Focaccia with sesame and nigella seeds

This bread is perfect as a side for dinner, on a buffet or just as a snack. If I bake it with dinner, it will most likely be gone by lunch time on the following day. I love the taste of the nigella and sesame seeds, and they look amazing with their contrasting colours. Delicious on its own or with a couple of hunks of nice cheese - add a few olives and a glass of red wine, and you've practically got yourself an Italian feast!

Focaccia with sesame and nigella seeds:

25 grams fresh yeast

300 ml lukewarm water

1 tbsp honey

1/2 tbsp salt

250 grams tipo 00 flour (fine durum flour works well too)

200 grams plain flour

Topping:

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp nigella seeds

1 tbsp sesame seeds

1 tbsp coarse salt

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add honey, salt and flour and knead well. Add more flour if the dough is sticking to your fingers, but be carefully not to add too much. Only add enough to make the dough manageable. Preferably, you should knead the dough for five to ten minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic, but if you're very hungry, less will make a perfectly edible bread :) Place the dough in a big bowl, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rise for about an hour, until it doubles in volume.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees.

Remove the dough from the bowl, punch it down, and roll it out flat, about 1 centimetre thick. Place dough on a lined baking tray, drizzle with oil and sprinkle with sesame seeds, nigella seeds and salt. Poke little dents in the dough, using your fingers or the end of a wooden spoon. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until crispy and golden.

No-knead pot bread

This is the easiest bread recipe I know. It requires hardly any work, just lots of time. On top of that it's delicious and comes out looking like it was baked by a professional baker - if you ever need to impress anyone with your bread-baking skills, this is the bread to bake!

This bread is baked inside a preheated saucepan under a lid. If you want the technical explanation as to what that does to the bread, check out this article from the New York Times. All I know is that it works.

No-knead pot bread:

500 ml cold water

A pea-sized amount of fresh yeast (or a quarter teaspoon dry yeast, according to the NYT article)

1000 ml plain flour

2 tsp salt

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the salt and flour, and mix. As soon as all the flour is mixed in, you're done.  Cover the bowl with cling film, and leave the dough to rise for at least 12 hours. I normally make the dough in the evening and bake it in the morning or when I get home from work. 

After 12 hours, the dough will be visibly full of little bubbles. Turn it onto a generously floured surface, and fold it over on itself a few times - that's all, no kneading involved. The dough is very wet, so you need quite a lot of flour to stop it from sticking to the work surface and your fingers. Now gently lift the dough back off the work surface and place it into a greased dish of some kind. I use an oval oven proof dish which I grease with oil and dust with flour. It doesn't really matter what you use, as long as it has room for the dough to grow additionally in size. Cover the dough with cling film, and leave it to rise for another two hours. When the two hours have passed, the dough is ready to bake.

About half an hour before the dough is ready to bake, heat your oven to 250 degrees C. At the same time, place the pan that you are using to cook the bread  in the oven. Both oven and pan need to be really hot by the time you bake the bread. Most recipes I've seen for this type of bread use the very fancy and very expensive Le Creuset cast iron pots. I just use a 24 cm stainless steal saute pan and a quiche tin for a lid. The most important thing is that it can handle going in the oven at 250 degrees and that the lid won't let any air in. Once the dough is ready, remove the pan from the oven, place the dough inside, put the lid on and stick it back it the oven. Let it bake under a lid for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and finish baking for 15 minutes. Turn the bread out of the pan and cool on a cooling rack for at least 20 minutes before serving.

Falafels with arab-style flat breads

I'm currently stuck in the prison that is exams. All day I spend alone in my bedroom, buried under books and notes, thinking 'til my brain hurts and typing 'til my fingers bleed. And that is exactly why I chose to cook the most time-consuming dinner I could think of! I'm really good at thinking of really important other things I probably should just get done before I can continue working on my exams - suddenly I feel an overwhelming need to wash the floors, clean the oven or bake a cake. Cooking this meal gave me a good two hour break from my studies, and it was fun, too :)

Everyone in this home (all two of us) love falafels, and we'd probably have them much more often if they didn't take so long to cook. Also, they require a little bit of thinking ahead, as you have to soak the chickpeas for about 12 hours or so before you can use them. But if you can find the time, they really are all worth it!

Flat bread (as adapted from the brilliant Danish bread blog, Brødet. Check it out here!):

I get 12 flat breads from this recipe.

350 ml lukewarm water.
25 g fresh yeast
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
(At least) 500 g flour (I used 100 g spelt flour and 400 g plain flour)

Instructions below


Falafel:

250 g dry chickpeas (Tinned won't work for falafels - I can't make them work, anyway)
A couple of big handfuls of parsley
2 red chillies, no seeds
4 cloves of garlic
1 onion
2 tsp tahini
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp plain flour
1 litre sunflower oil for frying

On the night before you want to cook the falafel, place the chickpeas in a bowl and cover with water about twice as high as the chickpeas. Leave to soak in the fridge over night.

To make both flat breads and falafels, start by making the bread dough. Dissolve the yeast in the water and add salt and sugar. Then add the flour, and get your hands in there to mix. Knead for a few minutes, and add more flour if the dough is sticking to your fingers. If it's sticking to your fingers now, it will stick to the pan later! Leave the dough to rise in your warmest room while you prepare the dough for the falafels. I left my dough for about half an hour, and it was fine.

Meanwhile, put your chickpeas into a food processor, and blitz for a few minutes, until they are roughly chopped and resemble a grainy pulp. Spoon the chickpeas into a bowl, and add to the food processor the remaining ingredients, except for the flour and baking powder. Now add about four big spoonfuls of the chopped chickpeas - This will make it easier for the other ingredients to mix. Blitz for a couple of minutes until everything is roughly chopped - you might have to spoon the mixture of the sides a few times to get everything in there. Add this mixture to the bowl of chickpeas, and mix. Now in another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder and mix well. Add it to the chickpeas, and get your fingers in there to make sure everything is mixed well, and that the flour/baking powder mix is evenly distributed. The flour binds the other ingredients together, allowing you to shape the mixture into balls later. Stick the bowl in the fridge while you make your flat breads.

Get your dough, which should have grown substantially in size by now. Remove it from the bowl, knock the air out of it, and cut it into 12 equally sized pieces. Now put a pan on the hob and get it nice and hot, I always just stick it on the highest heat possible. Don't add any butter, oil or anything to the pan. While the pan is getting hot, lightly flour a surface, take a piece of dough and roll it out paper thin. If the dough is sticking to you rolling pin, dust it with flour. You might end up using quite a lot of flour, which is fine. Take your paper thin dough and place it onto the dry, hot pan. Let it cook for about a minute on each side. While it's cooking, roll out your next piece of dough. Continue until all your 12 pieces of dough have turned into yummy flat breads! If you are stacking your flat breads on a plate as they've cooked, a good piece of advice is to keep the most recently cooked one separated from the one underneath it with a piece of baking paper. I find they stick together if they touch while they're very hot.

Back to the falafels! Get the dough from the fridge. Pour your sunflower oil into a sauté pan or just a regular saucepan and place over a high heat. With your hands, start rolling your falafel dough into small balls the size of a walnut. Every once in a while, check to see if the oil is hot enough for frying. You can do that by sticking the wooden end of a match into the oil - when the oil bubbles around the match, it's hot enough to start frying. I normally have time to roll all my falafels before the oil gets hot.

Use a spoon to place the falafels in the hot oil. I only cook four at a time - adding too many will make the oil go cold. Unfortunately, one litre of oil in my sauté pan is just too little for the falafels to be fully emerged, so I have to turn them over once while they fry. I let them cook for a minute or two on each side, until they become golden brown. Remove from the oil, add another four, and keep going until all your falafels are cooked.  While the falafels are cooking, you can chop whichever veggies you want in your flat breads with them. We served them tonight, as they would have been served by our local falafel pusher, with iceberg lettuce, cucumber, tomato, finely sliced red onion a garlic dressing. It was delicious as always, and the best news is that there is plenty left over for lunch today!