Search Results for: how to make bread

Potato Flatbread with Zucchini and Mint

It’s been almost two months since I last posted. Sorry it took me so long to come back online but life kind of intervened… Anyway here we are in our summer river retreat enjoying family, friends and retirement. Hard to believe we finally have time on our hands. What a treat!

I have been baking up a storm, mostly Gérard’s rustic batards which have become a staple in our house since it is such a tasty bread and such a reliable recipe and if I make a double batch, there is enough for us, for the freezer and for the neighbors too, which is always nice. Although the other day, I overlooked the fact that it was searingly hot out and I let the dough overproof. That’s how I discovered that, when overproofed, Gérard’s dough makes deliciously flavorful and crusty flatbreads (not pretty to look at though).

However this zucchini flatbread was made with a different dough. I found the recipe for it in The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, an excellent book which I have certainly underused since I bought it last October. It calls for mashed potatoes but I didn’t have any on hand while we had some leftover steamed potatoes. I just peeled the skin off one and mashed it with a fork and voilà, it worked. I also had one zucchini, mint from the garden, some red pepper I had roasted the week before and kept in olive oil, fresh goat cheese and, in the freezer, a bag full of za’atar, a flavorful Middle Eastern seasoning which is also delicious on salads and veggies but goes equally well with grilled meats and yogurt cheese, among other dishes. For best flavor, the dough is made 24 hours ahead of time.

We had friends over and I totally forgot to take a picture of the baked flatbread. The pictures you see show it before it went into the oven. Size-wise, it would have made a meal for the two of us with a salad on the side. There were four of us and we had it as an appetizer.

Ingredients (for one 10-inch flatbread):

100 g unbleached all-purpose flour

0.8 g instant yeast

2 g sugar (Beranbaum uses 8 g)

2.5 g salt

38 g mashed potatoes (or peeled and fork-smashed steamed potatoes)

7 g olive oil (Beranbaum uses butter) + 4.5 g for the bowl

44 g water (preferably potato water) at room temperature

8 g lightly beaten egg

Toppings to taste: here I used an unpeeled zucchini, sliced very thin, steamed for 1 minute in the microwave and squeezed dry, ribbons of grilled red pepper, crumbled goat cheese, mint, za’atar, pepper and salt but you can use whatever you have on hand that goes well together and looks pretty.

Method:

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, yeast and sugar. Then whisk in the salt, add the mashed potato and olive oil and mix with a wooden spoon or rubber scraper until just incorporated in clumpy bits
Add the water and egg and stir in until blended
Using an oiled spatula or dough scraper, scrape the dough onto a counter and knead it lightly for about 15 seconds, just to form a smooth dough with a little elasticity
Pour 4.5 g of oil into a bowl and place the dough in the bowl. Turn it over to coat all sides. Cover tightly and allow to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes or until slightly puffy
Set the dough, still in the container, in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours (if planning to use it right away, double the fermentation time to one hour and skip the fridge part)
When ready to bake, lift the dough out of the bowl and place it on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper (Beranbaum uses an oiled pizza pan)
Press down on the dough to deflate it gently and shape it into a smooth round by tucking under the edges. Allow it to sit for 15 minutes, covered
Place a baking stone on an oven shelf at the lowest level and preheat the oven to 475º F/246º C one hour before baking
Using your fingertips, press the ball of dough out into a 10-inch circle, sprinkle with some olive oil from the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and allow to sit for 30 to 40 minutes, until the dough becomes light and slightly puffy with air
Garnish with the desired toppings and set directly on the hot stone
Bake for 10 minutes, check for color (turn 180º if your oven has heat spots as mine does) and bake for another 5 to 10 minutes until nicely colored
Eat while still warm.

This flatbread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille (Abbey Bread)

The recipe for this bread was devised by William Alexander during his stay at Saint-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy. As related in his book, 52 loaves, the monks had been baking their own bread for ages but their baker had left two years earlier and since none of the remaining monks possessed the necessary skills, they were happy to have a baker come and make “un peu de pain pour la communauté” (some bread for the community). They wrote that they would also be grateful if their helpful guest could show one of them how to make bread.

Not feeling qualified enough, Alexander almost wrote back to say he couldn’t possibly live up to the monks’ expectations but then he reflected: “I wasn’t just being asked to train a monk or to bake some bread; I was being asked to repair a broken thirteen-hundred-year old chain, to return fresh bread to this abbey, to reignite a tradition what had tragically been extinguished. It was an opportunity to repay a debt, to do for this abbey what the abbeys of Europe once did for the rest of us – keep knowledge alive during dark times….” You’ve got to love a man who thinks like that!

Once at the Abbey, he discovered the monks were reluctant to commit to the rigorous feeding schedule of a levain (although I wonder why… What did the monks use in the old days but levain?). They agreed however to feed the one he had brought them on the nights preceding baking days. Alexander didn’t argue, he adapted his recipe for fresh yeast (with a bit of levain thrown it for flavor) and, two years later, at the writing of the book, the monks were still baking his bread three days a week and hadn’t gone back to the local baker. They even asked for brioche and croissant recipes!

If their village baker made bread that was anything like the one we sampled last year in France near Bourg-en-Bresse, I fully understand why the monks were calling for help. We had stopped for breakfast in a tiny village on our way to visit an old mill. The owner of the café told us that she didn’t have any bread but that we could cross the street and buy some from the bakery and that she would happily provide us with butter and jam.

So I went to the bakery where I observed with amazement voluminous loaves which looked like oval balloons: the label said they weighed 1-kg but they were gigantic. Logically they should have weighed much more. I bought a half-baguette which I brought back to the café. We tried it. It was very white and bland and its texture recalled that of cotton candy. Apparently the village baker had mastered the dubious art of producing the worst possible kind of French bread by using no preferment and mixing the dough at high speed.

The café owner saw our faces and she said: “Well, now you understand why I don’t have any bread to offer you. Not only is the bread pretty bad but it goes stale so fast that if I buy it before 9 AM, I have to go back to the bakery before lunch hour begins and still my customers complain! Unfortunately we are stuck with it as he is the only baker in the village.”

Well, the monks were lucky enough to have all necessary (albeit rather old-fashioned) baking equipment on the premises and their determination to go back to “real” bread paid off. The “pain de l’Abbaye” is of the quiet variety (just like them) but it delivers. It has lovely rustic undertones, thanks to the addition of whole wheat and whole rye, and the combination of poolish and levain gives it a satisfying complexity. It rises beautifully in the oven and bakes to a ruddy burnish.

I baked a big batch as I needed bread to give away, to bring to a party and to freeze and I had fun with the shaping and the stenciling.

Alexander reports that the monks insisted on a blunt-end cylinder shape with no points “so that everyone gets the same-size piece”. I guess the monks are nothing but egalitarian! I didn’t have the same concern (some of us – meaning myself – love the pointy ends while some others – meaning my significant other – don’t – how lucky is that!), so the blunt shape wasn’t a requirement. I tried however to make my ends as rounded as possible. I had to make my loaves shorter than the monks’ as my oven is rather small and they ended up stubbier.

As it is, I settled on 7 680-g loaves (raw weight): 4 short and fat bâtards and 3 boules (one of the boules weighed a tad more, 710 g, I think). Only six loaves can be seen on the photos as one was given away while still warm from the oven. The last loaf was rather overproofed even though I had tried to delay things by putting the dough to ferment in the cool basement. The day was pretty hot and incipient summer weather does make a huge difference in fermentation time.

Generally speaking the loaves all ended up proofing a bit too fast. Maybe for that reason, I didn’t get all the holes I was hoping for in the crumb. It could also be because I used more whole grain than indicated, both in the poolish and in the levain. Anyway like the Olympic torch, the burning desire for the perfect Abbey loaf has now passed on to me and this summer I plan to forge ahead in my own quest for the holey crumb. I also plan to tweak the recipe a bit by adding no commercial yeast at all in the final dough.

William Alexander has kindly allowed me to post the original recipe (which is in the book but not on his website). The recipe you’ll find below is my adaptation. I used all organic flours and grains.

Ingredients: (for 7 loaves)

Poolish

400 g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur’s)

267 g high-extraction flour (I used La Milanaise‘s sifted flour)

111 g freshly milled whole wheat flour (red hard winter)

56 g freshly milled rye flour

834 g water

15 g fresh yeast

Final dough

1,433 g all-purpose flour

223 g freshly milled whole wheat flour

112 g freshly milled rye flour

154 g high-extraction flour

1,012 g water

334 g mature levain (100% hydration) (originally a 42% whole-grain firm levain based on a mixture of wheat, spelt and rye, changed into a liquid levain and fed once with high-extraction flour the night before the bake)

all of the poolish

31 g fresh yeast

54 g sea salt

Method:

I pretty much followed the indications given by Alexander in the original recipe , except that I did the autolyse before adding the salt (salt tightens the gluten networks, slowing down their development, which is the opposite of what the autolyse is supposed to achieve. See Hamelman’s Bread, page 9). Alexander may have the monks add it earlier so that they don’t forget it later (as happened to him once).
I also did one fold after one hour and another one 30 minutes later. I also baked at 475 F instead of 500 as my oven gets really hot and at 500 F, the bread turns dark before it is fully baked.

Le pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Pain polka (Polka Bread)

I was browsing through some papers my Mom gave me in 2005 when she moved from the apartment she had shared with my Dad to her retirement home and found an old notebook in which she had kept a detailed account of household expenses for a whole (presumably lean) year (only months are indicated but several clues lead me to think it was the year of my birth).
Two food items appear on every single page day after day. Knowing mine was a French family, I am sure you already guessed that one of these two daily purchases was bread. The other one was milk.
In my family, milk was sometimes used for soups (my mom made a wickedly delicious rice and potato milk soup) or dessert (caramelized rice pudding comes to mind), “pain perdu” (French toast) or crêpes but mostly it went into the hot Ovomaltine (Ovaltine in this country) which she had us drink every morning. We never drank cold milk and I don’t remember us having cereals in the house until much much later and then only plain corn flakes which I didn’t particularly care for as they became soggy extremely fast. I didn’t like the taste of Ovomaltine either but my mom said we had to drink it because malt was good for children. Some blessed weeks she relented and bought Banania, a hot cocoa mix based on banana flour. We loved that!
My Mom never had to coax us into eating bread however. It was an essential part of every meal. We mostly had baguettes, but also bâtards when we were in the country at my grandparents’ house. Even at age 80, my grandfather rode his Solex (motorized bike) to the next village on the itinerant baker’s day off (that baker drove slowly through the village on most days, selling bread from his store on wheels).

I have no pictures of my grandfather riding his Solex with fat long loaves fastened to the rack behind the saddle but since he always wore a beret and had a big bushy mustache, I am pretty sure he must have looked like a poster Frenchman on the rides back home.
We only ate crusty white bread, except for festive occasions when fresh oysters were on the menu. Then we had “pain bis” (a darker and denser bread which contained rye), spread with thick country butter. I liked it. But then, even as a child, I seldom met a bread I didn’t like…
Coming back from France last week, one of the first things I did was to reactivate my levain (the one I had started with Gérard) and get ready for baking again. The levain (which I had dehydrated nearly three months ago and kept in the form of dry nuggets) literally sprang back to life. I was able to use it after only two feedings.
From my first batch, I made one bâtard, one funny-looking (but deliciously crunchy) S-shaped “tordu” (which I twisted but didn’t score prior to baking) and two round polka breads.

Polka bread is for crust lovers. Popular throughout France, it dates back to the first years of the 20th century according to Pains d’hier et d’aujourd’hu i (literally “Breads of yesteryear of and of today”), Mouette Barboff’s excellent compendium of French breads which Marc Dantan has illustrated with stunning photographs.
Barboff goes on to say that polka bread is a levain-fermented wheat bread, usually made from white flour. What makes it different from other breads is its tic-tac-toe scoring. While it is often round, it can also be found in long shapes (thus offering an even higher percentage of crust). In Paris and surrounding areas, it is often sold as a 4 lb-galette shaped loaf.

I hardly ever make an all-white bread, so I chose to use rustic bâtard dough for this batch but bearing in mind that polka bread is often made with overproofed dough (which would not bake into a handsome loaf if shaped and scored as usual but gives the bread an ever more complex flavor), I retarded the dough, letting it bulk-ferment at room temperature for about one hour after mixing, folding it once then sticking it in the fridge for about 14 hours. I let it come back to room temperature before shaping, proofing and baking.
The loaves were shaped as boules. Once proofed and just prior to baking, I gently flattened the ones I wanted to make into polka breads with the palm of my hand (till they were about one-inch thick), floured them lightly and scored them as deep as possible (until I felt the countertop under the blade but without cutting through the dough) using the blunt side of the blade of a long kitchen knife. I could also have scored them with a lame and will do so next time for a more rustic look. They baked for about 35 minutes at 460 F/238 C. They were crunchy and delicious for breakfast and later on in the day with a runny French brie from Trader Joe’s…

Ingredients (for 1 “tordu”, 1 bâtard and 2 polka breads):

630 g organic unbleached all-purpose flour
270 g flour from freshly milled organic berries (60% wheat, 30% spelt, 10% rye)
770 g water
360 g ripe levain (65% hydration), cut into small pieces (like fluffy little pillows)
50 g wheat germ
18 g salt

Method: (this bread is made over two days but could be made in one day if desired by skipping the retarding of the dough in the fridge)

Mix the flours with most of the water (at the required temperature to produce a dough at 76ºF/24ºC) in the bowl of the mixer and let rest 45 minutes to one hour (autolyse)
Add the levain and mix on first speed
Continue mixing for a few minutes and add the salt
Adjust the hydration with the remaining water (different flours require different hydration rates), continue mixing for a minute or two and turn off the mixer. The dough should be soft to medium soft
Transfer to a tightly closed oiled bin
Ferment for one hour at room temp (69º F/21º C in my house), give the dough a four-way fold and put it in the fridge for 12 to 14 hours
Bring the dough back to room temperature
Transfer it to a flour-dusted work surface, divide in 4 pieces, pre-shape in 4 boules and let rest 30 minutes, covered
Shape as desired (you might want to make 2 round and 2 long polka breads, in which case you would want 2 boules and 2 batards) and proof on a floured couche at room temperature, covered, for about one hour or until the dough springs back slowly when poked
Meanwhile preheat the oven to 480ºF/249ºC (my oven doesn’t heat very well. A lower temperature setting might work just fine in your oven), taking care to put it in a baking stone and, underneath, a heavy metal pan for steaming (mine contains barbecue stones which we bought solely for steaming purposes)
When the loaves are ready to be baked , dust with flour and score as desired. For the polka breads, whatever the shape, you must gently flatten the bread with the palm of you hand, then score deeply either with a lame (for a more rustic look) or with the blunt side of the blade of a long kitchen knife
Pour a cup of cold water in the metal pan and bake for 35 minutes, turning the heat down after the first 10 minutes (in my case to 460ºF/238ºC) (since my oven has hot spots, I also move the loaves around after the first 15 minutes)
Remove from the oven and cool on a rack. Enjoy!

The Pain polka goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Peanut Bread

I am not a huge fan of commercial yeast. First of all, I don’t particularly care for the flavor, then I often find the crust way too thin for my taste (although I love deliciously crisp and tasty poolish-based baguettes such as the one I once tasted in North Carolina at Lionel Vatinet’s La Farm Bakery) and finally I am convinced that levain breads are nutritionally more wholesome (see Professor Robert Low’s article on the health benefits of levain).
So, coming to the Bay Area for a 3-week stay (which somehow morphed into 4-week one), I brought with me a dry nugget of my levain à la Gérard, which I diluted it in lukewarm water upon arrival and mixed the day after with some wheat, spelt and rye flours. After playing dead for 24 hours, it came back to life with a vengeance and I was able to bake with it only 24 hours after its resurrection.
However, since I didn’t have access to a mill, I had to used store-bought whole grain flours and the taste was just not the same. Let’s put it that way: knowing and loving what this levain can do, it was hard to settle for less. So after a while, I told myself “Oh, well! Forget about it, at least I tried. There are so many good bakeries in the Bay Area that I’ll just go and buy bread every day. Let me dump the levain (gasp!) and save myself the chore of feeding it twice a day.” And so I did…
But I failed to take into account the fact that the urge to bake has an irresistible grip on me. I just love making bread, I have it in my blood, I can’t stop doing it. So, suddenly bereft of levain (a novel kind of experience for me since, back home, I am always swimming in a surplus of the wild beasties), I cast around for alternatives and stumbled upon Jim Lahey’s My Bread – The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method. I decided to give it a try.
The book is esthetically very pleasing. The photography, by Squire Fox, is gorgeous and the recipes are very clearly presented. So far I have only tried two of them, the Olive Bread and the Peanut Bread. Both were completely hassle-free. I would say these are the easiest breads I ever made, much simpler actually than the ones to be found in Kneadlessly Simple.
The proportions given for water and flour work beautifully. The dough comes together like a charm and after one single fold, it looks strong enough to shape.

No-Knead Olive Bread

I didn’t particularly care for the above Olive Bread. The recipe calls for 3 g of instant yeast for 400 g of flour and somehow the flavor and smell of yeast came out too strongly for my taste. I forgot to shoot the crumb and the bread disappeared so fast (I guess my kids liked it better than I did) that by the time I remembered to take a picture, it was too late. There was nothing special about it anyway.

No-Knead Peanut Bread

Now the No-Knead Peanut Bread is good (it uses 1 g of yeast for 300 g of flour). Its greatest advantage (and I suspect that it is the case with most of the recipes in the book) is that it is truly no-hassle, provided one is willing to wait 24-hours between the mixing and the eating.
If one doesn’t have an overwhelming preference for levain breads or other breads made with a preferment (aroma-wise, I don’t think the 18-hour slow fermentation of the whole dough offers a valid substitute, at least in this case) or if there is no good bakery in the vicinity (as often happens in vacation areas), then it is a quite handy recipe to have in one’s repertoire. It tastes specially good when toasted. Lahey also offers a slightly different peanut butter and jelly version which must be specially popular with the younger set. I’ll have to try it on my grandchildren back home.

Ingredients (for 1 loaf):

280 g unbleached all-purpose flour (Lahey specifies “bread flour” but in my experience what bakers often mean by “bread flour” is actually regular all-purpose and, unless there are indications to the contrary, AP flour is always what I use)
20 g whole-wheat flour
4 g table salt
1g instant yeast
260 g water (@ 55 to 65 degrees F/13 to 18 degrees C)
50 g unsalted smooth peanut butter
35 g unsalted dry-roasted peanuts, whole
35 g unsalted dry-roasted peanuts, roughly chopped

Method:
Please note that his bread is made over a 2-day period.

In a medium bowl, stir together the flours, salt, and yeast. In a blender, blend the water and peanut butter (some settling will occur if this is left to stand, so blend just before using).
Add to the flour mixture and, using a wooden spoon or your hand (I actually used a dough hook, a tool which I find most useful for mixing no-knead doughs)…

…mix until you have a wet, sticky dough without any lumps, about 30 seconds
Stir in the whole peanuts until evenly distributed
Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature until the surface is dotted with bubbles and the dough is more than doubled in size, 12 to 18 hours
When the first rise is complete (in my case the dough fermented for 24 hours because of a scheduling conflict but it still looked perfectly fine when I took it out of the bowl), generously dust a work surface with flour. Use a bowl scraper or rubber spatula to scrape the dough out of the bowl in one piece
Using lightly floured (or wet) hands or a bowl scraper, lift the edges of the dough in towards the center. Nudge and tuck in the edges to make it round
Place a tea towel on your work surface. Generously dust with wheat bran or flour. Gently place the dough on the towel, seamside down. Sprinkle the surface of the dough with a light dusting of flour.
Fold the ends of the teatowel loosely over the dough to cover it and place it in a warm, draft-free spot to rise for 1 to 2 hours. The dough is ready when it is almost doubled. If you gently poke it with your finger, it should hold the impression. If it springs back, let it rise for another 15 minutes
Half an hour before the end of the second rise, preheat the oven to 475 degrees F/246 C, with a rack in the lower third, and place a covered 4 1/2 to 5 1/2-quart heavy pot in the center of the rack
Using pot holders, carefully remove the preheated pot from the oven and uncover it. Sprinkle half the chopped peanuts into the pot. Unfold the tea towel and quickly but gently invert the dough into the pot, seam side up. (Use caution – the pot will be very hot). Sprinkle the remaining chopped peanuts on top of the dough. Cover the pot and bake for 45 minutes
Remove the lid and continue baking until the bread is medium chestnut color, about 10 minutes. Use a heatproof spatula or pot holders to carefully lift the bread out of the pot and place it on a rack to cool thoroughly.

Lahey offers several other appealing recipes, some of which – such as the stirato, a kind of Italian baguette – are not baked in a pot but rather on a baking stone. New Yorkers might want to try the Jones Beach Bread (made with seawater as in prehistoric times). The Carrot Bread -made with freshly squeezed carrot juice, currants and walnuts – looks really good. So does the Apple Bread which uses fresh apples, dried apple slices and freshly squeezed apple juice.
I wouldn’t mind trying the Fennel-Raisin Bread which requires caramelized fennel bulbs and Pernod or other anise-flavored liqueur. I probably would like these breads better if they were leavened differently but in a pinch, I would certainly give any of these a shot, especially when they contain flavorful ingredients which might somehow distract from the less complex taste.
It can be (and has been) argued that such books as Lahey’s dumb down the bread-baking process so that anyone can believe himself or herself a baker and that there is more to making good bread than mixing flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast and letting the resulting dough sit 18 hours at room temperature before sticking it in the oven.
Maybe so. I still like the idea that many more people might get hooked into baking by such a book or others like it. Not every home baker needs to be a “serious home baker”. More bakers mean more debate and more ideas. It may also mean more people caring about what goes into their bread and, consequently, a wider selection of flours and grains.
More bakers might mean that one day, my local East Coast Costco will finally carry organic all-purpose flour instead of the awful bleached flour it now stocks. And on that day, I will give thanks to whom thanks are due, namely the bakers -well-known or anonymous – who work tirelessly to promote the cause of bread. Like it or not, Jim Lahey is one of them…

Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Peanut Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Bread Bowls

Going back to the buttered baguette “soldiers” we used to dip in soft-boiled eggs when I was a child, I have always been fascinated by bread as a container or as silverware. I may yet make a “pain tranchoir”, a slab of bread on which medieval ladies and lords heaped their meat as the valets made their way around the great halls with chunks of roasted animals on huge platters. The bread would slowly absorb the dripping juices and since the mighty only ate the meat itself (which they cut with a knife close to their mouths), it was distributed to the poor (or sometimes sold to them by the servants) the day after, nourishing and flavorful.

Maybe I’ll try that over the summer. Mighty Man can have the steak and, as I’d pick bread over meat any time, I’ll have the humble tranchoir.
In the meantime, I like the idea of making bread bowls as vessels for soups (here a New England clam chowder), salads, chilis, appetizers, side-dishes, etc. (for some suggestions, check out The Sourdough Bread Bowl Cookbook, by John Vrattos and Lisa Messinger).
This time (I made the dish for the first time last year, using baguette dough, and posted about it here on my French blog) I made the bowls out of the same batch of dough as the rustic batard. The dough was a tad too wet (85 %) for the purpose. If you make the dough specifically for the bowls, you may want to go for a lower hydration rate (maybe 70-72 %) as it will make it shaping easier.
However I was more or less able to reproduce the technique that Gérard demonstrated for me on a piece of his firm levain (a much less hydrated piece of dough) last time I visited.

Gérard says that we are going to let the dough rest a few minutes and that he made one a bit bigger as the other.

Gérard says the shaping is the same as for a brioche, the idea being to embed the top (or head) in the main ball. During the proofing, the dough will rise in a pear-shape (or cone). No scoring is necessary if the top is well buried in the main part as the base will widen a bit and get more stable. The lid is cut out after the baking.
Gérard offered a further tip, which is to melt some butter and after scooping out as much of the crumb as possible, to use a brush to gently (and sparingly) “paint” the inside of the bowl with it. The bowl is then put in the hot oven for about 5 minutes until nice and crisp inside.
For last night’s soup, I got my inspiration from Barbara Kafka’s recipe for clam chowder in Soup – A way of life, which I adapted somewhat. For instance I used canned minced clams and bottled clam juice instead of fresh clams which I would have had to scrub and cook myself. I also added a tiny bit of bacon (about 1 strip, chopped in tiny pieces and cooked separately until crisp).

Ingredients (for 2 bowls):

2 baked 270g-bread bowls (you can make the bowls smaller if you’d rather serve the soup as a first course. Even as a main course, we ended up eating only a small part of the bowl)
15 g butter for the soup itself + 30 g to “paint” the inside of the bowls
10 g unbleached all-purpose flour
ground mace to taste (I didn’t have any and used freshly ground nutmeg)
A pinch of cayenne pepper
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
225 g firm potatoes, peeled and diced
125 g heavy cream (or more to taste)
1 10-oz (280 g) can of chopped clams, drained
1 bottle (450 ml) of clam juice
Pepper and salt to taste
1 strip of bacon, diced, cooked till crisp and drained on a paper towel
1 bay leaf
1 scallion, finely chopped

Method:

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Stir the soup flour, the mace (or nutmeg) and the cayenne pepper. Cook over low heat for 2 minutes, stirring
Stir in the onion and cook, stirring and scraping the flour from the sides of the pan frequently, for 10 minutes, or until the onion is translucent
Slowly whisk the clam juice into the pot until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the potatoes and the bay leaf. There should be enough liquid to cover the potatoes. If there isn’t, add additional water to barely cover them. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Lower the heat and simmer for 12 minutes, or until the potatoes are almost done
Stir in the clams and cream. Heat through. Remove the bay leaf. Check the seasoning
Carefully pour into the bowls, garnish with chopped scallion and bacon bits. Bon appétit!

The bread bowls go to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

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