No bread is an island

...entire of itself. (With apologies to John Donne!)
I live and breathe breadmaking. I’m an evangelist who would like everyone to make his or her own bread. I want to demystify breadmaking and show it as the easy everyday craft that it is. To this end I endeavour to make my recipes as simple and as foolproof as I possibly can.

I call my blog 'No bread is an island' because every bread is connected to another bread. So a spicy fruit bun with a cross on top is a hot cross bun. This fruit dough will also make a fruit loaf - or Chelsea buns or a Swedish tea ring...
I'm also a vegan, so I have lots of vegan recipes on here - and I'm adding more all the time.

Monday 27 November 2017

FAINA - FARINATA

There are a whole range of recipes which use a chick-pea batter - here's my recipe for socca, which is a thin pancake, done in a frying pan.

Faina, or farinata, if I've done my research properly, is a lot thicker, and baked in the oven.

The basic recipe is very simple:
100g chick-pea (gram) flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
300ml water
1 tablespoon olive oil (optional)

However, I love to tinker with recipes, and I wanted something spicy.

So I added a teaspoon of my homemade curry powder, a teaspoon of bouillon powder instead of salt, a teaspoon of Italian seasoning and a splash of mushroom sauce.

I whisked this to get rid of the lumps, and poured it into a 20cm cake tin ( actually, my silicon cake form).

This was baked in the oven for about 20 minutes at 220C.

It came out as a solid slab - and (apart from nibbling it constantly, for it was very tasty), I wasn't sure what to do with it. Eventually, I cut off  about a third which I sliced horizontally and fried lightly for a couple of minutes each side. I had this for dinner with a spicy tomato sauce with cannelloni beans (sort of baked beans) and some curried potato wedges.

I thought it was absolutely gorgeous, and it's one I shall do again. Whilst eating this, I realised that, cut into chunks and fried, it could well be used in a chilli non carne. In the event I made the chunks and added some to a veg curry I was making. This again was a lovely way to use up the faina - and I've still got some chunks left in the oven (which I'm nibbling on every time I go to the fridge!)

I could certainly see me using this in the same way I use seitan - and it's yet another alternative to soya chunks.

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