An Ode to HFW and his Magic Bread

I stopped short of actually writing poetry, but only just. And even then mostly just because I’m already wanky enough for starting an ethical food blog and kicking off with a pretty intense post.

When I grow up I want to BE Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall. A cross between Peter Cundell and Jamie Oliver, an hour of his TV show River Cottage is long enough for him to drive his recycled vegetable oil powered jeep into the veggie patch of your heart (seriously, he fuels up at the local fish and chip shop). 

A London food writer, he threw it all in to move out to the country to run a community-style mixed farm, exploring every facet of what it means to eat food. This includes picking seaweed off the beach, nettles from the garden, even making his own elderflower wine with elderflowers from the hedgerow. In one particularly memorable episode, rabbits are getting at his lettuces, and a hundred different ways with rabbit (each of them delicious) ensues. Managed, of course, as a sustainable food source so he can have rabbit pie for years to come. Other than his cheeky sense of humour and the constant parties he throws for the whole village, one of the best things about HFW is the way he makes everything so easy. Making your own yoghurt? A snap. Pastry? He does it every day. He even has a magic bread recipe, which he promises is so named as it can “grant you so many wishes”. From flatbreads to loaves to pizza bases, this is his all-purpose home-baker recipe. And it’s pretty good. Being a Coeliac I don’t eat bread myself, but I do get a very domestic glow from being able to bake it for the people in my house (though, in all fairness, this rarely happens). 

The recipe (as written in his fabulous book River Cottage Veg Everyday) goes like this:

250g plain white flour

250g strong white flour*

1 ½ level teaspoons fine sea salt

1 tsp instant dried yeast

1 tablespoon of olive oil, plus a little extra for oiling

*Strong white flour is also known as continental flour, 00 flour or sometimes bakers flour. It has a higher gluten content which makes the bread more elastic.

I’ve paraphrased the method a little bit:

Put the dry ingredients into a bowl (including the yeast) and mix well. Add the oil and 325mL water, and mix in the bowl until it forms a dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 5-10 minutes until smooth (it will get less sticky as you knead it). Turn it into a bowl with a little bit of oil, and let it rise, covered, somewhere warm for an hour or two. Once it is well-risen, tip it out and knock all of the air out of it basically by poking it. For pizza bases and flatbreads, it is ready to use, for loaves and rolls, make into the desired shape and let it rise for another hour until it is doubled in size. Cook flatbreads on a grill, pizzas in a 250 Degree Celcius oven for 10-12 minutes once topped, and rolls at 220 degrees celcius for fifteen minutes.

  

And there you have it. There is nothing particularly hard about making this bread, and you can manipulate it yourself any way you want. Take these two examples I made at home from the same recipe:

   

The bread twist has rosemary, olives and sundried tomatoes kneaded through and is then topped with some more olives and feta. The bread rolls are topped with egg wash and poppy seeds. So give it a go yourself, and offer some up to friends and family with a smug smile and a false modest “Oh, just something I whipped up this afternoon”. It feels great.