Send Me To Sleep | Baking

Hello, it's your host Andrew here. If you're enjoying Semi to Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Semi to Sleep Premium. Over there you'll get ad-free episodes as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a 7-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening and here's just a few ads before the show begins. No meth, no stress. Just one tasty chew. Advantage chewable. Fliantik protection made easy. Find out more at advantagechewable.co.uk. Easy to love, easy to protect. I don't think there's anything quite like the smell of freshly baked bread. In the morning I remember when I was quite young and my dad brought home a bread making machine which was quite fancy and it was short-lived in our household. We didn't use it for more than I would probably say a few months in the house but those days when we did and waking up to a fresh loaf of bread and smelling that in the morning getting really excited to tear into that soft loaf was a beautiful memory. It is a beautiful memory and I think formed part of my interest in baking in later life. Funnily enough to this day and then even still I'm not entirely sure how it is that a bread maker works exactly. How it makes bread in such a light and fluffy manner. You know it's not stodgy in any way but of course if you've made bread before as you will certainly have perhaps at least once in your life then you'll know that there's this sort of process to it you know you need to let the dough rise for an amount of time and then you'll as I say punch it down let it uh let it rise once again on the counter just under a cloth maybe awesome cling film and then you would undergo the process of baking only once it has risen to a a certain degree but with a bread machine you simply put all of the ingredients in and then some hours later it would just produce a perfectly lovely loaf of bread and like I say I'm really unsure how it is that it's capable of doing that with all without all the extra steps but um I suppose we'll leave that to be a mystery of the bread machine hello my name's Andrew thank you for joining me today today I'm going to be talking about bread well not just bread I'm going to be talking about baking and my experiences with baking in life which have been up and down let's say I appreciate you being here I hope and across this conversation I can evoke some memories of your own from baking in your life and you know there's a few lovely things in this world that are nice to think about when falling asleep and few are as calming and serene as the idea of baking I think that has something to do with the slowness of the process of course it doesn't always have to be slow you could rush a bake but I think it's always better to make sure you have plenty of time I know that whenever I've attempted to bake in the past it's always when I've had ample time to do it otherwise well that sort of takes the fun away really doesn't it I think myself like many many are there got into baking most during lockdown and I specifically was was doggedly determined to be able to make a really good loaf of bread not like a special loaf of bread at all just normal sandwich bread funnily enough the kind of thing that you might be able to get from a bread machine itself but it was my challenge so to speak during that time at which I had plenty of time to be baking and I think during the span of time that I was at home I may have baked I would say easily over 40 loaves of bread and I will say by the 40th my bread was getting fairly good um and there's something I think that I really liked about the process and that's why I would repeat it so often it gave me sort of a structure to my days because like I say you have to leave the bread for a little while and a number of hours perhaps to rise before you return to it and it could take you several hours across the day to produce your loaf of bread and so it always gave me something to come back to across the day which was really nice and it felt slow but quick at the same time not sure how to explain that this process of making the dough initially letting the yeast in the milk the warm milk bubble up letting it sit for a little while before creating that first load of dough and kneading it together into a nice smooth round consistency and then allowing it to rise coming back to it folding it down and kneading it once again making sure you don't over knead it otherwise the bread would not rise correctly by the time you need to put it in the oven and then I remember towards the end when I was getting a bit more adventurous with my baking I would not just make a standard sandwich loaf shaped bread but I would not my bread I would I would say braid the two pieces of long dough together to make a more interesting shape and before putting it in the oven giving it that wash of egg white over the top to give it that shiny glossy texture when it comes out of the oven and as well as smelling beautiful of course it it looks so amazing when you pull the fresh steaming loaf of bread from the oven and I haven't actually baked a bread since my last lockdown loaf of bread now I wouldn't be surprised if it came out terrible if I tried to do it today it's funny I think life might have gotten quite a lot busier in that time and part of me wishes that I would introduce baking into my life again to slow things down a bit there is something meditative about baking most certainly if you allow it to be of course I think I personally started to have this idealized imagining of baking from these youtube videos I watched some time ago and it was when I was attempting to make a batch of cookies for a special occasion I'm not entirely sure what it was now but I wanted them to be especially good so you know how one does they find themselves searching something like the very best cookies the ultimate cookie recipe or something like that and the first video that I saw attracted me immediately and I remember the thumbnail though unfortunately I don't remember who made the videos themselves but the thumbnail was of a faceless person sort of neck down at their kitchen counter in a scene that looked like the early morning and they had a bowl in their hand and a whisk in the other and the scene looked so gentle and quiet and the video was very much the same I remember there was no narration of the recipe it was all text on screen but the way that they filmed it it really gave across this quietness of the morning and there was almost a story behind the recipe that they were making they said themselves that they were making the cookies for themselves as a bit of a treat for having done something worthwhile recently and and that they got up early to do it and the gentle quiet sereneness that that video was imbued with really made me want to get up early make the cookies and that's exactly what I did but some days later I woke up on a day where I didn't have much to do later because I'm not someone who's very good at getting up very early but I quietly made the cookies to myself and I remember there was a process of melting butter in a pan and browning it for a particular deep flavor of the cookies and and you would whisk this brown butter into first a mixture of brown sugar and vanilla extract and then you would fold in the flour and the recommendations to put in these large chunks of dark chocolate this was a really rich cookie recipe and they were these sort of large circular about as big as the palm of one's hand sort of American style cookies that in the end turned out fantastic it really were excellent and I remember eating them vividly because they had such a soft bite but I don't actually remember where I was eating them I know it was a special occasion but I can't I don't think it will come to me but it's funny how that happens sometimes a taste a smell a sight will bring back a memory from somewhere deep within put you right in the place but I guess sometimes a taste a smell a sight is so powerful so vivid that it is simply the sensation that makes an impression to the point where everything else around it dissolves I guess in my mind whatever particular or specious time it was was ephemeral and irrelevant to what was in fact more formative really this incredible taste of cookies and I've made those cookies several times since I first learned the recipe it's quite an easy one as well it's funny how when you learn particular ways of doing things it totally changes the way you think you know I was used to think of baking as this particular science I guess where you need to get everything really precise and you run your finger down a long list of ingredients and methods steps and you must follow them very particular with your weights and scales and getting your measurements right and filling the measuring drive up just just to the right point and I think it would be a lie to say that baking is not a science to a certain degree but I think in that particular recipe I learned that there is an art absolutely to baking and that not just baking but I think cooking making any food as without sometimes you really must go with your gut but of course you can't do that until you've followed recipes to the tea for some time you might be able to make a comparison to learning music perhaps sometimes it's best to learn the pieces note for note practice them over and over incessantly until you can play them without thinking and then only then can you begin to inject particular other things into it things that come to mind improvisationally naturally and I certainly become a lot more improvisational with my baking since that cookie recipe I remember a particular time I made what I feel was probably the best cake I've ever made though I have probably only made a number of cakes that I could count on both hands during my lifetime however the reason that this was such a particularly poignant moment for me was because I wanted to make a cake but I hadn't expressly gone out and bought all the ingredients for it which is something I would usually do being prepared ahead if I was intentionally going to make a cake but it was almost impromptu this bake so I needed to see what I had in the cupboards and make a cake that could reflect the ingredients at hand and what I had in the end was ingredients for a tea cake style loaf although it was made in a in a circular pan but it did feel a bit more loafy in its consistency and my favorite part of having made that was when it came to adding the currents and from like I say having made a few things in the past had that little bit of experience which transforms into intuition I knew that if I put these raisins into this cake now they would crisp and burn and taste vile when they came out of the oven and so it was my idea from the top of my head to steep them first in hot tea so as to put water into them hydrate them further so that they might survive the baking process a little better and lo and behold taking it out of the oven they were the best part of the cake the flavor was deep it was rich it had brown sugar and cinnamon in it but these raisins had maintained their hydration and they were so delicious they would fall out as little jewels when you'd eat the cake and they were almost like small grapes in the way that they tasted and it was only a little bit after that that I discovered that steeping raisins in tea was in fact something that people did regularly but I was always very proud of myself for having thought of that off the top of my head rather than looking up a solution I used that intuition to improvise although having said that one never really knows what sneaks up into the subconscious there is a chance that at some point I could well have read it in a recipe somewhere else and completely forgotten it as irrelevant information at the time or perhaps I saw it on television or on an episode of the great British Bake Off or something like that and it just lodged itself into my subconscious until I needed it most but then I suppose you could look at every kind of invention in that way right just these things that lodge themselves into our subconscious make a home there become part of the taspistry of things that exist in our mind but we don't know that they do and then as and when life happens to us and this information needs to be called upon it rises forth but it has become such a part of our tapestry that the thoughts seem to be our own but of course they're not and in that sense I suppose you could say all of our thoughts are like this because how on earth could we have an original thought without having seen it or perhaps shall I say experienced it first to have it then lodged and catalogued into our mind and so I most certainly did see it somewhere hear about it somewhere I don't think I'm that inventive that much of a genius to have thought of it entirely in a silo it was almost certainly on the great British Bake Off because by this point I had seen perhaps three or four seasons of the show and was an avid fan and it's such a tradition when the series would come onto the BBC of sitting down for every episode and absolutely non-negotiably requiring some kind of baked good whilst I was watching it and also a cup of tea to go with it a cup of English breakfast tea and some kind of cake or some kind of pastry some kind of tart to sit down and eat with it and that was such a joyful experience this was during the time at which it was still on the BBC and not on channel 4 which I in my personal belief was the vastly superior series of the Great British Bake Off though the more recent one also has its charms but I'll let you have that debate if you own I'm sure you yourself have a preference and I don't mean to speak over whichever you find to be the best but I certainly loved watching it in those days I haven't really seen so much of it recently but in those days I would always make a habit of it and I didn't really ever think of baking something myself to eat whilst watching it I would always go in and purchase it from a little corner shop that was about 10 minutes away from where I live this is my family home at the time and I'd love to say that I was quite a lot younger when this was the case but I was still I think in my mid 20s I was living in with my mum and dad and I would pop to the shops to get some sort of I think it would more often than not be some kind of small party cake that was of the chocolate fudge variety perhaps a victorious sponge often very partial to a red velvet cake I had a very funny moment recently whilst I was on holiday with my partner and my young son in Norfolk just a few weeks ago and we went to a small cafe it was the only cafe that was nearby where we were staying well that's not quite true there were two cafes but on this particular day it was the only one that was open this was a really small town like I say in Norfolk like I say in Norfolk just on the coast and it was beautiful really lovely stay beautiful to be by the beach it was the first time my son saw the sand and the sea which he found I think probably too much to comprehend although he really enjoyed staring at it he wouldn't stop staring at it and that was a beautiful moment and one of these days we were taking it slow you know the whole holiday really we were taking it slow when you have young kids these ideas of packing in your days and getting as much as you can done sort of go out the window I think and it's wiser to choose one thing that you think you'd like to do for that day and make slow and calm efforts to do that one thing if you manage to do that then you know you're doing well for the day but this one day we were around the cafe and I remember sitting there it was quite a warm day probably the warmest day of our three-day trip and I was sat in this really comfortable sofa the whole decor the theme was quite new age it was a vegan cafe and it had all these beautiful pieces of art like quite colorful mixed media stuff there was oil paintings there was stained glass there was art made of things like the the debris and the pebbles from the local seashore and all of the sofas and furniture had really interesting sort of there I say psychedelic kind of patterns on the upholstery and on the blankets that they throw over the top of it and it was quite a nice gentle relaxing atmosphere there were too many people in the cafe with us which was a good thing because it was quite a small cafe as cafes go but they had a wonderful selection of vegan cakes there and I would add that I myself am not vegan I although I respect it highly I think if I were less of a hypocrite I would do what I believe to be the right thing and and be a vegan but unfortunately I am and perhaps one day I'll grow up enough to be different in mind around this but the reason we were in the vegan cafe was simply because it was the only other cafe that was open not to say that it was in any way hindered because of its exclusive dietary provisions it was a wonderful cafe we had a lovely breakfast and a lovely piece of cake afterwards and it was quite a funny moment when the owner of the cafe was taking an order from some other people just across the way not I'd say less than five feet away from where we were sat and as such in that kind of environment it kind of feels like everybody's in the room together a bit more so especially in this kind of new agey sort of open plan almost domestic style setup that they had in this cafe and so he was taking their cake orders and they had three or four different kinds of cake and I remember them bringing it into the cafe in the morning it was a bit of a rush because the cakes arrived late whilst the cafe was still open so the the owner was a little bit worried that he wasn't going to have anything to serve to the customers outside of his savory breakfast offerings but then whoever it is that locally bakes the cakes brought them around and they looked big and beautiful and they certainly tasted excellent I think for the fact that they contained no animal product they were incredible in fact you know comparable honestly I rate rate them highly but he was taking these orders from these people and he was going through the cakes that they had because somebody asked well what what cakes do you have and he was saying that he had a Victoria sponge and a dense chocolate cake and then he said he had a red velvet cake and someone asked well what is a what is a red velvet cake and he stumbled he furrowed his brow and he attempted to explain he said well it's a red cake it's the sponge is red um I don't I don't know he said I don't I'm not sure and so I interjected at this point as if I was someone who worked at the cafe myself and of course explaining that a red velvet cake is a mixture of vanilla and chocolate that has been dyed red for decorative effect and it didn't go with the red velvet in the end but uh it was quite a humorous interjection for me because I think the the cafe owner looked a little relieved after I'd done this um having realized that he was struggling a little bit in that description myself and the cafe owner had a small discussion after that it was a very friendly place very open place kind of felt like walking into somebody's house in a way a house where you were very welcome and very looked after and they'd made that restaurant funnily enough sometime just after lockdown and it was the only vegan restaurant I say restaurant vegan cafe in the local area for some miles and so I suppose in that respect they were very niche but had quite a strong and dedicated clientele regular flow of customers and he himself had actually moved from further away I think about three or four hours away to help his mother-in-law who was in fact the person who initially started the cafe and had been running it ever since and that it used to be it's just a small shop that only sold the cakes and you know what I can totally believe that because the cakes were good enough to start a business of their own but then they expanded into the broader cafe that they are there was not lovely people a lovely man and we spent a really nice morning slash afternoon in that shop in fact after we'd eaten our cake we were quite tired and our son had fallen asleep as well and when he falls asleep we generally like to let him sleep if he possibly can they seemed fairly relaxed in the cafe environment with the gentle chatting going on around us and the light tinkling and clinking of cutlery and cups and it was a very serene ambience so serene in fact that we ourselves myself and my partner were beginning to fall asleep on the sofa and when we realized we had and the owner of the cafe came over to take out our plates sort of well I I saw I woke up I sat up a little bit and in realization looking a little bit embarrassed because it I think at this point been about 30 minutes since we'd finished our meals and not ordered anything else um they simply sat in one of the largest sofas that the small cafe had and began to fall asleep in the corner and almost about to sort of get up from the seat sort of embarrassedly sort of saying I apologize and it was very emphatic that we should sit down relax enjoy ourselves not worry about the fact that we were taking up seats or whatever just um enjoy ourselves which we did we slept for some little time afterwards yeah I really liked that man I thought he was the perfect person to be running such a business and I suppose that's why it is that he was doing so and those cakes I mean I don't think I'll forget those cakes because it's it's hard to find a vegan cake that tastes as good as those did there was a time a little while ago when I was into trying to make more vegan things more vegan food and do some vegan baking as well because I had a friend who was a vegan at the time and I thought it'd be nice to try and make them some treats and also an interesting challenge I think I was looking to stretch my abilities in cake making though I hadn't exactly mastered cake making in its basic form but it is uh it is quite a skill to figure out how to replicate those things about animal products that make cakes the way that they are give them their denseness give them their rich nurse there are of course alternatives to these things like well a lot of recipes say to replace things like eggs with oil which can be good can have sort of detrimental effects I think the oil is sort of meant to replace the egg and the butter simultaneously because it does have this richness but also kind of this thickness I suppose but I found that you know if you can imagine an oily cake that is essentially how it comes out although as an egg replacement often they would uh these recipes these vegan recipes would recommend using something called aqua fava which is in fact the leftover water from like a jar or a can of chickpeas and so you drain the chickpeas out keeping the liquid itself and then you would whisk and whip up the aqua fava inside and it would begin to sort of stiffen in the same way that egg whites do into into peaks and I'm not sure that you could in fact bake them then and you know add sugar and and make some sort of vegan meringue I don't think it quite works just like that but this is something you would then fold into your cakes as an egg replacement and that did work quite well that is a replacement I would recommend highly although it's very difficult to find chocolate replacement of course when you're baking like a chocolate cake or a chocolate cookie you can of course just use cocoa powder to get that chocolatey taste and that works quite well but in terms of hard chocolate the chocolate that you bite into the chocolate that you might enjoy a a bar of cut up and you know put into cookies or used as a topping decoration it's um it's incredibly difficult to find a replacement for that that's um that's quite hard because chocolate just has such a unique taste really and I couldn't quite tell you what it is that gives it that different kind of deeper more substantial taste I think that's the only way I can sort of differentiate between vegan chocolate and animal product chocolate and that's this sense of substantialness not that I notice it particularly I'd say when I'm actually eating regular chocolate but when I'm eating vegan chocolate you certainly notice that there is something lacking it in some way feels lighter perhaps watered down I've found well I've eaten plenty of perfectly serviceable vegan chocolate um there's quite to my taste um it's not so much worse that I wouldn't eat it at all I'm not I'm not saying that but um some some vegan chocolate is is better than others I'll put it that way and so yes I think it'll be some time before I'm able to give up animal products as it were I remember when I was at school at college you know a little bit older and there was wasn't even a bakery it was like a it was like a convenience store a corner shop as we call them in the UK and they would sell these pastries under this hot lamp to the side and I don't know where they got the pastries from I don't remember them being labeled as branded or from any particular local bakery or anything I think it was fairly innocuous just this sort of um glass window with wire racks behind it and these lined up hot sweet and savory pastries that were there and I think two or three times a week I would go to get hey what they called a cheese and bacon twist which was as you might imagine cheese with bacon twisted into a pastry and I I just couldn't get enough of that that was my most favorite thing I could eat meat and then thinking about that now I don't I don't think I'd be the same I think that would be over much for me two or three times a week but I loved it so much and that must be formative to my existing taste in food because like I say I don't think I'd see myself coming away from animal products just yet just just now in this time in my life but um yeah it was certainly certainly a treat to get one of those it's funny that my mind drifted back over to school because I think one of my first baking experiences was baking bread at school when I was much younger though I think I must have been about six or seven years old and it may well have been the case that I'd have baked at home already with my mom uh in fact I do remember that she used to do a little bit of baking my mom's not a huge baker my dad perhaps more so um because there was this particular recipe of my grandmother's for a lemon drizzle cake that my mom and my dad really loved and I think maybe twice a year they would feel the urge to go and bake this lemon drizzle cake and that was always a special moment to get it out hot from the oven and have a nice hot slice of lemon drizzle and I think there was also imbued in it this sort of lovely atmosphere of my grandmother and yet anyone who has recipes handed down from all the generations as I'm sure you probably do you may you may be aware of one in the family perhaps there is this sort of uh beautiful sort of there's a magic behind the legend of it that for some reason because it has been handed down it is you know imbued with this sanctity that makes the recipe all the better like this is the ultimate pinnacle of what this particular item of food could be because it is written on an old piece of crumpled lined paper that's worn at the edges and being kept for such a long time which is a shame because things like that are probably going to devolve in the future you know the idea that we're looking up recipes online quite a lot more these days I think less of the time writing them down because I suppose these things would have been handed down from generation to generation and thinking about it we only honestly there is sort of this sanctity around written and passed down recipes that we will certainly lose as time goes on but as I say I'm sure I would have baked one of these cakes at home with my mom but one of the more poignant experiences of baking was when I was about six or seven years old and what happened was we were making bread as a school project and that's probably why I remembered more vividly because there was a point being made to the whole class that we together as a class as a community were going to help make this bread all together with only a selected few of us being allowed to go over to the kitchen area to do the finishing touches and I was luckily one of those lucky few who were able to help turn the dough that we made in class with our yeast and milk and hot water and stirred up together and kneaded out I was able to help turn it into small roll sized spheres that went on to the parchment paper to be baked in the oven and I remember vividly a moment that didn't really click with me in its hilarity and poignance until I was much older when the memory sort of recollected itself to me and with my adult mind I was able to see fully what was going on or the sort of cheekiness of the act but I remember vividly myself and I think it was two maybe three other children who went over to the school kitchen to finish off these bread rolls were taking out clumps of this dough and rolling them into spheres and not too long after we'd only just started to do this one of the children clumsily sneezed directly into the bowl and like I say we were probably only about six years old at this time so that was the kind of thing that was very active to happen and the teacher who was a particularly stern teacher as well in my in my recollection perhaps they weren't so in actuality but in my recollection they were they were a stern teacher probably why they were the ones chosen to take us over to the kitchen area in the in the more sort of dangerous area that needed needed someone to be able to control children I suppose anyway she was for an instant quite livid quite frustrated with the child that they'd sneezed and I understood immediately why because of course that meant that it was no good that they had you know sneezed into this dough that was meant to be for the entire class but she took a moment to pause and and said it'll be okay that's okay and in my childlike mind I said to myself well okay I guess it's not as bad as I thought for some reason it'll be okay and you know you could you could justify the fact that the dough you know was in fact going into a very hot oven and that was most likely going to sort of sterilize any germs that may have made their way into the dough uh from that little child's sneeze but when I think back and I see the teacher's face and I remember the moment I know sureedly I am confident that in that moment when she made that decision she was mulling it over realizing that she had two choices one was to tell the class tell the other teachers go back remake the dough that the class had put together go through all the remoral again or do nothing carry on she decided to do nothing and carry on and honestly I think I most likely would have done the same in her position I most likely would have done the same do