REAL SIMPLE FOOD

Daydreaming about food, one dish at a time

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INSTANT FOOD

It’s always the small pleasures. I am sitting at home waiting for the plumber to arrive (and have a mountain of emails to clear from my inbox). But instead of heading straight to the office this gave me the chance to have a quick breakfast at home, something that happens rarely these days thanks to a lot of travel and free breakfast at work. And so I picked up some brioche buns from the bakery across the street and finally opened a small jar of Matcha Milk Jam I picked up at @sadaharu_aoki when I was in Paris a few weeks ago. And it is glorious. Beautiful texture and perfect balance of flavour - not too strong and not too weak and the matcha nicely balances out all the sugar. Now I want to try making my own milk jam, but maybe a kinako or hojicha version! Also, those flowers in the background are surprisingly long-living. Going on two weeks now!

Channelled my inner Christina Tosi today and made Dorito(!) financiers. I have never cared much for crisps and other salty snacks, but give me a bag of doritos and I can’t stop. I have already baked with toasted masa harina a few times (there is a great recipe for masa harina madeleines on the blog) and adore it’s strong corn flavour. Using powdered doritos is even better. It’s almost like eating cornbread, but in the form of these rich and buttery small French cakes. Extremely good if I dare say so myself. Speaking of Christina Tosi, I bet powdered doritos would work a treat in her corn cookies!

Rose water. Another essential ingredient in my kitchen. It doesn’t get used nearly as often as the bottle of Orange Blossom Water but when I do use it it makes all the difference. My favourite thing to do with is probably anytime I make something involving raspberries - the two just pair wonderfully. E.g. I love profiteroles filled with whipped cream flavoured with raspberries macerated in sugar and rose blossom water. You could also make a rose blossom water simple syrup and use that to brush on stale brioche if you are making bostock with fresh raspberries. But rose blossom water is also a fantastic pairing with apples, the tarter the better, and anything involving cardamom and pistachios. Just be careful - if you use too much you risk creating something rather soapy in flavour.

Coming back to one of my favourite topics: substitutions in the kitchen. And this time, I want to talk about fat! Yes, you might not think of fat as a very substitutable ingredient given the key role it plays in baking (and cooking). And yet, provided you stick to one basic rule (more on that below) it is totally doable. So what is the key rule? Substitute fat with fat! No, seriously, when it comes to baking you want to keep the fat percentage in your recipe the same regardless of what type of fat you use if you want to achieve the same result. And that’s pretty easily done when you remember that butter has a fat content of around 80 per cent and oil of around 99 per cent. So if a recipe calls for say 100g butter, you can swap this for 80ml of oil plus 20ml of whatever liquid you need for the recipe (e.g. milk or water). You may be asking yourself why you would want to swap one type of fat for another. And the reason for this is flavour - as much as neutral tasting vegetable oil is great for cooking, when it comes to baking it can be fun to swap butter for something more flavourful like olive oil or toasted sesame oil or coconut oil. And to get you started, here are some of my favourite ideas for fat substitutions (starting with the one pictured here and linked to in my profile): - Making financiers with Moroccan argan oil instead of butter - Making brioche with peanut butter or other nut butters - imagine how delicious a babka would be if made with a peanut butter brioche dough and some toasted and salted peanuts sprinkled on the filling! - Making a coconut loaf cake with coconut oil instead of butter for an extra intense coconut flavour - Making chocolate chip cookies with brown butter instead of regular butter - Making a saffron and cardamom pound cake with ghee instead of butter for an extra buttery flavour - Making brioche with olive oil instead of butter - I especially love this when pairing brioche with anything citrus flavoured, somehow the brioche with olive oil lets the flavour of citrus fruits through more (e.g. a lemon curd filling or candied orange zest in the dough itself) - hence why I love Gibassierso much.

The downside of my worktrips to Istanbul is that I end up spending half of my Sunday in taxis, on a plane or traipsing through airports. The upside is ending the week with delicious Turkish food all washed down with a glorious glass of Turkish wine.

The half-life of a babka is always much shorter than you expect. Especially when it’s a @honeyandco one. That filling is so chocolatey, it’s amazing. Added an extra generous pinch of sea salt to the filling and some Orange Blossom Water to the sugar syrup this time - will definitely do that again.

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German baking

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