Monday 4 October 2010

145: A simple flatbread, p77, and 146: Taramasalata - the real thing, p77

Oooooh, this was a revelation for both of us! Me, because I hadn't realised how easy taramasalata is to make and love recipes where something curious happens to the ingredients and they change into something completely unexpected, and T because he never knew taramasalata was a fishy pate-type of gloop. How? Who knows... but he'd always apparently regarded it as a suspicious pink relative of hummous or tzatziki.

The flatbreads were great. We make all our bread in our breadmaker so I wasn't really looking forward to making these by hand, but it was easy and didn't need too much kneading at all. It more than quadrupled in size after being left for an hour, but started to deflate pretty quickly when being divided up into pieces. The main problem was that it was still pretty sticky and difficult to handle - so I had to use a lot of flour to manhandle it into pieces to bake, let alone form them into 'slipper' shapes. They puffed up like footballs in the oven, so I squished them down onto the baking tray to flatten them out a bit but they weren't very 'flat' flatbreads... I thought flatbreads weren't supposed to use yeast, hence the 'flat', but hey. And they were yummy - I love different types of breads, especially doughy ones like these with very little salt or sugar in them.
Located a lump of cod's roe in the wonderful Sandy's - it wasn't as expensive as Nigel seems to suggest in the book (but the red mullet made up for that...) - rather revolting looking solid sausagey type brownish lump with a hard, plasticky skin which the recipe states to peel off. Yum! Blitzed with the rest of the ingredients it curiously changed from the brownish colour and turned pale pink like the bought taramasalata. Bizarre! Then with the gradual addition of the olive oil it suddenly changed from a fishy slurry into a thick cream - like mayonnaise, as it says in the book. T loved it.

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