The Oven has baked its last loaf. This blog is no longer being updated.

My cooking videos appear at youtube.com/janeragavan

I write on food at star2.com

Sourdough Surprises: Rolls (Garlic Knots)

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Does this look like fried chicken to you? I took this to the office for a colleague's farewell tea and more than one person said they thought it was fried chicken. Huh?

They're garlic knots. I admit they're a lit-t-tle big for a snack but they make good-sized rolls for dinner. They're for this month's Sourdough Surprises.

Anyway, they're made with the 1:2:3 sourdough formula ~ one part leaven to two parts water to three parts flour by weight. It's easy to remember and always produces a good loaf. For these knots, the amounts were: 92g refreshed and very active leaven (at 80% hydration), 184g water, 276g all-purpose flour and a teaspoon of salt (which should be weighed so that it is around 4%, but I winged it this time).

Lately, I've been making cooking videos for work and made this one which I can probably use when I write about bread in the future ~ although before I put it up on YouTube, I will have to edit in new bread knots that don't look like fried chicken!


The dough is bulked proofed in a square container so that when it is transferred to the work surface, I don't have to fiddle around with the shape too much (I learnt this from Paul Hollywood's recipe for ciabatta and watching the latest series/season of The Great British Bakeoff). Using a pizza cutter, I divide the dough into 11 strips (the last one was runty!), tie them in knots and bake them for around 25 minutes. I didn't let them get crusty or too brown on top or they wouldn't soak up the garlic-parsley dressing.



The Wayward Oven meets Work

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

I have neglected this blog. That doesn't mean I haven't been cooking though. My job as a journalist involves writing about food and cooking for print and our website and since I have been doing a lot of that for work, the blog has been dormant.

But I've decided that to keep this blog current and when I don't have any blog-specific things to post about, I should just put up some of the things I've done for work.

Yesterday, I put up web-exclusive recipes for a cured broccoli dish (that's the picture at the top of the page) and last week, it was for chilli tuna fish cakes, which came with my own stop-motion video:


Stop-motion films ~ that's what I've been interested in for a while now and I plan to make more. It's time consuming ~ so many pictures to take! ~ but it keeps me amused.

Last week, my colleagues and I made four types of cake for our monthly column, Don't Call Me Chef. I made a video of the photo shoot:


I used Windows Movie Maker but I also love YouTube's royalty-free music/sound effects and editing help.

So that's the blog updated. On to working on more articles...