First Wednesday from Spade to Plate: Beetroot soup and fresh bread

Today was the first day that I introduced a Wednesday cooking event.
The weather was lovely so we walked to the allotment to dig up the last of the beetroot.
This variety was not the deep red one but the more orange coloured one.



We turned it into  Beetroot Soup which we had for our lunch with some freshly made bread.
The recipe is in the first From Spade to Plate recipe book on page 21

Ingredients
1 onion, 1 potato 450g beetroot, a table spoon of rapeseed oil, 1.2litre vegetable stock
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon marmite, ground nutmeg, natural yoghurt and chopped parsley.
Sesame, pumpkin seeds as topping.

Chop all the vegetables and saute for a few minutes
Add the stock and bring to boil until all vegetables are soft.
Blend until smooth and addd the vinegar, yeast extract, nutmeg and season.
Just before serving add the yoghurt and sprinkle parsley and seeds

To make yoghurt 

You only need 2 ingredients

Whole milk 

a couple of spoons of starter (previously made yoghurt) or life yoghurt from the shop.

Bring the milk to simmer so that bubbles appear on the side of the pan and a skin forms on top of the milk.

Let it cool to body temperature, 

Stir in the starter and make sure that there are no lumps in it.

Gentle warm up so that it is not cold to touch but luke warm.

Then put in a warm place  (I put it in this tea cozy) for 8 or so hours.

It should have thickened by then, put in the fridge and it will settle a little more.

In this case we made a batch of bread dough:

300 gr  organic white strong flour
300 gr organic whole meal strong flour
7gr (one sachet) of dried yeast and a pinch of sugar
12 gr sea salt
mix of of seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, poppy and sesame seeds)

Mix all together, knead and let it rise. When double in size  knock back and put in a greased tin.

I am going to experiment and freeze the dough in plastic bag as we still had bread left that I baked on Monday and don't really want to use the oven more than once a week.  I am following instruction from the internet but will write the outcome, when I have it.

Bingo! I defrosted the dough overnight, shaped it into a 'bread shape' put it in a greased tin and waited 2 hours (a bit long)  for it to rise fully again. baked it and in 35 mins we had a delicious fluffy loaf of bread.


This post was first posted on 14/3/2018