A slice of life

Since the bloghead mentions eating, I thought I better share some recent cooking.

We have had a cube of fresh yeast in the fridge for ages, waiting for someone to get round to making bread. I got inspired yesterday evening, after noticing that the 'best before' date was last week.

I've got about 200 cookery books, but only a few on bread. One of them is Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery.



I decided to try her basic bread recipe - one of the few I could find that used fresh yeast. It came out pretty good, and as you can see, there's not much left after this morning's breakfast of bacon sandwiches.




It was very straightforward recipe, with minimal kneading and raising time. It does call for a lot of salt, which David acknowledges, so next time I will probably halve the salt quantity. I will also try it with rye and wholewheat flour instead of strong white flour.

In the past, I've found breadmaking quite hard work, but that's probably my own fault. I used our own sourdough starter, which I "created" in 1999 out of water, organic raisins and flour. It finally died this summer, after going solid and cheesy. I was never fully happy with the bread I made with it, and it took ages to knead and rise. That said, I always enjoyed the fact that I didn't use "artificial" yeast. Ha. Anyway, I'm converted - it's fresh yeast all the way.