Wild Garlic Focaccia

As anyone with even a vague interest in wild food knows, spring is the season for wild garlic - a pungent wild allium which grows in woodlands, and which has become very popular in recent years. A couple of weeks ago, I was out walking and found a vast sea of wild garlic stretching as far as I could see into the trees. I picked a bag full, stuck it in my rucksack and carried on walking. I spent the next few days making pesto with it, chucking it in a stir fry, mixing it through ragu, and anything else I could think of. A week later I went walking with my Mum and she turned up with a very full carrier bag of wild garlic, and I had to think of more ways of using it. I made a wild garlic focaccia, which was delicious.

A sea of wild garlic...

Emmer sourdough

One of the joys of baking my own bread is experimenting with different flours. Sometimes that might be seeking authenticity baking a ciabatta using an Italian type 00 bread flour, or baguettes using French T55 flour. What I particularly enjoy is baking with heritage flours, from grains such as spelt or emmer. Humans have a long history of growing grains, and over the millennia have developed and cross-bred countless varieties. The pace of this advance has been particularly fast since the Second World War. As I wrote in another post, mainstream varieties of wheat grown commercially today are quite different to those grown 50 or even 30 years ago. Often, yield and disease resistance, rather than flavour, are the major driving forces behind the development of modern cultivars. (And in many ways this is understandable, we live in an increasingly crowded planet and have only a finite amount of agricultural land.) By baking with heritage flours, we can inject more complex flavours into bread, as well as getting a taste of the breads our ancestors ate.

Trouble with gluten?

I have been baking bread at home now for several years. I find it a deeply satisfying process. There is something magical about taking four basic ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast (sometimes in the form of a sourdough starter), and with a bit of kneading, fermentation, shaping and baking, turning them into a loaf of bread. And what bread too! The flavour of home-baked bread far surpasses that of supermarket bread and much of that found in high street bakeries.

Saffron buns

Saffron buns are a Cornish speciality and are part of the fine British heritage of enriched bread products. The addition of saffron gives the buns a wonderful yellow colour and warm flavour. Although saffron is often thought of as a Mediterranean spice, Cornwall had a history of saffron growing, (the spice having been introduced to the British Isles by the Romans) and saffron appears in a number of traditional Cornish recipes.

Saffron hot-cross buns