The Worst Bread I've ever made

These really are the heaviest, hardest, most concrete like bricks of bread I've ever made, and I include in that summary all the crumbly pasty doughs of my early youth, before I learned about flour and baker's percentages.

What went wrong? Nothing really. The flour was a white bread flour, from Lidl admittedly but I've used it before with good results. The dough mixed up fine in the Santos, I didn't forget the salt and the yeast, which had received the blame, was almost certainly alive when I added it to the mix, I've proved this by starting another batch with some of its brethren. All fine.

But the water and the kitchen were a bit cold, I wasn't really paying attention, doing a couple of other things at the same time (which it pains me to admit are nearly as unsuccessful) and I've lost my cooking mojo. Just recently, I couldn't care less.

It's pervading my entire life and although I can coast, keep my fingers crossed and be forgiving of my failures really it's not a healthy state of mind. It shows up in everything I do or rather don't do, no painting, no gardening, no blogging. Something has to change so I don't promise anything but I'm going to try harder off screen and hope it boils over into the webbysphere. Fingers crossed.

Balls

I wanted an aebleskiver pan but despite the fact these originate in Denmark I could only find suppliers in the States. It made me cross to think that something that should be almost local to me here in the UK or France would have to be shipped such a long way.



So, with perfect logic, I decided to buy the Japanese equivalent, a Takoyaki Pan, reasoning that an authentic Japanese pan might have to be ferried half way around the world but at least I'd have the real thing. I ordered it from the Japan Centre in London and with postage it cost me about £35.

It was made in China.



The street food Takoyaki is made with octopus, or sometimes shrimp along with a selection of usual Japanese flavourings, ginger, spring onion, dashi in the batter. This is obviously not vegan and I've yet to perfect a substitute filling because this is only my second attempt with the pan.

For these, I made a simple batter of self raising flour, nutritional yeast and soy milk, flavoured with grated ginger, chopped shallot (no spring onions) and a little finely shredded cabbage. The texture is good and the flavour has potential although once dressed with the traditional Japanese toppings of mayonnaise and brown sauce it's hard to imagine any flavour really shining through them.



Japanese brown sauce isn't quite Worcestershire, nor Daddies, nor Plum sauce but occupies some special area in between them all. I don't have any and used some of our own "brown sauce" based on green tomatoes and heavily spiced. It's a good substitute but use vegan Worcestershire varieties if you have nothing else.

I skipped the mayo, these babies are already mighty greasy.



Fried food, you've just got to love it.