As promised, Eggy Bread Variations...

Two bits of real comfort food, ideal for using up that slightly-elderly bread I was talking about a couple of days ago.  I assume you're already up on basic eggy bread (aka French toast). 

Bread frittata

This is one of those recipes that isn’t really a recipe, so much as a method for dealing with whatever you’ve got to hand.

Per person, you’ll need 2-3 eggs, beaten, a slice or two of stale bread crumbled up fairly small, and some chopped cold cooked vegetables – fried onions are terrific – and/or the kind of fresh veg that cook quickly (e.g. sweetcorn kernels, chopped-up tomatoes or canned pulses of some kind).  Plus grated or cubed cheese if you’re a cheese eater, and plenty of seasoning.  If you eat meat, something like chopped ham or corned beef would go well too.

Mix the whole lot together and let it sit in a covered bowl for at least thirty minutes, longer if possible.  Then heat a frying pan with a small amount of vegetable oil until pretty hot, as though you were going to make an omelette.  Tip in the mixture and level it out, then turn the heat lower.  Cook until set; if need be either finish the top under a hot grill or turn it out onto a plate and flip it over as you return it to the pan, to cook the other side.  Serve hot.

Eggy bread toastie sandwich

This is particularly good with “sandwich loaf” bread like Genius bread.

For each person, you will need:
2 slices of bread
2 eggs
Vegetable oil

Plus a choice of one or two of
Feta or some other cheese
A sliced tomato
Some flaked canned fish
A slice of ham
Some stoned olives, chopped roughly


Beat the eggs thoroughly with some pepper and pour over the sliced bread in a flat dish.  Leave to soak for half an hour minimum.  Sandwich the two slices of soggy eggy bread with your choice of filling(s) and press down hard. 

Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan; get it good and hot to start with.  Pick up your gooey egg-soaked sandwich and slip it into the hot oil.  Fry for five minutes on a fairly high heat, then turn the heat down to fairly low.  Turn the sandwich over carefully with a spatula.  Continue cooking on the other side.  You’ll need to turn it two or three times altogether; gently does it each time.  The idea is never to let it burn but to get all the egg cooked and the filling thoroughly heated through and/or melted.  Serve hot.

The big bread question

The northern European diet is very bread-dependent, isn’t it?  Some of our most celebrated foods are breads or bread-based, or variations on the theme of yeast-raised-dough.  Think of a crisp fresh baguette, a springy focaccia or a dark, crusty rye loaf; think of pizza, think of home-made Danish pastries.  Or on second thoughts, maybe don’t think of them (I am making myself hungry, and I’ve already had my mid-morning snack).  

When I was a kid, in small-town England in the late sixties and the seventies, bread meant that white pappy stuff, ready-sliced sandwich loaves with a rubbery, rather gluey texture and no crust to speak of.  Wholemeal bread was referred-to as “brown” and probably wasn’t wholemeal at all; and it was if anything even more tasteless than white.  

The one exception, in my life at least, was when my mother and stepmum baked.  Mum tended to make white bread, but by an old-fashioned, slow process with three kneadings and three provings.  It was dense, golden-crusted and full of flavour, and a single slice with butter was as filling as a meal, and as delicious as cake.  My stepmother Jane baked knobbly wholemeal rolls, which she covered in poppy seed or sesame seed before proving and baking them; they were filling and flavoursome, and to this day any bread that tastes like Jane’s will take me back to memories of childhood.  Sometimes, for a really special occasion, she would make chollah, which was golden inside as well as out, and even more delicious.  

I’m hoping to work my way up to trying to create my own wholegrain home-made low-carb bread; but the ambition of that idea makes me quail a bit.  Bread-making is one of the few kinds of cookery that rely on accurate proportions and a degree of knowledge of the chemistry involved.  One can always throw a lot of random stuff in a pan and end up with a stew of some sort, but that just doesn’t work with yeast cookery.  Give me time, I’ll work my way up to it.

It isn’t too much of a problem, anyway, since these days there are plenty of decent, tasty breads available, for a price (though there’s still plenty of the squidgy pap around as well).  There are low-carb breads and extra-high-fibre breads, nut-free breads, dairy-free breads, high-protein breads, ancient-grain breads and even a moderately good choice of gluten-free breads.  Thank the gods for that, then.  It’s easy to romanticise the past as a more innocent era of organic agriculture, traditional customs and natural foods, but some aspects of it were rubbish, and British bread certainly went through a phase of being one of the rubbish things.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, one of the things I did straight away (besides cutting out all sugar) was to reduce my carb intake to an absolute minimum.  This got to me badly (I hated having cold hardboiled eggs for breakfast, but getting up early to cook fresh eggs was even worse as I am emphatically not a morning lark).  So I’ve been slowly re-introducing some carbs since then, starting with a home-made sugar-free muesli, and pumpernickel and its cousins sonnenbrot and vollkornbrot (which for a while I thought was called volkenbrot – ah, “the people’s bread”, how poetic – oops, no).  Oats are digested fairly slowly, as are high-fibre unrefined carbs in general, so don’t cause as much of a blood glucose spike as refined carbs like white bread.  Breakfast feels like breakfast again now.  

Proper German and Austrian pumpernickel is about as high-fibre as a bread is ever going to get.  Fortunately I’ve always loved the stuff.  Its flavour is a mighty thing.  But the pumpernickel family aren’t made in the UK, they’re imported, and they cost a pretty penny.  

Most other special-diet breads are even more ferociously expensive, which makes it particularly galling if they then get stale and have to be thrown away.  One can only derive so much consolation from feeding the ducks, when what they’re getting for their lunch is several quids’ worth of unusably-dry special bread.  So I find having some ways to use up elderly bread handy.  

Vollkornbrot and sonnenbrot both make passable toast, if you keep them under a low flame (or a lower setting on the toaster) and cook them for longer (full-blast pumpernickel, not so much, but luckily that keeps the best; that said, they’re all pretty good keepers).  They go wambly at first, and then they make a strange hissing sound, and then slowly but surely they crispen up.  Most of the gf breads I’ve come across also toast well.

They also (with the exception, once again, of pumpernickel) make a decent eggy bread, bread-and-butter pudding and strata, its Italian savoury cousin, if you give them long enough to soak before cooking them.  

Next post will be some variations on the theme of eggy bread.  Now there's another of the tastes of childhood.  Mmm, eggy bread!

No 1 Low-carb Baking Mix

A lot of my recipes are based on this; a gluten-free low-carb mix that gives a nice flavour and a reasonably open texture in baking.  And, as the White Knight says in “Alice”, it’s my own invention.  It keeps well for a month or so in a screw-top jar, though I wouldn’t recommend storing it much longer than that as the fat content could make it go rancid.  I mix up a batch of this and then use it up over the following weeks.  

Like all my baking, this uses ingredients that are easily found provided you live in or near an urban area with a health food shop.  Dried milk is very widely available and, at least in the UK, you can normally buy all the slightly more unusual things at Holland and Barrett and most independent health food shops.  And I’m sure all of them can be ordered online.

The one big problem with Baking Mix No 1 is that it isn’t nut-free; the secret ingredient of a lot of my gluten-free baking is ground almonds.   I’m still working on the challenge of a nut-free version; early attempts have not been terribly successful but I will share any breakthroughs, so watch this space.  It would be nice to be able to bake a cake that both my brothers would eat...

Ingredients

3 oz/ 80g/ scant 1 cup soya flour

1 ½ oz/ 40g/ heaped 1/3 cup dried skim milk powder

2 oz/ 55g/ heaped 2/3 cup ground almonds

5 ½ oz/ 150g/ 1 ½ cups linseed meal aka ground flaxseeds

Method

Empty into a bowl and stir together thoroughly, pressing out the lumps in the soya flour, then spoon into a storage container with a good tight screw top.  Makes 12 oz/ 325g/ 3 ½ cups.  Keeps for a couple of months in an airtight jar.

A quick note about weights and measures

I’m lucky enough to own both a good set of two-way weighing scales and a set of US cup measures.  I'm trying to get into the habit of always noting quantities in all three systems.

In the UK you’ll need to go to a specialist cookery shop to get cup measures.  My set has four, in quarter cup, one-third cup, half cup and one cup sizes, and you can get swankier sets with more sizes.  But since when you’re using cups you’re measuring by proportion rather than weight, you don’t have to have formal cup measures.  You can use any size cup, so long as  it’s roughly the right size and you always use the same one.  One of those enamelled tin cups is about right, or a large-ish teacup.  It does help if you’re good at guessing halves and two-thirds and so forth, though!