Rye bread revisited – again

Preparation Time: 24 hours

Cooking Time: 35 minutes

Yield: a loaf

The ultimate light rye – great loft, slightly moist fine crumb

After about a year’s experimenting with rye bread, the ultimate loaf has finally emerged.

One of the biggest problems with a pure rye loaf is the lack of loft. Even using light pure rye flour, the loaf tends to be quite dense, the slices small. If sliced too thick, it is inclined to be stodgy, and it does not toast well.

Having started working with a poolish of late – a fermentation starter or pre-ferment – in my bread baking odyssey, the thought struck me that perhaps weaving a poolish into the conventional rye recipe may well make a difference.

The origins of the name poolish are not credibly determinable, but the word is used in French to describe a sponge pre-ferment, consisting of equal proportions of flour and lukewarm water, and a pinch of dry, or a thumb-sized piece of fresh yeast.

Green Thai Curry Fish

Preparation Time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Yield: 4

Spicy green Thai curry fish with Basmati rice

This is one of my earliest forays into stir-frying. I’d recently purchased a mild steel wok, from a Chinese food store at N1 City. After seasoning it well, I decided to test drive it. This is the result.

With the onset of winter, and the imminence of cooler weather (and a not inconsiderable prod from the Editor!), I felt that my Green Thai Curry Fish recipe would be appropriate for this week.

It introduces the concept of stir frying, which is ubiquitous with Asian style cooking, and if that scares you, don’t let it. It’s a lot easier than you might think.

With fish increasingly under threat – the WWF’s SASSI List System wouldn’t be around if there was no problem – finding decent fish is becoming difficult. Other than those listed below in the recipe, you may also want to try Gurnard or if you can get it, Mackerel, since Yellowtail is not that easy to get.