Finally! I must admit I've grown a bit tired (if one might say so after 2 posts!) of putting in nice words what was essentially a disaster... It's all good and well to describe the ups and downs of two amateur bakers, but when you happen to be one of them, all you really want to report of are the ups!
So, finally the long awaited success story. I should have known it, though. Of course it's good the learn and to read all the wisdom you can find about bread making there is on the internet, and of course it's general knowledge that, contrary to cooking, baking is somehow a precise science... truth is, you have to trust your feelings. The numbers are undoubtedly important and helpful so you can repeat a good result, but trust me, they are not the bible!
Well, let's get it over with, shall we? Take 250 grams of barley flour, 150 grams of strong white flour. Mix with a teaspoon of olive oil and a table spoon of honey, plus a teaspoon of salt and a good sip of dark beer (in case anybody reading this thinks a 'sip' is not a precise measure, you can substitute with 75 ml). Mix all this very well as usual, while in the background, your yeast is activating itself (50 ml of boiling water, 100 ml of cold water, 2 table spoons of sugar, 3 table spoons of dry yeast). Note to myself: Try fresh yeast and see if it makes a difference!

As usual, turn all these ingredients into a nice dough (but don't exceed 10 minutes of kneading, as it might not be good for the dough or your muscles might hurt the next day) and leave it covered in a warm place for 1 hour. More or less... I actually did end up leaving it for 3 hours, by then it did rise a lot!
Before turning the attention to the dough again, we prepared the 'twist': 1 fine chopped fig (we used a fresh one, but I have the feeling a dry one would be even better) and a handful of dried mushrooms, porcini for example. We did went mushroom picking 2 weeks ago, and we dried a big pile of boletus (the same family as porcini). Obviously, using self-picked mushrooms does improve the bread. Use enough of them, though, so they complement the fig!
I kneaded the dough a second time, stretched it out a bit, spread the fig and mushroom mix, rolled it and twisted it... as usual, use your imagination! A bread should not just taste good but also look pleasing to the eyes...
So, here's the verdict on the result (after letting the dough rest for another 40 minutes before putting it in the oven for 20 minutes at 210 degree: A nicely balanced (not too soft but also not a brick) loaf of bread with a good rustic crust and a moist but not too wet inside. The figs ad texture and fruitiness while the mushrooms enhance the overall flavour and add subtle complexity... sounds fairly convincing, don't you think?

Every heard of the saying 'third time lucky'? Well, it doesn't always apply....
Having said that, we have been fairly successful picking mushrooms (milk caps and ceps, but I won't go into greater details here) in the New Forest. We dried quite a few ones and had pasta, quiche and scrambled eggs; a true mushroom bonanza!
And then I turned my attention to bread making (as Ana was busy with the quiche). Things were looking promising! For the first time, the yeast was doing what a yeast is supposed to do when you activate it. It bubbled and the surface became frothy. I mixed 50ml of boiling water with 100ml of dry cider, dissolved 2 tablespoons of sugar and then added 3 table spoons of yeast. Cool. (It seems to work, but since then Ana told me that alcohol doesn't just affect people, it also makes yeast sluggish.)

In the meantime, the following ingredients came together: 200g of white strong flour, 200g of rye flour, a good share of butter, a table spoon of maple syrup, a tea spoon of salt. Nothing that would give reason to believe that problems were imminent.

Mixing everything together I soon started realizing that the dough was a bit tougher to knead than other doughs before, but I wasn't worried. Actually, we both started worrying that after one hour of resting in a warm place (the usual way), it didn't rise. Okay, it did rise, but that was by far not the double size we wanted to see. So we gave it another 30 minutes, and it did look a bit better.

Now came the second time kneading and then it went into the oven for 20 minutes. Now, while usually when things go wrong you might start puzzling and creating theories why the result didn't match the expectations, this time I did make an obvious mistake, which added to the shortfalls of the finished bread:
Our oven is a product of rather strange ingenuity, there is a little switch in the door, so when you leave the door open a bit, it switches to the grill-function. Luckily, the mistake was soon discovered, as the top of the bread was turning black-ish and a slightly alarming smell reached our noses. Then the door was closed and the bread continued baking the way it was intended.
So, what was the outcome? The bread does actually taste surprisingly well and it does look pretty rustic. It also looks rather solid and very flat, which is a bit of a giveaway that things are not quite right. The crust is... well, edible. But only just, and you'd need strong teeth.

What will we do differently next time? First, never grill a bread. It's not a t-bone steak. Second, better drink the beer rather than trying to intoxicate the yeast. Or add it later. Third, rye is a difficult type of flour. Rye bread is wonderful, but when it goes wrong, it really does go wrong.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to our next bread. It's got to be better!

Alright, let's start with a picture illustrating what I was saying last week about bread in Norway. We were told that this was the best bakery in Oslo. We didn't stop there, so we just have to believe it, fact is, it looked very good through the window!

Now, for this week, we have to report some major drama... it started all so well! Last week there was a really interesting program on TV, called 'The Great British Back Off'. They were doing bread this time, so we watched and took mental notes. Not that our bread has been bad so far, but of course we're always ready to learn and improve. It's all about the yeast, the temperature, the amount of sugar and salt (that's possibly the reason why I like to be rather vague about those amounts, so nobody can claim that I was giving wrong instructions!)

So, here we are, and this time we tried to do it really 'proper' according to what we learned. Preparing the yeast with the right amount of warm water (1/3 boiling and 2/3 cold) and the right amount of sugar. Keep it in a warm place for about 15 minutes... the surface should froth, but maybe the bubbles where still there from the whisking? I don't know...
Nevermind, I got 400 grams of white flour, 2 teaspoons of salt, a dash of olive oil. Added some nice ale from Dorset to get the amount of liquid right (approx. 150ml for preparing the yeast, so we needed another 100ml, more or less). Now, one thing I seemingly always did wrong was that I worked the dough just roughly in the beginning and thoroughly after the 1 hour rest, in which the dough size should double. Okay, if that was wrong, let's see how it done right: Work the dough thoroughly, cover with a wetted tea towel and leave in a warm place for an hour. Guess what, it didn't rise! Something was not going according to plan, but we ignored the warning signs, kneaded the dough (that is to get the non-existing air bubbles out), let it rest for another 30 minutes, in which it didn't rise either.
Oh well! Still put it in the oven and 20 minutes later we had a lovely looking brick. Crust was not too bad, it sounded right when tapping, but when we cut it, it was practically raw dough inside. What a disaster!

Anyway, today we started all over again, used more yeast, more sugar. Warmed the ale before subjecting the yeast mix to it. To cut a long story short: The result is better. If that doesn't sound too enthusiastic it's because I'm not convinced. The dough did rise, but far from what it was supposed to. The bread stayed fairly compact, at least it looks really interesting! So, we did cut, we did try. Not too bad. Actually, it is better than expected. But the next time I'd like to see something more convincing... or is our baking career grinding to a hold? I hope not!