Successful baking from mud and Enthusiasm

So, last Saturday, I could contain myself no longer and I finally decided to fire up my oven. I called my friend Steve, with whom I had constructed it the week before and like two ridiculously excited schoolboys, at 6 o’clock, we lit it. I had started the dough, with strong durum flour, at breakfast time, put it in the fridge for a few hours, given it a good slapping-about mid afternoon and then left it to prove for a few more hours.

Well, a few hours later, the oven was getting hot to the touch and there was considerable amount of heat coming out of the front of it. So we made a pizza and swept the embers to either side of the base of the fire. Placing the pizza dough on the paddle, or “peel” as I believe it is called, the first flatbread was plonked unceremoniously inside.

Yes, those are chairlegs. That’s how eager I was. I chopped up furniture to burn.

 

Well, it wasn’t an immediate success. It fell into the ashes and the edges were a bit gritty. But the principle had been proven. We had baked our first bread in a home-made clay pizza oven made from clay from my flower beds!

My IOW pizza

So we made up a proper pizza and rearranged the ashes a bit more. This time, I blocked up the door with a bit of plywood. The results were better, although the shape rather reminiscent of the Isle of Wight. But it cooked, and we ate it and it was lovely!

The next attempt went better. the oven was warming up now and the outside too hot to touch. The technique to get the dough off the peel left something to be desired and an accidental folded-up calzoni was produced, which now tasted something like we had hoped. Many hands appeared, to grab a slice, and enthusiasm was building along with the heat. we were getting the hang of it now.

Well, by now it was getting late in the evening and the oven was fair singing with heat. We had one ball of dough left, sufficient for one large final pizza. On to this one went bacon, mushrooms, chorizo and olives. Five hours after lighting, the oven was perfect. And we had run out of dough. And beer. Luckily by then, i was on to the blackberry wine, which now has a lovely fizz, so I had it with creme de Mur, and this was gorgeous. But that’s another story.

This pizza was the best I had ever tasted. Our deep satisfaction from our endeavours – the idea, the construction, the toil, the lighting of the fire, the cooking – all converged upon this one glorious moment of shared consumption.

Much was learned that night about how (not) to use a clay pizza oven. It seems the way to do it is to light a fire a good four hours earlier than you need to use it and to get the base and structure really hot before attempting to cook anything in it.

Then, when there is a layer of glowing embers a good 5cm deep over the whole base for a significant time, remove enough to make space for the food, and sweep the remainder to the sides. These then need to be kept on fire and flaming with small, thin, long pieces of kindling. After that, you have a wonderful hot space at perhaps upward of 400C in which to cook (very quickly). In here, pizza, bacon, lamb kebabs or even small loaves of bread can be cooked. More experiments will continue. I shall keep you abreast of developments, but for now, I am retiring to the patio with a glass of lemon wine to sit and look at my oven and to pretend it has a fire in it.

Outdoor living with a clay oven!

My garden contains about six inches of soil under which is a seam of thick, impenetrable clay. I always considered this to be a bit of a disadvantage where gardening is concerned, but after a recent Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall program on telly, a friend of mine, who is really into his bread making, expressed an interest in building one and before you know it, there was beer and a plan. I had been feeling a bit frustrated and generally thwarted in my recovery and still not allowed to drive since my haemorrage. So it was good to be finally doing something constructive.

Hence, one rainy day, I dug a big hole in my garden and extracted some clay. It was the right kind, as you can tell by making a blob of it and dropping it from shoulder height. If it splats and remains intact, it will work. If the blob fragments, what you have is mud, not clay.

Then after the strenuous task of gathering all the materials from the allotment for the plinth (I used an H shape of breeze blocks and four heavy duty slabs with one 2 x 2 foot slab as the base, overlapping the inner corners of the other four) we made a former from sand in the required shape of the inside of the oven and covered it with wet newspaper.

I used two 3 gallon potfuls of clay to an equivalent amount of builders sand (a pound a bag from the B&Q). The sand was laid over the clay and then stomped for half an hour or so to mix it up, turning the corners of the tarp every now and again to flip the mix over. Beer was added to us as we performed our merry dance. Bath Ales Gem is an excellent oven-making beer which I can thoroughly recommend. No product placement, i just like it

.

Then, the clay/sand mix was made into “bricks” which were really just fist sized blobs, and these were laid around and over the former to cover it up to a depth of about 2 to 3 inches. I did use a strip of chicken wire to reinforce the structure. Whether or not this was a good idea, I cannot yet say but I couldn’t think of a reason not to.

Eventually, we had a kind of clay igloo about three feet across and 18 inches tall. At this point, we felt most pleased with ourselves, mainly as we had only really decided to get started at about three o’clock and it was now nine and it was two pints and one clay-igloo later.

It didn’t look like rain, so we left it drying out and my friends went home, whilst I went to chip clay/sand mixture off my hands and out of my hair in the shower.

Next morning, it seemed to be still there and hadn’t fallen down, so I cut a door in it. Wisdom maintains that for the fire to draw properly (for there is no chimney), the door must be exactly 63% of the height of the chamber within. Well, i am know for my inaccuracy so we cut it by eye and oddly, it seems to be just a bit over 60%. i will let you know how the fire burns with this approximated doorway. It is wide enough to accept a 12″ pizza tray and that is all I care about frankly.

After the door was cut out, I left it a few hours and then scooped out the sand former. Now we had something that looked like what was supposed to. I felt most chuffed, if a little anxious about the cracks that were beginning to develop

.

Thinking about it, cracks are bound to happen. This is clay we are dealing with after all, and as any architect or housebuyer knows, clay dries out and stuff cracks as a result. But, my research on the web  seems to indicate these cracks are nothing to worry about so I stuffed them with some left-over clay/sand mix and all seems to be well so far. If they open again, I shall stuff em again. Simple as that.

So ,now, i am just waiting for it to dry out properly so i can light a fire in it. This feeds two of my primeval desires: fire and food. If it doesn’t crumble into a pile of fragments, then some flatbreads will be baked therein and success will be declared. Mark I clay oven will be declared fit for purpose and festivities will ensue.

Convalescing with sequential Passtimes

Well, it has been five weeks today since the rather unpleasant “POP!” in my head. It has been an interesting month though not one I would care to repeat, especially the very painful and quite terrifying week in hospital. But hey! I am, as the doctors predicted, getting back to “normal”, albeit with a tendency towards headaches and extreme tiredness for often no reason.

I have mostly been sitting around watching telly. Not daytime TV, but reruns of science programmes and gentle films with simple plots. But I have also been making significant amounts of bread. This is in fact quite a new passion. The types and varieties of bread you can make are astounding and there are so many I want to try. Ok, it’s a bit of a messy passtime, but it’s sequential and that is about all I can cope with at the moment. Anything involving concurrent streams of thought are out of the question for me at the moment.

Misfortune and frustration

Hi, I won’t be writing much here today, or possibly for a while. A few weeks ago I suffered a sub-arachnoid brain haemorrhage which wasn’t as bad as it could have been, as evidenced by the fact that I am still alive.

However, it was a fairly significant brain trauma and I am thanking my lucky stars to be as relatively unscathed as I seem to be. Partly, this is down to the excellent care at the High dependency neurological Unit in which I spent a very painful and quite terrifying week mostly insensible and grateful for the morphine.

In general, all my circuits seem to be intact but any level of mental activity can only be undertaken in short uncomplicated periods before the confusion, fatigue and inevitable headaches creep in. As you can imagine, this is rather frustrating as boredom cannot be alleviated by normally simple tasks like reading or watching television as they exhaust me extremely quickly.

It also means i have missed a large portion of the planting season. My seeds are awaiting planting in the compost which I had already put into trays, ready, the day before my haemorrhage. But alas, I think i have missed the window. But I still don’t have the capability to do anything about that so I suppose I just have to resign myself to it.

I am told I should make a full recovery: I am one of the “lucky” 7% of SAH sufferers who manage to do this. How long this will take nobody can say. There appears to be a genetic component to this “luck” and I shall be enrolling in a scientific trial to investigate this.

But for now I am taking it easy and appreciating the love and support of family and friends who pretty much without exception have all been wonderful in every way.

I will be back, never fear. But now, I need another lie down for a bit

Seasonal Harvestings

This year, I planted over 300 leeks. Arent they Splendid! (Variety "Musselborough")

It is the bleak midwinter and outdoors is mostly a place we hurry out into before returning to the warmth of our houses. Nature is notably, with the exception of the birds, dormant, though green buds and crocuses are hinting at Spring not being far away. And yet, Mother Nature can still be bountiful, even in these times of ice and cold.

Not for show! For eatin' !

For dinner

Parsnips. Beauties, aren't they! (Variety "Avonresister")

Parsnips. I don’t actually like parsnips. But everyone else does.

Brocolli (Variety "early purple sprouting")

The brocolli is still waiting to burst into tasty bloom.

Swedes (Variety "Marion")

Even though it is undoubtedly still Winter (I know: I can see frost on the cars in the morning sunshine), nature can still provide a seasonal bounty.

A quick word about my planting method: I don’t have time for a lot of digging or weeding so I use a bed system. All of my veg is grown in beds about 4 feet wide with, where I could manage it, wooden edging boards. I dug it all once, about twelve years ago and since then, have only cultivated it with at most a light forking and the addition of compost from my array of bins. In this way, the soil structure is not disturbed and fertility is maintained (as hopefully you can see from my produce!).

To keep weeding to a minimum I plant through landscape fabric (50m for forth quid-ish from Screwfix). The holes are made with a tin can on a wooden handle which I heat with a blowtorch and use like a pastry cutter in a grid pattern. I use a baked-bean tin for most plants, like leeks  or sweetcorn and a tuna fish can for swedes etc. At the end of the season, I pull it off and pull up the few weeds, sprinkle pelleted chicken manure or compost depending on the next crop and voila! It is ready for the next crop!

In this way, I indulge my creativity at interesting practical solutions and get the maximum yields from the allotment with the minimum of effort. Most pleasing!

Old Friends, Bread and Wine

Magnificent, isn't it!

This weekend, we had some old friends staying with us for the weekend. We had a lovely weekend and as well as much eating and drinking and lazing around, went for a lovely day out to Weston Super Mare. On Friday evening, whilst we awaited their arrival, I baked this lovely bread for dinner. It’s called “Stromboli” and is rolled withstrips of ham and chunks of mozzarella such that when baked, the mozzarella melts and pushes up through holes pokes in the dough as lava does from a volcana. Well, that didnt quite happen but it was lovely nonetheless.

The dough is very “wet” and uses a lot more olive oil than usual. This makes it pliable such that you can pull it into a rectangle of about a foot by ten inches on your baking tray. Then you roll into it chopped up lumps of mozzarella, about 3oz in total and ham, also about 3oz.

Then you roll it all up and put it in the oven for half an hour. I would have taken pictures of the intermediate stages but my fingers were extremely mucky.

Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of Windows, I published this post before I could make my main point, which was not about the bread, lovely though that was.

No, with the pudding, which was a big box of home made chocolate brownies, we had a bottle of my ginger wine and frankly the two flavours, combined, were uttterly exquisite. The sweet chocolatey flavour of the brownies was complimented well by the earthy ginger flavours in the wine.

Our two friends, both trained tasters from the brewing industry, were very impressed with the ginger wine and commented on how much my wine-making has come on in the last couple of years: Praise indeed from those in the know.

The conversation came round again to how I know  a lot about this subject and I have been nagged, cajoled and finally persuaded that I should indeed write a book on the subject.

Which I might just do.

There! That was what I really meant to write!

I am here:

This is the view from my window this morning.

Not much possibility to do anything crafty at the moment, but this view fills the soul with joy.

Back soon.

Pete

Hic! (et nunc)

Tonight I was going to go to the gym. It’s not a narcissistic thing: If I don’t go regularly, my poor old smashed up shoulders stop working. Bike accidents years ago.

A half litre kilner jar. This makes a half-bottle

However, tonight was the night, pre-Christmas, when the Summer’s vodka soaked fruit gets strained.  In Kilner jars, reside yellow plums, blackberries and sloes in vodka and that old favorite, sloe gin. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the process, but in tasting the results this evening, it occurs to me that they are so delicious that the world ought to know how to do this.

This year was a very good year for sloes. The bushes hereabouts were covered in September, with lovely black-purple marbles which if bitten will dry your whole mouth out in an instant, Best not to really.

In addition, there were the plums. You know about the plums because I have used them extensively in my winemaking and currently have about twelve gallons at various stages (some in the “consumed” stage”). But they also make a gorgeous liquer. Similarly, there was a glut of blackberries at just the time all my demijohns were full so I had to find another use for them when the freezer was full of the allotment and hedgerows’ bounty.

And so, this is what I do with them (or in truth, mostly Mrs E does with them as I never got around to it until this year). So, what you need:

• Fruit (plums, blackberries or sloes)
• sugar (old recipes say caster but granulated seems fine)
• vodka or gin (40% ABV if possible)

And that’s it really.

So, what you do is very simple (and I really wish I had a photo to show you this). You fill the jar to the neck with fruit. Then you pour sugar in to the gap and shake it until it is settled to about a third of the way up. After that, you fill the space with spirit. For sloes, it works best with gin, but equally well with vodka which frankly goes well with any fruit.

I have yet to try blackcurrants. I hear they are good, like cassis, I suppose

A note of caution here, and this is a piece of useful information you won’t find in the usual books: The vodka or gin should be 40% or more (in fact, in olden times one could buy “Polish Spirit” which is a kind of vodka with about 60% alcohol, I think, and has no intrinsic flavour, or so I am told. But I can’t find it anywhere.) You need the 40% because if you use the 37% stuff, the water from the fruit can dilute the spirit to the extent that its percentage alcohol goes below the level at which yeast can live and it will start to ferment. I found this out to my cost. It was drinkable but really not as nice, crisp and tart, as when you use higher alcohol spirit. And it was cloudy which is not pleasing to the eye.

After three or four months, turning occasionally to dissolve the sugar and mix all the fruity goodness around, you can strain it through fine muslin or similar, into a jug and thence bottles.

Interesting and unusual bottles are an advantage.

If you use nice bottles, it will provide you with lovely presents for people you really like at Christmas. So much nicer than some nasty bought’n thing or last minute purchase from desperation, unsuited to the recipient and causing a puzzled but polite response as you hand it over. No, you will never get one of those giving a bottle of something lovely like this! Only smiles and sincere gratitude.

And of course, you rarely get full bottles so there is always a glass or two left over for tasting after the bottling.

And that dear readers, is why I never made it to the gym!

The bit I like best… and name the mystery wine

I am notoriously scatterbrained. Everyone who knows me is aware of this. I always think I will remember things, but I don’t. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my my winemaking. Though once, after a significant indulgence of trappist biere in France, I did forget my childrens’ name and call them for some reason “Penny and Geoffrey”. They are not called Penny and Geoffrey and were quite surprised.

This evening it is dark outside and the fireworks are popping and crackling above as they do increasingly every November the fifth. It seems austerity results in people spending more on festivities in order to cheer themselves up. And frankly, given the low interest rates there seems little reason to save any money anywhere like a bank.

The hamster is rolling purposefully around the laminate floor in his transparent ball and I am sitting here, ankles knocked, sipping a glass of 2010 elderflower wine. This is the part of winemaking I anjoy most: the drinking!

It wasn’t a particularly good vintage. I performed a sin of impatience, squeezing the straining bag and so the wine wouldn’t clear. I also balanced it all wrong by using about 12 oz of raisins to the gallon, giving it far more body than a light floral wine should have. And so, five indifferent gallons of what my son calls “flower port” were produced. It is in truth a little strong and characterful for elderflower and still hazy with what I suppose must be pollen proteins. No matter. It still tastes quite good and has a hint of summer  in its many flavours. I am on my second large glass, with fizzy water to make it a sociable strength.

However, I was perusing my many batches of bubbling gorgeousness earlier this evening and amongst them was a beautiful, light fruity red, clear as a bell, quite dry and with the promise of being wonderfully delicious some time around June next year.

Only… I don’t actually remember what I made it from. I am deeply embarrassed to say that it is also quite impossible for me, with my unfavourable genetics with respect to taste and smell, to discern what comprised the main ingredients of the recipe. In my current cornucopia of creations I have damson, apple, dessert plum, blackberry, rosehip & something and.. this.

I have no idea what this is, only that it is very nice. Answers on a postcard please to...

Every time I make a batch of wine, strain it and do all the things one should at that particular stage, to get it in to the demijohn and fermenting nicely, I should really attach some kind of label, but arrogantly, I think I will remember what has gone into it. And this used to be the case. Only these days I am so prolific in my production that one bubbling creation sits happily next to another for a dozen weeks and the next thing I know, I have forgotten not only the recipe, but what  the hell I made it from. I always mean to write down all the vital statistics: The original gravity, how much fruit, which yeast, that kind of thing, but then Hugh Fearnly-W comes on the telly with a recipe for sand eel and woodlouse omellette or something and I sink into the chair and forget all about it.

Should anyone have any ideas what a light fruity red wine might have been wrung from in about late August in England, i would be very grateful for them. It might jog my memory back to a bucket of fizzing pulp on a sunny day. Or more likely, given the effects of the 2010 elderflower now reaching my poor addled brain, it might cause to remember incorrectly a day that didn’t happen and some fruit I didn’t pick with friends I never met.

I think what I need right now is another glass of flower port and a packet of cheese and onion crisps.

And this dear friends is the result of all those hours of consideration, fermentation, racking and bottling: A vaguely incoherent ramble powered by elderflower wine on an early Winter’s eve with an inebriated grin, a nearly empty glass and a packet of crisps, writing on a laptop pulled out of a bin and fixed by my son. (Nearly) All my philosophies are here embodied.  Cheers!

Now what the bloody hells is that wine made from….

Aquatic Passtimes

Sorry dear friends, but of late, life has been rather hectic. Variously I was in Munich, Oslo and Hanover over three weeks and now university visits are beginning to appear for No2 offspring. I really haven’t had much time to do anything very creative, let alone write about it. Oh, the damson is bubbling along nicely and the consumption of the pink plum continues in a reasonably disciplined manner, but making and doing have had to take a reluctant back seat whilst I have dozed on aeroplanes, sat in meetings or stomped huffing around airports railing at flight delays.

But this weekend, I get some head space, as recreation that is not intellectually demanding appears to be becoming known. I am going to the sea to bob about in the Atlantic waves. And it will be good, even if there is no surf.

Drama: Me and John getting over the break

Some may find the idea to be rather unappealing: large, cold waves washing over you, spray in your face and occasional total immersion. But to me this is part of it. Something about the cold water in your face washes away all your cares and troubles – not that I have any serious ones – leaving you with an empty head with only the sound that you hear in a shell as cranial contents. I can see why various cults use partial or total immersion as a kind of initiation into their belief systems. It really does wash away not only physical dirt, but also psychological baggage.

Me making the best of a small wave and loving every second of it.

So, I shall not be making anything of note this weekend. But I shall be clearing away the detritus of 21st century living by immersing myself in and struggling heroically with, an element that is not normally the habitat of the human animal. By the time I come out of the sea, my shoulders will be exhausted, my torso tired and my arms barely able to lift a pint.

But the skies will be bluer, the hills sharper, the grass greener and the gorse on the hill vibrant with yellow. I will have, so to speak, “new eyes” for a while. And with my new, crystal-clear perception, freed from the static of distraction, I shall sit and smile with my soul full of mellow spiritual creaminess. It is a graphic reminder of a strange phenomenon that distraction, care and worry diminish the quality of experience. Somehow having many thoughts in your head causes you to lose touch with one’s sensations. Participating in a passtime where all of your intellect must be put to one side whilst reaction and experience leads your actions somehow causes the mind to recover its facility to experience properly, without the dissipation of attention that constant mental deamnds seem to bring about. When events calm down and you cease whatever activity it was that so completely absorbed you, somehow a film has been lifted from reality, allowing sensations and perceptions to be somehow much more vivid and personal. And this is the beautiful by-product I shall gain from my duels with Neptune.

See you very soon, if I don’t drown.