Note: Because I’ve messed about with the comments settings so much on this post, they’ve slipped out of their previous order. If you look around, you should still be able to find the one you’re looking for (none of them has disappeared). Let’s hope it won’t happen again.
I’m not qualified to write a food blog, but I wanted to show this loaf of bread that my wife made today. She has claimed that she gets out her aggression by pummeling lumps of dough. That was before she bought a very fine looking stainless steel machine (it’s not a bread-maker, it’s a dough-kneader), so now she’s a walking time bomb again. She makes bread every few days and freezes it and it’s sooo much better than the bread in the shops. She uses very little yeast, a little sourdough starter and she lets it rise for two hours. The only problem is that Alma & I get bored if it’s always the same, so she uses different recipes and different kinds of flour and seeds.
This loaf is made from gram flour that we bought at a Turkish grocery in our local town. What is gram flour? It’s a flour made from ground chana dal, a legume otherwise known as chickpeas*. Who would have thought you could make ordinary loaves of bread with chick peas. It looks lovely; it tastes lovely, but not much like chickpeas.
*in the words of Wikipedia
A Bad Guide 
This photo reminded me of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. A more upbeat sequel of sorts to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it extolled the value of actual food, real food, and it doesn’t get much more real than home-cooked bread. Just the mere photo of your bread is evocative and gets the gastric juices and olfactory nerves twitching. Thanks!
For those who wish to extend pacifism and non-violent treatment to all ‘living’ things, even a humble yeast, there was a great ‘no-knead’ recipe in the NYT a couple of years ago. We actually bought a dutch oven just to try it out, and it worked rather well.
Here’s a pdf of the NYT article and the recipe. Warning: I converted all units to metric in the recipe so imperialists will need to reconvert back.
Click to access kneadless.pdf
Great photo. I’ve been thinking of getting a bread machine—I was using a recipe where I made 4 loaves worth of dough and stored it in the fridge for up to two weeks, but I’ve been getting tired of having a big bowl of dough in the fridge …though it did get a wonderful sourdough taste if the dough sat for a week or so. I guess that’s the sort of thing to put on a wedding registry, eh?
What does the gram flour bread taste like? Chickpeas? Or is it more subtle than that?
Thanks. I’ve been told to change the wording of the post. It’s not a bread machine, it’s a kneading machine, that’s what you want. Here’s ours, it’s made by Electrolux (i.e. it’s Swedish).
No, I didn’t think it tasted at all like chickpeas. More subtle, but I haven’t got the food adjectives to describe it. It’s more like semolina bread.
Stuart, that Times recipe sounds very much like the way my wife does it, very little yeast, lots of time. Except she does knead it! I’m no baking expert, so I can’t comment on the reasoning.
Your metric conversion included the degrees from Fahrenheit into Celcius, no?
My wife also makes bread every few days and freezes most of it, and I infinitely prefer it to store-bought. (Being less novelty-driven than you and Alma, I’m content with her usual whole wheat, though I don’t mind variety and I loved the NYT no-knead recipe when she tried it.)
That looks very fine. We’ve just bought a supemarket bread that contains soy and linseed. Pretty palatable, and allegedly it has the lowest GI of any bread that’s been measured – a big deal for diabetics and other dieters. (It’s taken me a year to lose 5 kg, but Wot I Say Is at least it’s going in the right direction.)
Great photo! Great Mrs. Crown!
I love pummeling the dough too.
Been a while since I last baked. Guess I know what I’ll do tomorrow.
I just don’t have any room left in the freezer, I don’t really like firing up the oven without filling it.
Well done, Dearie!
It’s much harder going to lose weight nowadays, I’ve found. Next time you’re at a supermarket you should make a pile of 5 x 1 kg bags of flour. That’ll make you feel better.
Thanks, mab. Credit goes to Alma for the lavender vase.
Yeah, that’s a problem. After much gnashing of teeth & rending of garments, we ended up buying a second freezer.
Thanks to Stuart’s conversion I can now show my wife the recipe. It’s true we’re novelty-driven; on the other hand, you guys have a bagel shop down the road.
Your metric conversion included the degrees from Fahrenheit into Celcius, no?
Oh, it should have Celsius. D’Oh! I converteed from Fahrenheit to Kelvin – no wonder it didnt cook so well.
Last year I was working my way through an Ethiopian cookbook and one of the recipes was for chickpea-flour injera — if I recall correctly, mainly chickpea flour, yeast, water, chili powder. By itself it tasted a little chalky (not my normal association with chana dal, as I normally just get canned chickpeas for convenience) but was not unpleasant. It was filling (to me it tastes “richer” than wheat or rice flour, but not as sweet as chestnut flour) and a nice vehicle for the meat dish and sauce it was paired with, which I believe was spiced with pippal (long pepper) and grains of paradise, among other things.
Crown,
I don’t like to complain, but now that you have that disclaimer in place I no longer see a list of recent comments. And if no such list is available, then it become easier for us fans to miss new stuff on old threads.
A related thought: Would it be possible (and do you think it might be desirable) to set things up so that comments on a thread get arranged in chronological order instead of being nested as they are now?
I’ve put the list of comments & posts back (I never read them and that’s why I took them away, but as long as they’re useful).
The nested comments thing has been driving me nuts too. I think they should be simple & merely chronological now. For the time being, some comments are getting stranded a long way from what they’re replying to.
Yes, that’s right, Snow Leopard, it’s richer.
The injera I had in Ethiopia was almost a purple color, and delicious.
The Greek guy at our supermercado showed me what kind of chickpeas the Greeks like. They are dry and come in a plastic bag. They have to be boiled but the skins have been removed so they don’t have to be milled (?) (that circular contraption with the handle that goes around and forces the legumes through holes in the bottom)–they can just go in the blender.
It’s a shame that the option of replying to specific comments has gone. Anyway I just wanted to say that at first the idea of a machine no knead the dough sounded very appealing, until I saw that it is more than four weeks rent, over $1000NZD. That’s a whole lot of dough!
I myself prefer the linear form for threads (and saying so gives me a chance to point out that linear is related to linen (and thus to that other product linseed oil of the flax plant, which Dearieme has been eating in her bread (although here in the US my experience has been that the oil is called flaxseed oil when prepared for use as a nutritional supplement, the term linseed oil being reserved for the less refined version that is used to protect wood surfaces))); but some others may like their threads nested, so don’t just listen to me.
The classic Ethiopian spice mixture with long pepper is called berbere; read about it at Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.
Looks like it’s not so much a special purpose kneading machine as a stand mixer with a dough hook. We have one of those retro KitchenAid ones.
Burmese tofu is made from chickpea flour. We have it as a salad regularly.
No it’s not. It’s the bowl that goes round, not the hook. (We have a Kenwood for what you’re talking about.) Honestly, it’s simply for kneading dough.
empty: Dearieme has been eating in her bread
My good friend Dearie is a bloke, a retired Cambridge professor of the natural sciences.
empty: don’t just listen to me
What I didn’t like was the hundreds of strings, like a cobweb. Maybe we’ll try giving the option of max. one reply to each comment (after that you’ll have to start anew)…
My mistake. In my defense, the Amazon page to which you linked says it’s a stand mixer with a dough hook and that you can whip cream with it. But now I see that the reviews entirely agree with you on what it’s actually good for.
Amazon says it’s a stand mixer
Yes, sorry, I don’t suppose Amazon is the best place to select appliances. I only linked there so that people could see the price.
Sorry, Dearieme. Jumping to conclusions. By the way, it now occurs to me that the etymology is “Dearie me”. All along I’ve been reading it with a French flavor: with final syllable -eme, as if first e circumflexed — don’t know why!
Chickpeas have lots of names around here. On a can of them in the supermarket you may see “ceci beans” or “garbanzo beans” as either title or subtitle.
All along I’ve been reading it with a French flavor: with final syllable -eme, as if first e circumflexed — don’t know why!
I don’t know why either, but I did the same thing, and am still tempted even after having realized the origin.
Perhaps we should ask dearie to tell us the origin of the pseudonym, though it sounds more Scottish than French to me. They are old allies, though.
The expression “Dearie Me” is so standard in what I shall for convenience call “Commonwealth English” that it never even occurred to me to pronounce it as one word with French-style pronunciation. At least here in Zild, it is simply a variation on “Dear Me”. Perhaps because dearieme has often mentioned their UKness I automatically parsed it as “dearie me” – the french alternative sounds perilously close to calling poor dearieme an ass.
All along I’ve been reading it with a French flavor: with final syllable -eme, as if first e circumflexed
So did I — except that I was reading Dearième, like galérien de trirème —, thinking that he was a she, but some have better excuses than others, hmm?
I think I only wrote “circumflex” because I happen to like that word. It hit me later that all I really meant was last e silent, previous e short, suggestive of French.
If nothing else, this blog has explained to Sig that dearie is not a trireme.
It has also taught me that grams could be used to make bread. (That grams could be eaten with brèdes was already known to me.)
You know Sig this stuff just goes in one ear and out the other, with me. I knew ‘gram’ looked familiar as a name for chickpea, but I couldn’t remember why. It is only a few weeks since we were discussing it with MMcM.