Crumpets
Hi all,
I haven't blogged for a while. (Lots of trouble uploading photos, which is a fairly big part of what blogging is about, I suppose; it could just be a problem at my end...Nevertheless, following all the directions on the site, implicitly, still does not work for me. I don't care why, any more...)
We've had weather that was too lousy for me to go out and about, so I did a fair bit of cooking and baking this weekend. Top of my list was a 45% durum semolina loaf made with a tiny 65 gram sourdough ‘biga’ that came out pretty well and helped me learn a lot about proper 'shaping' of a round loaf. (I’m still learning, as you can see!) I just had a hankering for good English crumpets (what other kind is there?)
The bread:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71323838@N00/5709745191/in/photostream/ [1]
I know that my credibility is probably weak—NY yank and all, living in Japan—but I went to Australia at a 'formative' age. Back then, people in Oz used to say, "Our daughter's gone 'back home' for a year..." meaning she'd returned to some part of Great Britain where her ancestors (may have) lived...We also used to eat Cornish pasties; London buns; Bath buns; Banbury pasties; disgusting (but very delicious) sausage rolls; rock buns; roast lamb dinners [with mint sauce(!)] and, of course, fish & chips—in other words, I'm trying to say that we had the benefits (or otherwise) of the typical, full British diet as our daily cuisine. Supermarkets were still a 'thing of the future', back then...We paid nine-pence for a freshly-made meat pie or pasty in those days.
I found an ancient sourdough crumpet recipe on my HDD using volume measurements <GRRR!> and, because I only had rye starter, I ended up with:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71323838@N00/5710307490/in/photostream/ [2]
They were tasty enough, with lashings of butter and jam…but there weren’t really enough holes to satisfy a crumpet ‘aficionado’. I rectified that today with this all-white crumpet recipe cobbled together from 4-5 web-sites and modified, by me, to accommodate a small amount of white sourdough starter. (I used some of the leftover white-flour ‘biga’ from the semolina loaf.) This is what I got:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71323838@N00/5709745211/in/photostream/ [3]
Maybe not ‘up to snuff’ for a lover of true British crumpets, but would probably satisfy any expatriate British colonial who can’t find the usual 6-pack of 'supermarket fare'.
copyu