Things To Do With Vegetables When You're...

The first instalment in my celebration of meat-free cooking

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Now let’s get to business…

If I had to choose between meat and bread, there’d be no hesitation as to which I’d give up.

Bread just means so much to me. Maybe even more than potatoes do and, my God, do I have a weird love of potatoes. The comforting blank-canvas-simplicity of a crisp baguette. The slightly pretentious complexity of a sourdough baked so hard it hurts to bite into. Even a slice of pale-as-porcelain, mega-processed sliced white slathered in butter and marmite. It’s all beautiful to me.

A breadless existence would probably take away 16% of the joy in my life.

(That might not sound like much but the rest of my living joy comes courtesy of my wife and kids so if I put the bread percentage higher it would start turning into a slight on those guys.)

Bread is important for this edition of the newsletter because, in its flattened guise, it will be the canvas on which we showcase some ridiculously delicious vegetables. I plan to do a little more with this newsletter to celebrate the endless joys of vegetables. I’m calling this series “Things to do with vegetables when you’re…” and I’m planning on ending that sentence differently each edition with different situations/seasons/moods.

For now, I thought I’d start with the best plant-based recipe of them all: bread.

What I’m sharing below is a recipe for absolutely stunning flatbreads. The idea comes from Finnish potato bread, but I’ve mixed that with my go-to poolish bread recipe and my general love of smoky flavours. What you get is something great mopping up hummus and curries, but also as a pizza base and wrap. It takes a couple days to make but the long ferment gives you excellent, almost sourdough flavour.

And since this newsletter series is a celebration of vegetables, I’m also sharing a few ways below to turn these into really lovely vegetable-topped flatbreads that stand on their own as a main dish.

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A Recipe for Finnish-inspired Potato Flatbread

This recipes makes use of a poolish to create a very slow-fermented dough with a subtle sourdough flavour.

Poolish-fermented flatbread enriched with potato Finnish-style

INGREDIENTS
For the poolish on day 1

200g white bread flour
50g wholemeal wheat flour
Scant 1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast (by this I mean don’t fill the 1/4 teaspoon to the top. The weight of this is well under a gram)
250g water

For the flatbread dough on day 2

200g white bread flour
50g rye flour
100g water
10g fine sea salt
50g smoked potato, smoothly mashed (Smoked element optional. See note below)

METHOD

Makes 6 large flatbreads

For the poolish: In a large bowl, mix the flour with the yeast and then add the water. Mix it together until it looks like a very thick pancake batter. Cover with a tea towel or plastic wrap and leave overnight or at least 8 hours.

For the dough: Come morning, your poolish will be full of bubbles, very loose and easily doubled in size. It should also smell really very lovely, which is great news because that aroma will be adding to the quality of your bread in the end!

First add the 100g water and the mashed smoked potato into your poolish and work it together with your hands. Then add 250g of white and rye flour. Gently work this together (all still in the same bowl) and then let it sit, covered, for an hour to let all the flours fully hydrate with the liquids.

After that hour you can start the stretch and fold process that develops the gluten in the flatbread and turns this sticky mess into something workable. All you need to do is lightly oil a hand (this stops the dough sticking to your fingers pretty effectively) take one corner of the dough while securing the bowl with your other hand and fold the corner of the dough over the rest of the dough. (Many recipes will suggest water, not oil, to lubricate your hand. I use a touch of oil because, when making a recipe quantity this small, I find that eventually the water on my hand contributes to an ever so slightly wetter dough.) Repeat your stretching/folding until all corners/sides of the dough have been folded over once. Then let the dough rest for 30 minutes before repeating the process. In total you should complete this folding process 3 times and end up with a smooth dough.

TIP: If your dough isn’t coming together into something smooth, a fall-back I use is to bring it together a bit rougher with the “slap and fold” method.

Once you’ve done this, cover the dough and let it “bulk ferment” in the fridge overnight.

I promise we are nearly there…

After a night of bulk fermenting, you can portion your dough. Here’s how I do this:

1. Take a large plastic container very lightly oiled on the inside

2. Put it on the scale

3. Using a slightly wet hand, scoop up a handful of the dough and place it directly in the container on the scale

4. If you hit 150g, congrats, you belong in a restaurant kitchen. If the the amount is too big/small, just take some of the dough away/add a pinch more

5. Cover the container and repeat

Once I’ve done this for all 6 portions I put these covered in the fridge for at least an hour to rest again before cooking.

Cooking the dough

Flour is your friend when shaping these things as the dough will be loose and tender. Get plenty of flour on your work surface and gently tip out each dough portion from the container onto it. Then gently pat out and flatten the dough without pushing all the air out of it into a round shape about 1cm/half inch thick. I like to end up with something about 8 inch in diameter for my topped flatbreads, thinner for wraps.

NOTE: Be careful when moving your uncooked flatbreads from the work surface to the pan, they are tender. Frankly a pizza launcher would be useful here but since I don’t have one of those, I carefully transfer them onto some baking paper and then flip them into the pan.

I cook these in a hot pan until they’ve risen and bubbles have formed on the surface before finishing them under a hot grill (this is a trick I learnt from a London pizza restaurant called Pizza Pilgrims back in the day, a lesson I’m still grateful for the because it does an awesome job of replicating the heat of a pizza oven). Alternatively, just flip and cook the other side in the pan also, I just prefer the top not to get flattened so much, but that’s purely aesthetics.

(On smoking potatoes: I do this in my barbecue at home. I wait for the red hot coals to turn ashen, at which point I add loads of damp wood chips and a few pine and juniper branches. I close the lid and let the smoke baste the pre-cooked potatoes until they’ve developed some golden colour and loads of smoky flavour. If this isn’t possible for you, then just use plain mashed potato.)

A bubbly and light dough with loads of chewy body to it. Lovely stuff.

Toppings

I really love this flatbread. I love the long process and flavour it creates. I also love how versatile it is. You can use it as a plain flatbread alongside curry or hummus and falafel. When using them as a bread like this, I always stack them on a plate and cover with plastic wrap to encourage them to remain soft and supple. They also make a pretty special pizza dough. Whatever you use them for, the long fermentation, though not giving all the benefits of sourdough, does help improve digestibility and flavour.

Most often, though, I cook them through on both sides, top them with a few lovely things, and run them under a grill to finish off.

Here’s a few of my favourite toppings to turn these lovely flatbreads into full on vegetarian dishes of their own. Each recipe makes enough to top about 6 flatbreads, so half/double quantities as needed.

Soy-glazed mushrooms and blue cheese flatbread

Does soy and blue cheese and garlic go together? It’s a yes from me.

120g soy sauce
90g honey
10g garlic
Handful of mushrooms (per flatbread)
Your favourite blue cheese

20g butter
20g flour
300ml whole milk
1/2 tsp salt

For the white sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour. Let this cook on medium for a few minutes. Off the heat, add the milk to the roux in small quantities, blending the roux with the milk completely before adding more milk, this keeps it smooth. Once all the milk is combined, bring to a simmer slowly, being sure to keep stirring so it doesn’t burn on the bottom. Once simmering, let it bubble for two minutes. Add the salt and let it cool before spreading on the flatbread.

For the mushrooms, start by blitzing the soy, honey and garlic in a blender until smooth. Cook the mushrooms in a dry pan and once the water has released and cooked away then add a touch of oil to start frying them on a medium heat. Once you have some colour on the mushrooms, add a few tablespoons of the soy/garlic/honey (per handful of mushrooms) and cook it down until it has reduced away and glazes the mushrooms.

When ready to grill the bread for service, spread some sauce on the bread, top with mushrooms and generously with blue cheese and grill until bubbly. Garnish with spring onions.

Roasted aubergine, chilli, and feta flatbread

1 large aubergine (you want about 400g cooked flesh)
2 tablespoon peanut butter
Good pinch of salt
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp ground cumin
Runny honey
Feta
Fresh chili
Pickled onions/spring onions to garnish

Grill the aubergine until it’s as dark and collapsing as a black hole. I use a cast iron grill pan for this but obviously a bbq does a great job.

Aubergine, grilling.

If you have none of these a hot oven will always do, if not quite as good a job. Scoop out the pulp from the charred skin (when I can I leave my grilled aubergine whole and unscooped covered with plastic wrap in the fridge overnight for the burn flavour to permeate the flesh) and blitz this with the peanut butter, paprika, cumin, and salt.

Spread this over your cooked flatbread, sprinkle with crumbled feta and sliced fresh chili. Roast under a grill until the cheese starts to loosen and things get bubbly. Top with sliced spring onions, pickled onions and a drizzle of honey for service.

Cheeky tomato rarebit

20g butter
20g flour
300ml whole milk
150g mature cheddar
Teaspoon chili powder
Teaspoon garlic powder
Teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 tsp salt
Sun-dried tomatoes
Fresh tomatoes

For the sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour. Let this cook on medium for a few minutes. Off the heat, add the milk to the roux in small quantities, blending the roux with the milk completely before adding more milk, this keeps it smooth. Once all the milk is combined, bring to a simmer slowly, being sure to keep stirring so it doesn’t burn on the bottom. Once simmering, let it bubble for two minutes. Grate the cheese and add to the hot sauce with all the seasonings, mix until the cheese melts and gets smooth. Let this cool. Then spread a generous layer on the cooked flatbread and grill until bubbly and darkly caramelised in patches. Garnish with sun-dried tomatoes and thinly sliced fresh tomatoes.

A satisfying cut-through

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Love,

Wil