Hello from NL 54. This is Bake Sense, the somewhat ordered record of ramblings that concern the world of baking. Here, we champion flavour and wholesome ingredients and keep an open and curious mind that questions where those ingredients come from and how we can make the most of them.
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There’s a line in Tamar Adler’s Everlasting Feast that goes…
‘Good meat only seems expensive because we eat meat like children taking bites out of the middles of sandwiches and throwing the rest away.’
The tender centres, the innermost. Eschewing the hardworking cuts, which often seem much too much hard work. Fillet and sirloin over shoulder and shin. But eating away from the edges is an expense to our pocket and the planet, one that the nose-to-tail approach to meat cookery has highlighted in recent years, where simple cooking, often either very quickly or very slowly, has revealed tenderness in places that have come to be overlooked.
Bread is about to seem even more expensive, partly due to a wet spring with delayed drilling and forecasts of lower wheat yields. Farmers with brows more furrowed than fields are worried, and as a baker, I feel their sadness. As cooks and eaters, we can learn some lessons and look in the margins for the hardworking parts of wheat, choosing not to overlook them and making more of them. By doing so, lower yields can stretch that little bit further and give more back to the farmer.
The word semolina refers to the mealy parts from the grain milling process. Durum wheat produces the hard and flinty Italian-style semolina; used to make pasta and couscous; corn semolina is better known as grits. Across the world, these coarse meals that fall somewhere between bran and endosperm are highly nutritious components of the everyday diet. They are cooked and served alongside soups and stews, baked into sweet puddings with fruit, or made into fortifying porridges to break the fast.
In the UK, the word semolina has connotations of lumpy, congealed school pudding and provokes a less than enthusiastic reaction. Semolina from common wheat varieties (not durum wheat) is also known as middlings, comprised of more bran and germ than endosperm and deemed of lesser quality when compared to fine white flour. The bran and germ have jagged edges, are a little rough-hewn and are problematic for high gluten development in industrial bread-making machinery. Middlings become second-rate, devalued and destined for animal feed.
Name tags aside, there is tenderness to coax from these intermediate and irregular mealy portions of wheat flour. They’re textural and intriguing, vehicles for flavour that thicken and diffuse bold flavours throughout a dish to make each mouthful joyous. What’s more, they make for an inexpensive pantry staple; partner them with good quality (often more expensive) ingredients, and you’re on your way to a well-rounded meal that is kinder to your pocket and the planet.
Ricotta Gnocchi
You’ll want a sauce to serve with these little dumplings; in this case, nothing is more suitable than the simple. Reduce a can of chopped tomatoes, season well and add a chiffonaded handful of basil. Or melt butter until foaming, add sage leaves and a squeeze of lemon and let the leaves crisp; toss with the just-drained gnocchi.