done and out the way, I didn't do too badly and now I am left to tweak and play around until I get somewhere close to the light and airy loaves I usually buy from the shop. I have a little way to go yet but the art of bread making was never going to happen over night. Whilst dipping some of my bread into balsamic vinegar and olive oil I toasted thinly cut slices, smeared them with sun-dried tomato puree and topped with tuna-bean salad. Eased into the flavours of summer I felt like slipping my flip-flops and board shorts on there and then, but it was freezing so I kept my bobble hat on instead.

A New Pet: My Sourdough Starter

I have a new friend, a pet. Something that is going to require feeding and loving. Ten days ago I created my sourdough starter. I sought a little advice on recipes to use and after much deliberation, and a little guidance from Food Urchin, I settled on one. I had been warned about the foul smell starters can emit and to protect my nose from the stench, made sure I had a large tupperware box complete with lid at the ready. By keeping it in this box I have not only protected myself from such an assault on the nostrils but also from the potential battering I may have received from my wife had I saturated the flat in the odour I smelt today. After ten days sat sealed and hidden away on a shelf I thought it high time I knew what all the fuss was about. It has what can only be described as a combination of bile, urine and human vomit with a faint hint of grape to the nose. A full bodied sludge that is living. I Feel a little like Dr. Frankenstein, what kind of monster have I created? I start feeding it next week but for now it has its lid back on and is safely nestled on the shelf. I'm already feeling quite paternal over my new pet. What with the responsibility of feeding it, keeping it the right temperature and the added reminder that I will have to stick with my commitment of making my own sourdough from now on. I've settled on the name Clarence. At least he won't mess on the carpet...

Baking Bread

I think baking bread is quite daunting at first glance and I've been meaning to make my own bread for ages now and as I've had a few days off this week I thought I'd step to it. Although it takes a few hours to do, keeps for only a few days and is probably no cheaper than buying a loaf from the shop, I think it is worth baking your own loaf just for the smell it fills your house with. This wasn't my first attempt, but the less said about my first loaf the better, if you imagine something that has all the characteristics of a brick, and could possibly be confiscated as a weapon and your somewhere near. Needless to say it has been nearly a year since that fateful day. So I found a recipe that looked gentle to the novice baker and set about the kitchen. The recipe was a Nigel Slater one that had been bastardised into american weights and measures, the whole cup system is too vague if you ask me, I much prefer grams or pounds. It came together as expected and once the ingredients resembled a sticky dough I tipped it out onto my side and worked the dough until springy, which took a while. Can Bakers get RSI?
I set it in a bowl with a tea towel on top in a warm place to rise for an hour.
When I took the dough out to 'knock-down' and knead again it felt amazing, really fun to push and fold, and if I'm honest I felt like a proper baker boy, "what this? Oh just knocking up some bread, you know."
After letting it rise again for forty five minutes I did start to think it was looking quite big. This is probably the point where I should have decided to split it into two smaller loaves or even three.
I tucked it into a nice long bloomer shape and floured it slightly before sliding my creation into the oven. Now I'm a bit of a nerd in the kitchen and often watch through the glass what's happening step by step in the oven to help learn and avoid problems in the future. "I've created a monster!" It wouldn't stop growing, I thought it was in danger or rising so much that it might touch the roof of the oven and wedge itself in there. Fortunately my bread considered its options and decided to take its chances at freedom rather than be confined to a life in the dark chamber of my oven. I set Frankensteins monster on a wire rack to cool and even though it was enormous and would probably be considered morbidly obese by his peers, I loved him anyway. The bread actually looked really good and as mentioned before, the smell my flat was now filled with was better than any incence you can buy.
Note to self: fresh bread incence, possible business idea, or the ramblings of an idiot?
Once Big Steve had cooled down, as I was now affectionately calling him, I cut into him and smeared some butter over a slice. The bread was good but slightly stodgy, It definitely wasn't as light and fluffy as I would have liked but as a second attempt I was quite pleased with myself. The behemoth bread wasn't actually that big once you cut a few slices off and was really a blessing in disguise. The slices were so big I made a massive sandwich with some extra mature cheddar, some free range, aged iberico chorizo and Tracklements Chilli Jam.


I was over the moon with my bread. I am going to keep experimenting with different flours and flour mixes and try to work the dough that little bit more. If I had eight kids the loaf would have been ample, but as it is just the two of us I will have to reduce the quantities, or start thrusting loaves of bread on my parents every time I see them.