Important: the potatoes are cooked slowly in oil at low temperature. They are neither fried or cooked first in water, or anything like that. Patience always adds flavour!!

Clovis, that also makes a real good one by the way, ate this one with me in Berlin for lunch and a series

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What a challenge! After making son many breads and being obsessed with my sourdough, this 2011 I decided to finish the year making il Panettone. Of course, with natural sweet sourdough starter, the traditional way. Not only that, but I decided to sell them (If they worked out well of course) as now I am also selling my bread each week with pâtés, cheese, marmalades and home-made things. Anyway, lots of nerves. I started Wednesday to convert a portion of my liquid 100% hydration sourdough starter into a stiff one (50% hydration). Y finished baking on Sunday, 9 kgs of panettone, which ended up being 16 panettone. They were soft, spongy, and really tasty. Of course I have some critiques of my own and would like to improve some things for next time -> January, that way, next year I’m an expert Are you ready for a fully detailed recipe???

Ok. But first, I’d like to tell you my favorite story about where this delicious sweet bread came from. There are many, this one is my favorite: It’s Christmas eve, and the 1500’s. Duke Ludovico, known also for the “Lord of Milán” is hosting a huge party. Time for dessert is coming, but turns out the cake is ruined. However, Antonio one of the dishwashers took some leftover fruits from the party and was baking a sweet bread for him and his family. The kitchen smelled so nice, the cook decided to serve his bread as dessert. The Duke liked it so much, he entered the kitchen asking for the cook that had made the dessert. …’Antonio’, ‘il pane di Toni’, and so today we know it for ‘Panettone‘.

It is very important that you manage well your time. You will be needing a 2-day early start to get your sourdough ready and ‘sweet’ (no acid).

The result was a very spongy soft crumb. Maybe next time I’ll add a bit more starter and I will feed it longer to get it more active. I feel the fact it took so long was this one. I’ll let you know!! They were really amazing and tasty. Great experience. Giving it a second one in January for sure.

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To make butter at home, you need the help of your KitchenAid. You can afterwards, add salt to it, fresh herbs, garlic, whatever you want!! And with the remaining Buttermilk, delicious breads and muffins, yogurts or fresh cheese. So it’s definitely worth it. You only need a good quality cream with at least 35% fat content (if it has less it won’t work), salt and any other herb that you’d like to add.

   

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The soybean paste left from the process is called Okara or Biji and it is used a lot in vegetarian cooking as a meat suplemment since it has a lot of protein and fibre.

Okara or Biji

The next step is making my own Tofu. I have to go and buy the nigiri (coagulant) and maybe see if I can get a mould and in the next days I’m going ot make! But for now, home-made soy milk recipe.

I already made myself a strawberry smoothie for breakfast, delicious!! I hope you feel encouraged to do it, it is a lot of fun and one of the best rewards it that it has no preservants or anything, it’s fresh home-made milk

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This recipe actually is from 2011, from the latest Christmas, which I spent with my family in Berlin. So, given the circumstances this German Potato Salad could not miss this year. I’ve been cooking it for many years now, this recipe though has new important ingredients such as broth and the juice from the bacon.

Adding the vinegar while still warm not only keeps the potatoes firm but enrichens the flavour, as does the broth and bacon juice. It is a simple salad, delicious to eat with nothing more, with a grilled fish, with sausages, with turkey, etc…. and it is also very simple to make! So here you go, the step by step recipe.

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T. spelta is part of the wheat family  (Triticum). This grain started to be grown in southern Germany since the year 4000 bc, but there is evidence that it started to be grown in Asia from 7000 bc. Today, it is popular in northern Europe, specially Germany, Switzerland and France.

Spelt is characterized by having high amounts of protein (17%), a moderatelly strong gluten quality but not so elastic. It is usually recommende to mix the spelt flour with normal wheat (T. aestivus) or other wheats that give a strong gluten if you’d like to have as a result a bread with a non-compact structure.

Comparing it to common wheat, spelt has a higher carbohydrate, protein, fibre, vitamin B1 and B2, plus a higher amount of minerals and aminoacid content. It provides a sweet and nutty taste to bread. It is highly soluble in water and easy to digest.

A special property is that the grain has a very strong skin, dificult to eliminate providing a high resistance to plagues and diseases, making it an ideal cereal for ecological growth, due to its natural resistance without the need to use transgenic seeds or pesticides.

Spelt is therefore the most ancient wheat grain, with no genetic modifications since its use, a high resistance to plagues, perfect for ecological growth, with excellent nutritional properties and which also provides a unique taste to bread.

So, what are you waiting for? Go buy it and bake this delicious bread. It goes really well with strong cheeses with umami taste and honey and sweet marmalades. This bread has to sourdoughs, common wheat flour (95), rye flour (9%) and 82% spelt flour. This flour I bought in August in Copenhague. It comes from an ecological growth and the grain comes from the recovery of ancient grains since 1994 that have returned from Switzerland to the biodynamic and organic farmers in Denmark. A bread whose taste makes us travel in time.

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They were delicious!! I leave you also the pictures from Clovis’ tortilla and some of the spanish things we had. Soon the delicious tosta!!

Clovis’ delicious tortilla de patatas:

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The name says it all. A perfect match of flavours and aromas. Simple as roasting peppers adding some garlic, rosemary and olive oil and melting some camembert on the pan. I remember when I made it it was completely improvised, had surprise guests, had the roasted peppers, did the mix and voilà. About the wine I know that creamy camembert goes well with Malbec, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon.

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Just to feed a few minds and become a little more wise in the culinary world I want to tell you a few curiosities about milk and cheese making. Milk is composed mainly of two proteins that determine its behaviour in cooking: the curd (caseins) and the whey. Another interesting property of milk is that we can heat it up at very high temperatures but it won’t coagulate (like egg proteins that do, for example) unless the environment becomes acidic. That’s why during ricotta cheese preparation lemon or vinegar is added to the milk. This generates the acid environment that causes all the curd proteins to clump together to form a solid mass, while the whey proteins remain suspended in the liquid. This is the base for making cheese. Isn’t it great to learn and understand more about what happens when we cook? I love it! Anyway, let’s get to ingredients and preparation Enjoy!

There are a thousand ideas for recipes with the home-made ricotta cheese. I leave you some pictures of what I’ve donde with it and some of the top of my head: for a cheesecake (can’t wait), for a salad with pears, pizza, malfatti, all alone, for cauliflower and butter, pasta with artichokes and dried tomatoes, for these delicious ravioli with spinach… and more and more.

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Brainstorming for picnic: sandwiches, fruit, cold pies, beer, pallets, cards, picnic basket, fun straws, bucket, squared blankets, muffins, etc. So I decided to try doing my own sandwich loaf and from there 4 different kinds of sandwichs (easy but ‘gourmet’ style). I also made a leek quiche (recipe coming up soon!), some fruit in different presentations and other Picnic stuff.

The sandwich loaf was a complete success. It came out so lovely that I only thought about singing outloud when I got it out of the oven and saw its crumb. So I made 3 of those for the sandwichs. Unfortunately everything could not be perfect and Saturday was a rainy rainy day. But we never give up (specially me!) so we celebrated the Picnic as an Indoor Picnic. That way we have the perfect excuse to make an outdoor one a.s.a.p!

So here’s the recipe for my sandwich loaf and 4 different kinds of sandwiches that I prepared and that are perfect for this type of occasion: birthday parties for you or your kids, for grownups, indoors, outdoors, wherever. The first two are typically present in Perú b-day parties, the other are new ideas! Piece of cake (you can buy a good bread if you don’t want to do it) and very very nice.

I manage to make like 200 sandwiches and there were so delicious they were all finished in half an hour!!!

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