The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

Preheat the oven to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8. Divide the dough into balls the size of a large walnut. Roll out each one on a floured work surface until it is very thin. Place on an oiled baking sheet, allow to rest for 5–10 minutes then bake for 8–12 minutes, until the flat breads are crisp and light golden in places.

kitchen note

You can also make these breads from maize flour (polenta), chestnut flour or gram (chick pea) flour, using them to replace a third of the ordinary flour.

dry flat bread

Bought and home-made flat breads become stale quickly but they can still be worked into other meals. If they are still soft, tear them up, then toast until dry. Alternatively fry gently in olive oil. Store in jars ready for use in salads or soups.

bread salad

Cut or tear a dry or toasted flat bread into postage-stamp-sized pieces. Make a salad with the bread, Cos or romaine lettuce hearts, spinach or other leaves, herbs (parsley and dill), sliced tomatoes – the juice soaks nicely into the bread – and cucumber. Dress with just extra virgin olive or walnut oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper.

pizza margherita

San Gennaro is the patron saint of Naples, the birthplace of spaghetti and that other international fast food, pizza. It is also the name above the door of our local pizzeria in London. We are lucky. At San Gennaro they make pizza in the traditional way, with ingredients from Campania, the region around Naples that is famous for its wheat, tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella. The proprietor, Enzo, operates on Neapolitan hours – the door never opens before 5.30 p.m. and it closes in the small hours. I first walked into this south London pizzeria late one August night. A few people were sitting at the bar drinking small glasses of home-made limoncello. We could have been in Campania itself and that was before we ate the pizza.

Good pizza dough is almost flaky, the air barely held inside, and breaks easily. It has a slight sourness, a faint smoky flavour where it has been charred by the heat of the oven. The secret of this recipe was revealed to me after an evening spent deep in the basement of San Gennaro, watching José make the dough. He refrigerates it overnight, so that it can be stretched to incredible thinness the following day.

‘Anyone can make good pizza,’ says Enzo. ‘You can be from Ecuador, Nigeria or London, but you need two things: authentic ingredients and “the knowledge”.’

Makes 2

4 tablespoons olive oil

8 basil leaves

6 tablespoons Tomato Sauce (see here (#litres_trial_promo))

120g/4oz buffalo mozzarella, cut into 1cm/

/

inch pieces

freshly ground black pepper

extra virgin olive oil, to serve

For the dough:

540g/1lb 2oz plain flour

/

teaspoon salt

7g sachet of fast-action (easy-blend) yeast

150ml/

/

pint milk, warmed to blood temperature

200ml/7fl oz water, warmed to blood temperature

2 tablespoons olive oil

Put the flour, salt and yeast in a mixing bowl and slowly add the milk and water, mixing until it forms a dough. Knead by hand (see here (#u37a000f9-6351-43bd-a9f5-46765d4791b8)) or in a food mixer until the dough is smooth and elastic. Add a little more flour if the dough is too sticky. Pour the oil into a large, clean bowl, add the dough and turn to coat it in the oil. Cover and place in the fridge for a minimum of 8 hours and up to 24 hours (you can use it sooner, after 2 hours, but it will not be pliable).

Preheat the oven to its highest setting (a commercial pizza oven cooks pizza at 350°C). A preheated pizza stone or perforated pizza baking dish helps; use in place of a baking sheet.

If you have time, bring the dough to room temperature before you shape the pizzas. Take half the dough and use your fingers to press it into a circle. Then pick it up and ‘open’ it with your hands by holding the edges and turning it about 45 degrees at a time. The pizza base should measure 30cm/12 inches across. Place on a baking sheet (or on the preheated pizza stone – but work fast when adding the tomato and cheese). Repeat for the second pizza.

Stir the oil and basil into the tomato sauce, then smear the sauce on to each circle of dough and scatter the mozzarella on top. Bake until the outer edge bubbles and turns crisp and the mozzarella is melted but not browned. Shake over a little extra virgin oil and grind over some black pepper before you eat the pizza.

kitchen note

Liquidised canned Italian tomatoes or passata can be used in place of the tomato sauce, but the pizza must cook fast at a high temperature for the tomatoes to sweeten and the juice to evaporate.

other uses for pizza dough

Try the Tuscan Schiacciata con l’uva, which is eaten during the grape harvest. Roll out the dough to a thin rectangle, sprinkle over a little Pernod or aniseed-flavoured alcohol, then fold it in three and roll again to about 5mm/1/4 inch thick. Scatter over a few red grapes – red wine grapes, if available, because their thin skins make them good for cooking. Bake at your oven’s highest setting until the dough is crisp, then serve sprinkled with a little sugar.

To make garlic bread, infuse 2 chopped garlic in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for an hour or two, then shake it over the uncooked pizza bases. Cut a few slashes in the centre of each one and bake as for pizza. Shake a little extra virgin olive oil over the bread as it comes out of the oven.

To make goat’s cheese pasties, roll out the dough thinly and cut it into rounds with a tumbler. In the centre of each one, put a spoonful of mild, fresh goat’s cheese and a little finely chopped dill or lightly cooked greens (such as chard or spinach, with all the water squeezed out). Brush the edges with water, fold over and pinch together to make little pasties. Bake until crisp and golden in an oven preheated to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8.

making the most of stale bread

It is easy to glance around the kitchen and say, ‘I have nothing in the house’, but that is not strictly true if the end of a loaf is lurking in the bread bin. This section of the bread chapter is intended to change ‘I have nothing …’ to ‘hmmm, well perhaps …’, or even to, ‘I have eggs, I have some herbs and I can make toast …’ Then there are breadcrumbs, so quick to defrost after storage in the freezer, then fry in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley to serve with pasta, or use as a coating for meat that has been hammered thin (see here (#ulink_d97c35fb-7d6a-510e-80d4-fd2a5b615f37)).

The art of making bread go further has become almost extinct – partly because of the preservatives in commercially baked bread, but also because it is the kind of hand-me-down information that disappeared when mothers stopped cooking and broke the chain of food lore. It is not that recipes using stale bread are old-fashioned – Tuscan bread soups are now championed by contemporary chefs as one of the most delicious things in the world. Their recipes invariably suggest using the ubiquitous ciabatta but it is fine to make use of that old loaf of everyday bread.

Good bread deteriorates faster than sliced and wrapped factory-baked loaves containing preservatives such as citric acid. They will not, however, develop a mould quickly, but gradually dry out during the week. My experience with factory-made breads is that they deteriorate suddenly approximately six days after they are bought, when an outbreak of mouldy spots appear and the whole lot must go in the bin.

Sourdough bread, on the other hand, has an extraordinary life. The crust will dry but no spots appear for up to two weeks. Because it costs more, I tend to scrape or cut any mould away and continue popping the bread under the grill, where it obediently becomes springy inside and crisp on the outside – edible again.

This is what a home-made loaf can give, assuming it yields 10 slices of bread. Half the loaf is eaten fresh over a day for breakfast, or in packed lunches; 4 slices of the drying remains are toasted and put in the bottom of four soup bowls, then a vegetable broth spooned over; the remainder is made into breadcrumbs. Half the breadcrumbs are used to coat some hammered chicken thigh meat and the other half fried with herbs and nuts beside a separate dish of roast pheasant or partridge. Fifty pence goes a long way with food.

toast

There’s nothing new. The French have croûtons, Italians crostini – we have toast. Crostini sounds so neo-Italian, so latter-day peasant that it is easy to forget that it is simply toast. Putting things on toast is genius – ordinary, everyday items of food are greatly elevated by their toasted mattress of bread. Toast belongs to the British Isles, and it is one of those things that we do better than anyone else. Thick slices of toast with butter and marmalade, what better breakfast? Apart from perhaps boiled eggs and toast. Or scrambled eggs on toast.

My father was very fond of savouries. These were small dishes, often on toast, served after the main course. They are out of fashion now, outside the gentleman’s club. His favourite was sardines on toast – and yes, they were from a can. We quaked with horror at the table, but out came the macho Worcestershire sauce: ‘They must have Worcestershire sauce!’ And he was right. They were very good after a liberal shaking.

sardines on toast