Category Archives: Fallback Pantry

Simple Quick and Tasty Home-Made Dog Biscuits – treats for your special friend, from the Fallback Pantry

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We’re all having to make-do at the moment when supplies run low – it’s not reasonable to pop to the shops just to pick up one or two grocery items. Then again, there’s no explaining any of this to our pets, and Rosheen (our Rough Collie) would be inconsolable if she didn’t receive her biscuit treats at least ‘once or twice’ a day!

When the biscuit jar ran dry, something had to be done. I developed this recipe for home-made dog treats, it’s so simple, only 10 minutes to make and 20-25 minutes to bake, full of  wholesome things, and good enough you can eat them yourself (but maybe don’t let your dog see you do it!).

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Ingredients:

  • dog-biscuits-fallback_1250g plain flour (any other flour will almost certainly also work here as a substitute)
  • 100g rolled oats (substitute linseeds, plain roast pumpkin seeds (chopped up), or just skip these if you haven’t got them)
  • 2 eggs
  • 25g hard cheese, grated – the stronger flavoured the better
  • 1 low salt beef stock cube (or chicken)
  • ~100ml water

 

You will need a mixing bowl, a rolling pin (a wine bottle can serve in an emergency) and a baking tray with a non-stick sheet or a piece of baking parchment or greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat your oven to 180C / 350F.

In a jug or bowl, dissolve the stock cube in the smallest amount of boiling water you can – ideally less than 100ml.

Combine the flour, eggs, two handfuls of the oats, and the grated cheese in the bowl, mixing well. Now add the concentrated stock a little at a time until the dough comes together and leaves the bowl clean. Give the mix a gentle knead to make sure everything is evenly incorporated (not too much, especially if you’re using strong / bread flour as we don’t really want to develop the gluten for biscuits).

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Scatter some of the remaining oats on the non-stick sheet or baking parchment, and on the top of the biscuit dough, and roll the dough out to about the size of your baking sheet, between 3mm and 5mm thick. Add a few extra oats if the mix starts to stick (you can use flour for this if you haven’t got any oats).

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Now, using a long-bladed knife, mark the dough right through at 1” intervals, and then repeat this at around 45 degrees to the first, to mark a diamond pattern in the dough. 

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Bake in the pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes, until the biscuits are crispy and starting to brown a little. You want these crisp not chewy so put them back in for another five minutes if they’re at all squishy when you get them out. 

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Transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool, then break up the biscuits and store in an airtight container once they’re completely cold. 

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Sample (if you like!) or just accept your dog’s opinion. They smell great and Rosheen goes mad for them! They will store well in an airtight container for about two weeks – if you ever manage to keep them that long!

 

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Fridge Dough, your Flexible Bread-Baking Friend – from the Fallback Pantry

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Home-baked bread is the best, isn’t it? But there’s no way around the fact that it can be time consuming – by the time the dough has been mixed, kneaded, proved, shaped, proved again, and finally baked you’re at least two, if not three or four hours into the process. Flatbreads like Pitta, wraps, and pizza, can be made a bit faster, but the dough still needs to be mixed, kneaded, rested, and shaped before it’s baked or cooked in a skillet – so you’re still waiting an hour at least before lovely fresh bread can be yours.  

At the moment, while many of us are at home under restrictions, time may not be such a challenge as it normally would be, but access to ingredients can be an issue. In various places, yeast seems to be a commodity in short supply. Fridge dough can help us here, too.

Dough in the mixer

What if I told you you could have a batch of dough, in your refrigerator, ready to be baked into flatbreads within about half an hour, or risen dough loaves, rolls etc after simply shaping and an hour or so proving? And what if I told you that this was a batch that you could keep using again and again just by adding fresh flour, water, and a little pinch of salt and sugar. Sounds like magic, right? 

In a way, it is – it’s the magic that has kept traditional bakeries going for centuries, long before standardised, fresh and dry commercial yeast became the usual technology for baking loaves. It’s not *quite* a magic bullet for yeast shortages – you will need a dose of yeast to start it, and you may need to top up with fresh yeast from time to time (because of a process called attenuation that I’ll come back to), but by using this technique you should be able to have almost ready-to-bake dough ready to be used at the drop of a hat, and stretch a single spoon-full of dried yeast to bake batch after batch of lovely fresh bread, which is great if you’re trying to eke-out limited supplies. 

I’m sold, how does this work? 

You start by making a batch of normal yeasted bread dough. Mine is made from a mix of 75% strong white and 25% wholemeal flour, because it gives a lovely flavour and texture while retaining the nice soft character of white bread, but use whatever you prefer. 

Start your batch with:

  • 500g strong bread flour (75% strong white, 25% strong wholemeal)
  • 1tsp dried instant yeast
  • 1tsp salt
  • 1tsp sugar
  • Progressively add cool water to make a well hydrated, elastic dough. 

Kneed by hand or in a mixer with a dough hook, with a little oil (I use cold-pressed rapeseed oil, but a nice light-flavoured olive oil would be fine), for 5-10 minutes until the dough is soft, pliable and elastic. 

Oil the inside of a bowl, or Tupperware-type container (a size about 3-4 times the volume of kneaded dough is ideal), pop the oiled dough into this, cover with a lid or cling film (don’t seal it completely as you need to allow gas to escape as the yeast works) and pop it in the refrigerator at least overnight. 

Fridge dough in tupperware container

When you come to use the dough:

  • Take the dough from the fridge, turn it out onto a clean, oiled worktop, divide the batch in two. 
  • Set half aside to bake with, and put half into a bowl or mixer, and add:
    • 250g strong bread flour (mix as above)
    • Pinch of salt
    • Pinch of sugar
    • Mix, adding enough cool water to make a well hydrated, elastic dough
  • Kneed, oil, and return to the refrigerator. You need to be baking with and refreshing the dough at least every 2-3 days to keep it healthy and in good condition. 

Now, you can bake the other half of the batch. The technique for pittas is here – you should be eating them within 30 minutes – but really anything you can think of will probably work, just experiment! The recipe and process for soughdough pizza should be equally applicable to your fridge dough. I will add to the tested techniques in a future blog post.

 

But my yeast is out of date and a bit rubbish, will this still work?

The key here is to really get the yeast going before you make the first batch, so I would modify the process like this:

Activate your yeast in some warm water with a bit of sugar, waiting until it really froths up nicely before making the dough. Then, rather than putting the dough straight in the fridge, I would allow it a full proving cycle at room temperature, so that the dough at least doubles in size, I would then take half the dough out and bake with it straight away, add fresh flour, water, salt and sugar as above, and only then pop it in the fridge. Hopefully your yeast will be strong and healthy and present in sufficient quantity by this stage. 

It worked, to start with, but it’s been in the fridge a couple of weeks now, and despite baking and refreshing regularly it’s just not rising properly any more. My loaves / rolls are turning out heavy and stodgy. What’s going wrong? 

You’ve almost certainly run into a problem with yeast attenuation. Without getting unnecessarily nerdy about this, your fridge dough is a live yeast culture. Yeast is a highly adaptable little blighter which gets through generations fast, and the culture you are maintaining in your dough can quickly change its growth characteristics to adapt to the circumstances it finds itself in. For nice soft puffy risen loaves and rolls, you want a yeast that expands its population rapidly at room temperature when its nutritional needs are met (that’s to say, once you shape the dough and leave it to prove before baking). Keeping the dough in the fridge, convenient as it is, in in effect selecting for yeast strains that are happier working and dividing more steadily at colder temperatures. This is less important if you want to use the dough for flatbreads, pizza bases and so on, as you’re not asking the yeast to put on that final ‘push’ of multiplication before baking, but if you want to use the dough to bake loaves and rolls too, it can be an issue. 

One option is to add an extra spoon of new yeast next time you add fresh flour to the mix. You’ll probably find topping up every four or five times keeps things ticking over reasonably crisply, and you’ll still be reducing your fresh yeast use by a significant margin. 

Another option worth experimenting with is giving the dough a room temperature proving step every few uses (as described above with older  yeast) as this might tune the behaviour of the yeast culture more towards the one we want. 

If all else fails, bake up a big batch of pizza or pittas with the dough you have, and start over!

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Pitta and Naan Breads – from the Fallback Pantry

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Pittas and other flatbreads are so versatile – whether you like to stuff them, wrap them or dip them – and the difference between the pre-packed long-life supermarket versions and freshly cooked bread is night and day. There are essentially two sorts of flatbreads – yeast leavened flatbreads, of which pittas and naan breads are good examples, which tend to be cooked in an oven, and unleavened breads, such as chapatis and tortillas, which are usually cooked on a hotplate or skillet. Different breads vary in their ingredients, but the process for each type is essentially the same.

Pittas are served

These are some of the easiest and fastest breads to make – it’s a mystery to me really why anyone ever buys them when they’re so quick, easy and satisfying to make at home. You can even make the dough a day or more ahead of baking – once baked it’s best to eat these breads immediately, as they go stale quickly. If you bake more than you can eat in one go, they’re best frozen as soon as they’re cold.  This recipe for pitta breads can easily be adapted to make naan, with the modifications to the ingredients noted below. 

To make 12 pittas (takes about 2 hours, including proving and baking time):

  • 500g strong bread flour (I use a 75% white, 25% wholemeal mix because I prefer the flavour and texture, but 100% white is fine too. Flatbreads are more forgiving of lower gluten flours, so if you only have plain flour at home you can still attempt this bread, it will just be a little less elastic / chewy) plus extra for dusting / shaping.
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp instant dried yeast
  • Oil – I use cold pressed rapeseed oil for this (and almost everything), but olive oil would be more traditional
  • Water (about 300-400ml)

In a bowl (or bowl mixer fitted with a dough hook) combine all the dry ingredients, about a tablespoon of oil, and mix in enough water to form a nice elastic dough. One of the most common mistakes people make when making bread is not adding enough water to the mix. The best bread comes from a really well-hydrated dough that’s just on the edge of being too wet to work with, under-hydrated dough makes stodgy, heavy bread with poor texture and rise. The more practice you have with this, the easier it will become to judge – I use a little shortcut, which is to add water until I’ve gone a little bit too far, so the dough is starting to become sticky, and then add a spoon or two of extra flour back in just to make it handleable again.

Knead the dough for 5-10 minutes, by hand or in the mixer, until it becomes lovely, smooth and elastic. I oil my countertop for kneading rather than flouring it, as that avoids accidentally incorporating more flour into the dough. 

What you do next depends on whether you want the bread today, or not:

  • If you want to bake the pittas straight away, oil your ball of dough, return it to the bowl, cover with a clean tea-towel and leave it at room temperature to double in size, which should take an hour and a half or so. 
  • If you don’t want the pittas until tomorrow (or a little later) oil the dough and cover the bowl with cling film, or put it in a good-sized Tupperware-type container, and put it in the fridge at least overnight. (What you’ve done here is create a batch of ‘fridge dough’, which is really versatile – more on this later. If you’re short of baking yeast at the moment, this is a game changer!).

When you’re ready to bake: 

Set your oven to its highest temperature (ideally at least 220C), with a heavy baking sheet or baking stone inside. 

Decide how many pittas you want to bake – I tend to take half the dough and divide it into six pieces. Flour your work surface generously for this bit.  Form each piece into a tight ball by drawing the edge repeatedly into the centre, and then leave the balls to rest for about 10 minutes, covered with a tea towel. 

To shape the breads, you could use a rolling pin (in which case try to roll them out about 5mm thick and in an oval sort of shape). Personally though I can’t see the point, it’s just as easy to stretch them out by hand and I think the texture is better. First, squash the balls down into a thick disk, then slowly stretch them out.

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Only stretch the edge, the middle will take care of itself. You’ll find they want to spring back but keep working on them in turn, each time you ‘go around’ you’ll find them willing to stretch a little bit further. Get them to the size and shape you want, around 5mm thick (but this will be a bit variable – it’s fine, but try to avoid going particularly thin as these areas won’t be able to ‘puff’ into the traditional pocket). Cover them again with the tea towel for about 5 minutes. 

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When the oven is up to temperature, working very quickly, pull out the hot baking sheet or stone. Place each pitta on it, the opposite side up to the way they were on the work surface (having the ‘dry’ upper side down seems to help them bake nicely), and get them back in the top of the very hot oven as quickly as you can. You want to avoid losing any heat if you can. 

If everything has gone right, they should puff up in the oven into little ‘pillows’. Once they’ve puffed, you can turn the baking sheet around (particularly important if your oven has hot spots). You want to cook them until the outside of the bread is dry but still soft. Don’t wait for the top to brown, they’ll be crispy by then – they’ll normally have some colour on the bottom where they have been in contact with the baking sheet. Take them out of the oven and cover with a tea towel until serving, just as soon as they’re still warm but not too hot. 

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They’re perfect for stuffing, dipping in home-made hummus, or enjoying with soups, salads – anything you can think of!

Variation: To make naan – 

  • Use strong white flour or a 50:50 mix of strong and plain flour (Or 100% plain, see note above). 
  • Use a mix of half-milk, half water, and add about four tablespoons of plain yoghurt (you’ll need less water/milk as a result). 
  • You can use a plain-flavoured oil or melted ghee in the dough.
  • Once out of the oven, brush with melted ghee or butter while still wet. Mix crushed garlic with this butter for a garlic naan, or fold chopped dried sultanas, figs, or dates and almonds into the dough, before shaping, for a Peshwari-style naan. 
  • I expect my naan to be a bit bigger than pittas, so I would make six or eight from a full quantity of dough. 

 

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Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread – a collection of recipes from the Fallback Pantry

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Limited shopping opportunities mean many of us are baking bread at home for the first time – or at least, for the first time in a long while! So here’s a quick round-up of recipes and techniques to give you some extra ideas and inspiration.

“But I can’t get…” Some advice on ingredients and making do:

Flour and yeast seem to be ingredients in short supply at the moment, so some creative baking may be required.

If you can’t get bread flour, you still have options if you have other flour types available.

  • Chapati (Atta) flour works well as a bread flour, it makes a slightly dense but very tasty wholemeal loaf. I recommend using a bread tin for this.
  • Soda bread and flatbreads are more forgiving than traditional loaves – you can make pittas, tortillas, chapatis and all sorts of lovely things.
  • You can bake with any mix of bread flours – combining rye, spelt, or wholemeal flour with strong white gives a tasty satisfying loaf which rises better than these flours will on their own.

If yeast is the problem:

  • Get cracking with that sourdough starter!
  • In the meantime, experiment with soda bread.
  • Old expired yeast (those packets in the back of that cupboard!) will be sluggish and produce poor results, but can often be brought back to life. It will take a little care and attention – activate the yeast in some warm water with a bit of sugar before baking, even if the instructions say this isn’t necessary, and use more than the recipe says. Be prepared to give it extra time to prove – time is flavour so this is not a bad thing!
  • If you have a little bit of yeast, you can make it last (almost!) indefinitely by making a ‘fridge dough’, which maintains a live yeast culture in the fridge for batch after batch of baking. This is what traditional bakeries have done for centuries, and works really well – store the live dough in the fridge and plan to bake two or three times a week to keep it refreshed and active.

Good luck and happy baking!

Yeasted breads:

No Weigh! – the bake-anywhere, traveller’s loaf
A basic, white bread recipe and technique which requires no special kitchen equipment – if you have flour, water, salt, yeast and oil, access to an oven and some sort of a baking tray, you can make this loaf.

Don’t be Sour – a dalliance with yeasted ‘quick’ bread
A good basic ‘pain d’épi’ loaf recipe that can be adapted for all sorts of different flour types.

Roast Garlic & Rosemary Bread
A lovely fougasse-type bread ideal for serving with pasta.

Pain de Savoie, from Paul Hollywood’s ‘Bread’ – Cooking the Books, week 2
This is a filing, savoury loaf with which is a meal in itself – made with bacon (or ham) and cheese, it really hits the spot.

Milk Loaf, from ‘How To Bake’ by Paul Hollywood – Cooking the Books, week 14
Something a little sweeter and more sophisticated – if you’re missing posh breakfast breads this simple but delicious milk loaf might be for you.

 

Sourdough (and semi-sourdough) baking:

Sourdough Saga: Episode 1 – failure to launch
How (not) to create a sourdough starter.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 2 – keep calm and carry on?
We got there in the end!

Sourdough Saga: Episode 3 – good things come to those who wait!
My basic sourdough recipe.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 4 – cheese and sun dried tomato bread
A nice recipe variation.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 5 – how to look after your starter

Sourdough Saga: Episode 6 – awesome home-made sourdough pizza
This is a really good replacement for take-away!

Sourdough Saga: Episode 7 – six months on, life with my sourdough starter

Sourdough Saga: Episode 8 – semi-sourdough baguettes
Not a ‘novice’ bake, but one I’m really really proud of. These baguettes are the business!

 

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Stinging Nettle Gnocchi with Garlic and Sage butter – advice on eating weeds, from the Fallback Pantry

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Welcome to a new blog series here at the Country Skills Blog: in the ‘Fallback Pantry’ I plan to build a collection of recipes to help make the best of what’s in the kitchen and garden. At the time of writing, at least a quarter of the world’s population is under some sort of ‘lockdown’ restriction resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, making the sorts of recipes and techniques the blog has always focused on more valuable and relevant than ever.

Whatever our circumstances, a slow, thoughtful look at the resources at our disposal will hopefully yield options to help us eat well and make the best of what we have available.

With regular trips to the shops on hold for most of us, access to fresh greens can be a particular challenge. Thank goodness it’s stinging nettle season! Nettles are a great wild food, really nutritious and full of good things, widely found in gardens and other green spaces, and can be used very much like spinach. This recipe for home-made gnocchi really makes the best of them, I think – and they’re fun to make, so you can keep the kids entertained for several hours, too!

An important note about wild food – 

When picking wild plants to eat, it’s really important that you’re completely confident that you know what it is you’re picking. There are one or two seriously poisonous wild plants out there, and eating the wrong one could kill you. That said, stinging nettles are some of the easiest wild plants to identify – most British children will have mastered this skill by the age of five or six (though an adult friend of mine admitted to me recently that she wasn’t that confident she could!). Invest in a well-illustrated field guide and learn how to use it, take someone with you who knows what they’re doing, and if you’re ever in the slightest doubt, don’t take a risk! Remember that in many countries there are rules about what you can and can’t pick, pull, or harvest on land that doesn’t belong to you, so please stay on the right side of the law, and check with the landowner first to be sure.

Stinging Nettle Gnocchi with Garlic and Sage Butter

SERVES TWO

Ingredients:
100g stinging nettle tops
200g potatoes
One free-range egg
Around 100g Type-OO white flour (you can substitute strong white bread flour (better), or even plain flour will do in a pinch. Not self-raising, please!)
Semolina (not essential – you can use more of your flour for shaping but will sacrifice a bit of texture)

To Serve:
50g unsalted butter
3-4 sprigs of fresh sage
2 cloves of garlic
Parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper
Optional extra: dry-cured streaky bacon lardons

Serving alternative: any other sauce you fancy – all sorts of pesto-type sauces will work well here, so the only limit is your imagination.

Picked stinging nettlesPick nettles carefully – I wear washing up gloves – selecting the top two or three pairs of leaves only. Nettles are best early in the year, they can get rather tough and coarse flavoured later on. Actually, I tend to pull up a whole batch of nettles – I’m usually weeding – and then pick through them for the nettle tops afterwards. Remove the leaves from the stems, wash them thoroughly, and dry in a salad spinner (keeping your gloves on all the while!). 100g is roughly the amount you get in one of those prepared salad bags.

Start by boiling your potatoes, skins on, in a pan of briskly boiling water. 

Meanwhile, in a large frying pan with a well-fitting lid, put a splash of water and a little knob of butter, add all the nettle leaves, cover, and steam until the leaves start to soften and go a slightly darker shade of green. You can take your gloves off now, as the sting will have been disarmed. 

Wilted steamed nettles

Squeeze all the water out of your nettle leaves, by hand in a tea towel, or in a sieve. Then chop the steamed nettles up as well as possible. 

Keep an eye on your potatoes. When they’re cooked, drain them into a colander and once they’re cool enough to handle, you can peel their skins off really easily. 

Your chopped nettles should now be essentially cold. In a food processor (or pestle and mortar) combine the nettles with the egg and reduce to a reasonably fine pulp. 

Mash your potatoes, ideally using a potato ricer if you have one.

Combine the mashed potato with the egg & nettle paste, and mix well. 

Now, start adding the flour until it makes a soft but manageable dough. This will probably be about 100g but will vary depending on how much moisture was left in your nettles & potato, and how large your egg was.

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Once you have a workable dough (it will still be a bit sticky) dust your counter with semolina, take a handful of dough, and roll it into a sausage about ¾” in diameter. Then cut the sausage into individual gnocchi about ½” thick and place – spaced apart – on a semolina-dusted baking sheet or chopping board. Carry on until you have used up all the dough. 

Allow your gnocchi to rest for about 30 minutes and then press gently with the tines of a fork to get the traditional ridges, which help sauces cling to the gnocchi.

Gnocchi ready for cooking

To Serve:

Bring a large saucepan of salted water to a brisk rolling boil. 

Meanwhile, in a large frying pan, melt the butter. Chop the garlic finely, add to the butter, and cook very gently until golden.

While the garlic is cooking, add the gnocchi to the boiling water. They will sink initially, and are done when they float to the surface.

Finely slice the fresh sage leaves. When the gnocchi are cooked, add the sage leaves to the butter and garlic, stir quickly, and then transfer the gnocchi into the garlic and sage butter in the frying pan using a slotted spoon. 

Mix well to coat the gnocchi evenly with the herb butter, and serve, topped generously with freshly grated Parmesan and a good pinch of ground black pepper.

Variation – fry off some good smoked streaky bacon lardons until golden and crispy, before you start cooking the gnocchi, and add these to the gnocchi and sauce at the end.

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