Today I nearly went to Cambridge, but didn't. I'd arranged to see a friend who lives in that direction, partly so that we could exchange Christmas presents before Christmas, and had suggested that I'd like to see Kettle's Yard. We agreed that we would go, subject to weather. The weather we were imagining at that stage was ice and snow, but by about Wednesday of this week the five day forecast was predicting torrential rain. I couldn't see the point of driving another hour from her house to Cambridge in the rain, waiting for a bus in the park and ride car park, which is a pretty windswept and godforsaken place that reminds you that Cambridge is on the edge of the fens, squelching around Cambridge in the wet and then standing at a bus stop in more rain for the return trip to the car. I suggested that maybe we should leave Cambridge until another day, and she replied that we could take a view on the day.
I arrived at her house in light drizzle to find coffee cups and posh panettone laid out on a tray. By the time we'd finished our second cup of coffee it was raining heavily. It was the sort of rain that would once have been described as coming down like stair rods. Nowadays nobody has stair rods and I'm not sure what the new benchmark comparison for rain is. Anyway, there was lots of it. I think she would have been game to go anyway, but she gave in gracefully when I repeated my view that while Kettle's Yard would be lovely and I wanted to go there at some stage, I didn't see the point of flogging around Cambridge in the pouring rain. We are both prone to chest infections, it's nearly Christmas, and why risk getting cold and wet to see something that we could see another day, when it was dry?
Instead we lit the fire, and settled down to a nice gossip, and after lunch she showed me her fail-safe version of bread, or at least the first stage of it. If I'd waited for the second proving and to see it cooked I'd just about be leaving now. This used a fifty-fifty mixture of wholemeal and white flour, rather than one hundred per cent wholemeal, and quick action yeast, which I've read about in the baking books but never cooked with, plus a slug of olive oil. One minute in the food processor replaces ten minutes of kneading, or rather four lots of one minute each, since she makes enough dough for four loaves at a time. (If you doubt that English is a challenging language for foreigners to learn, try saying the phrase 'enough dough' out loud, and despair).
The bread had rather a long time to rise, which it does in the boiler room, because we forgot about it, but she had previously told me that it didn't matter if you gave it two hours or even longer. She covers it with clingfilm rather than a damp cloth, and after the best part of three hours in the warmth of the boiler it was bursting out of the top of its bowl. The clingfilm peeled off beautifully anyway, without disturbing the surface, until she gave it a brisk thump, and the great puffball of dough subsided dramatically, with a sigh that released a beautiful whiff of raw organic bread. The second kneading will consist of a mere ten seconds per loaf in the food processor, then it will get a second rising, and into a hot oven.
I have never used a food processor. I've never owned one, my mother never had one, and so when I read recipes that tell me to whizz everything in a food processor I have to work out what you would do instead, if you were doing it by hand. The machine is very ingenious, and saves you some time. Against that it is noisy, and you have to wash the bowl out afterwards, so the net saving in time is not quite as much as you'd imagine. Whether to knead bread by hand is like asking whether you should dig your borders or vegetable patch. If you enjoy digging then dig, and if you don't then don't. I enjoy kneading bread, liking the rhythm and the quiet of it, and I have strong hands. But the food processor saves time and physical exertion, and I can see that if I were cooking more intensively, more frequently and for more people, then it could be very useful.
My friend was cooking in pounds and ounces, whereas I was making bread in grammes, and her four loaf recipe was larger than the one I was using, so I struggled to work out how the quantity of salt in her recipe compared to mine. I thought hers was saltier. As Cordelia famously observes, bread does need salt, but how much is very much a matter of personal taste and what you're used to. Bread is about the only thing I cook that I add salt to at all, and I find one teaspoon for 600 grammes of wholemeal flour is ample. My friend adds five teaspoons to three pounds of flour, which she has cut down from six as a concession to health, but finds any less makes bread insipid.
I have eaten her bread in the past. It was delicious. When I ate it I didn't know how much salt she put in, and it certainly didn't taste overly salty. It is a marvellous alchemy, making your own bread, and I shall try her recipe now I've seen it in action. It's true that the instructions for timings and temperatures were given in gas regulos, and we aren't on gas, so I'll have to improvise that bit. Done properly she promises me that it works every time. If you want to try it, you'll need 30 fluid ounces of water, give or take, for three pounds of flour, and two 7 gramme sachets of the quick action yeast.
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