Pizza Plait and Baking with a Toodler...

Today's produce!

Today I embarked on a mission with Kate to make my new favourite thing - bread.

Don't get me wrong - bread has always been a favourite of mine; 'man cannot live by bread alone'... well this woman would give it a damn good try! It's only recently that I've started to bake my own though. I've always seen it as temperamental beast, but actually it's not, it's easy as 1, 2, 3... literally... if you follow three easy steps you'll get good bread every time, and open up a whole new world of baking experimentation!

Rule 1: Look after your yeast! Keep it away from the salt in your bowl, give it lots of food in the form of butter or sugar and keep it toasty warm by adding lukewarm water to your dough and proving your dough in a lovely warm place (I find the top oven over a main oven which is preheating for the actual baking event works really well).

Kneading in action!

Rule 2: Perfect your kneading technique; practice makes perfect here, so get baking! If you want your bread to have a good texture and not resemble a house brick this is the place to put in the work. My Gran's technique is very reliable; form your dough into a circle, push out from the centre of the dough away from you and then pick up the furthest edge and lift it back up over itself into the middle of the dough. Turn the dough 45 degrees and repeat - simple! (I've since added a blog about this here)

Rule 3: Do what you like! Once you've found a good basic recipe (credit goes to Mary Berry for this one again) experiment! Dried garlic and herbs are a good place to start as they're dry ingredients so won't change the consistency of your dough, but once you get more confident you can start to add more exciting things like sundried tomatoes (particular favourite of mine), olives or cheeses, which will make your dough wetter, but this can combated with extra flour, but take care not to add too much or your bread will have a denser texture.

So, onto today's recipe... I started off making a basic white loaf dough, which I then divided between myself and Kate. I turned mine into an 8 stranded pizza plait whilst Kate reverted to toodler-hood and made a gorgeous array of mini buns in all shapes, sizes and flavours (including her pet cat in bread form... not sure if she'll be eating that one though!). Like I said, once you've got your basic dough you can make it into any flavour or shape you like; 8 stranded plaits have the wow factor, but classic rolls, loaves or even a crown loaf (think tear-and-share) can be just as effective.

 Tomato, basil and mozzarella doughs

8 Strand Pizza Plait

Ingredients:

1.5lbs strong white flour

1oz butter

2tsp salt

7g dried yeast

¾ pint (approx) lukewarm water

oil for greasing

Additions:

-          Tomato Strands: 1tbsp sundried tomato pesto

-          Cheese Strands: 5oz cubed mozzarella (1cm cubed)

-          Basil Strands: 2 large handfuls basil (shredded)

210oC fan oven, 230oF all other ovens

Method:

1. Preheat your oven - also makes your top oven a good place to leave your bread to rise like I mentioned before.

2. Add you flour, yeast and salt into a large mixing bowl - keeping your salt and yeast on separate sides of the bowl until you're ready to mix them all together and add the lukewarm water (think too cold to have a bath in).

3. Add the water gradually as you use one hand to bring the dough together; you might not need all of the water depending on your flour's moisture content so go steady with it until you have a dough that just holds together - if you go too far and get a sticky mess gradually add flour until you get back to something workable.

The doubled dough

4. Tip your dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead using the technique I mentioned before until you have a smooth and elastic dough - it shouldn't look the dough is tearing as you're kneading it, then you're there!

5. Place your dough into an lightly oiled bowl and cover with oiled cling film and place in a warm place until it's doubled in size. This should take an hour to an hour and a half, but can take longer - don't be afraid to leave it longer if your dough hasn't doubled in size yet.

6. Once your dough has doubled in size you need to knock it back - in other words knead it again for 2/3 minutes to knock the air out of it - now for the fun bit!

7. Divide your dough into 3, with one portion slightly smaller than the other two - this will be made into 2 of your eight strands for the plait, and the others will be two lots of three strands.

Plait preparations

8. Now you need to work your flavourings into each dough; in this case the addition of pesto and mozzarella to their respective doughs will make the mixture wetter so add a handful of flour and just keep kneading the flavourings in - it'll look messy but it'll come good again if you persevere! The basil is simple to knead into the dough.

9. Once your flavourings are thoroughly mixed in cut your smaller portion into two and your larger portions into three - you should end up with 8 equal size portions. One at a time flatten the strands into sausage shapes and begin roll it backwards and forwards, working from the centre outwards so you don't get lumpy strands.

Stuck to the bench and ready to plait

10. This next bit is slightly more technical, but take your time and you'll be fine; the plaiting! Place your strands next to each other and bunch them up at one end. Squash the ends to your work surface so they're firmly anchored.

11. For the plaiting sequence each strand is numbered 1 to 8, the strand will take on a new number every time you move it. 

a. place 8 under 7 and over 1 

b. place 8 over 5 

c. place 2 under 3 and over 8 

d. place 1 over 4 

e. place 7 under 6 and over 1 

f. Repeats steps b- e, until all the dough is braided

Once you reach the end of the strands (they might not all finish at the same time, so do this when one gets too short to work with) cut the remaining length off the strands, bunch them together and tuck them under the plait. Unstick the top of the plait from the bench and tuck it underneath too.

Ready to bake!

(With any off cuts you combine them to make a roll of leftovers, which is treated the same as the plait for the rest of the method.)

12. Carefully lift onto a baking tray, cover with oiled cling film and leave to prove in a warm place for another 30 minutes.

13. After 30 minutes remove the cling film, glaze your plait with milk and place your baking tray into the centre of your preheated oven. Bake for 30 minutes, check after 20 to make sure your loaf isn't getting too brown - cover with foil and continue to bake if it is.

14. To tell if your plait it cooked flip it over and tap on the base - if it sounds hollow it's done, if not put it back in the oven for another 5 minutes, and then check again - repeat until it does sound hollow.

The finished article!

15. Once you have the hollow sound put your plait onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely - it's massively tempting to have a slice now, but it won't slice very well, so if you can resist it is definitely worth the wait!

This is a fairly time intensive recipe, but it is SO worth it! It looks amazing, smells great and tastes even better!

I mentioned earlier that Kate was also baking with me... she had some fun experimenting with flavour combinations and shapes, so far the caper roll has been a big success, as has the garlic, parsley and cheese knot. Below is a selection of the very cute treats she made, my little protege :)

Bread can seem intimidating - even the amount of detail in a blog like this can be scary, but once you've got the little things mastered the rest is easy - and so blooming satisfying! I'm off to have some pizza plait for tea... so.much.win!

Marbled slices through plait

Happy Baking!

The Baking Ginger xx

Kate's Cat Roll