Becoming a woman who makes her own bread. A challah recipe with honey

Our NGO, The Ideas Partnership, works in the Roma community of Fushe Kosove. Food is scarce there, in families where there can be ten people sleeping in one room, for warmth, and where the men spend their days going through the municipal skips looking for scrap they can resell, while the women go begging. As anyone who has ever been on a diet will tell you, when you can’t eat, it becomes all you can think about. Food defines us, and more than once when I’ve been talking to women in Fushe Kosove their bemused questions have circled around my family (am I married? do I have children? are my parents still alive?) before settling on the immediate identifier of ‘do you make your own bread, or do you buy it?’.

I always disappoint – no children and no, I don’t make my own bread. My answers make both me and my interviewers slightly uncomfortable; we’re aware that some incompetence has been revealed. For the children they assure me that there is still time, but for the bread… So yesterday, when I bought the ingredients for the challah I ate this morning there was some curiosity. At the shop in the mahalla where I usually buy chocolate or snacks I bought some yeast. The shopkeeper smiled, ‘ah, so you’re making your own bread now?’. Setting off with the packet of yeast in my bag, I was stopped by another man from the neighbourhood. ‘I see you’ve bought yeast. You’re making your own bread?’. Like a proving loaf, the pressure was rising.

The bread I ended up making was nothing like the round trays of pogaqe made by the women in this community in their wood ovens to feed huge hungry families. I was trying out a fiddly recipe which uses honey for plaited challah loaves. I spent the evening kneading and punching down, rolling and basting with egg yolk – with bread, as with breeding I suppose, there’s a physicality to the process that makes you feel you are doing something elemental.

And the loaves were ready for breakfast this morning. They looked and tasted great – light, just slightly sweet. When I go to Fushe Kosove today I hope conversation turns to that question again; I am become, temporarily, a woman who makes her own bread.

My adaptation of a recipe for challah:

1 tablespoon yeast

1.25 cups warm water

2 eggs, beaten

A third of a cup of vegetable oil

3 tablespoons honey

2 teaspoons salt

5-7 cups flour

1 yolk, beaten and optional sesame seeds – for topping

 

Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add eggs, oil, honey, salt and 3 cups flour. Mix, and gradually add more flour until the dough is stiff. Place remaining flour on surface and knead the dough into it until it is smooth and the flour is absorbed. If it’s still sticky, add more flour. Place dough in a large bowl covered with oiled plastic and allow to rise in a warm place for 1.5 hours. Punch down and divide into 6 portions. Twist each portion into a rope an inch in diameter and make loaves by braiding three ropes for each. Place each loaf in a pan and allow to rise for 45 minutes. Brush top with egg yolk (and sesame seeds if you like). Bake at 190 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.

 

For other honey recipes and adventures (including the story of pogaqe bread, mentioned above), see my Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, published by Signal Books (2011) and available through bookshops and on Amazon.

A honey treat for Eeyore – thistle honey toffee sauce

Eeyore knew what he was doing. Feasting on thistles sounds like a hair shirt of a treat, but – as I should have guessed from a character who usually has a sweet edge to his prickliness – my first encounter with thistle honey, this evening, was a delicious revelation.

I looked up the honey in the wonderful Dictionary of Honey from Nomadic Bees (Corraini Edizioni, 2008) where I learned how bees appreciate thistles because of their flowering at times when other blooms are rare. And the dictionary told me that the honey would taste of white pepper and geraniums. Frankly, it seemed unlikely.

I spooned some into my mouth. It was fragrant, spicy, reminiscent of… wait a minute – this honey really does taste like geraniums. My mind boggles; so what would geranium honey taste of?

The Dictionary of Honey from Nomadic Bees also suggests a recipe using thistle honey ‘for your children’. Heat some milk, add salt to taste and dissolve the honey in it until its texture becomes like creamy toffee, then spoon onto slices of banana. It was an intriguing idea and I set about some amateur chemistry.

Not that Eeyore, the thistle-lover,  is much of a fan of experimentation:

“I thought,” said Piglet earnestly, “that if Eeyore stood at the bottom of the tree, and if Pooh stood on Eeyore’s back, and if I stood on Pooh’s shoulders -”

“And if Eeyore’s back snapped suddenly, then we could all laugh. Ha Ha! Amusing in a quiet way,” said Eeyore, “but not really helpful.”

“Well,” said Piglet meekly, “I thought -”

“Would it break your back, Eeyore?” asked Pooh, very much surprised.

“That’s what would be so interesting, Pooh. Not being quite sure till afterwards.”

Making thistle honey toffee isn’t exactly back-breaking work. One thing I did learn: to achieve a creamy toffee consistency you take it off the heat (in fact I put it in the fridge and then in desperation in the freezer). Once it had cooled it was fabulous to pour over banana. It might have sweetened even Eeyore’s temper; he would only have been cross that I fussed over writing about it:

“This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.”

 

To read more of what I’ve done with pencils and what-not, see my Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, published by Signal Books (2011) and available through bookshops and on Amazon.

Coriander honey

If I said that the scent of this honey reminds me of furniture polish, then I hope you’ll take it more as a compliment to my (beeswax-based) furniture polish than as a criticism of the foodstuff. The aroma is spicy and complicated. Knowing what the label says, I could believe I can scent coriander in there – the musk of the seeds and the paraffin kick of the leaves. I could believe there were lots of things in there, but you would never suspect it was honey.

So the sweetness is a surprise; furniture polish never tasted like this. But the relative simplicity of the flavour is also a disappointment after those complex and competing wafts from the jar. Only on the aftertaste – the tastes that linger around the tastebuds at the back of your mouth as you swallow – do you start to get more interesting flavours. The lanolin that is usually present only in the scent of a honey now asserts itself, with a smoky finish.

I think this honey should be used for something special. Maybe it would go with tofu and ginger, maintaining the Asian theme of the flowers from which it was harvested. Or maybe it would bring up the sheen on the mahogany gate-legged table in our sitting room?

 

More adventures in honey can be found in my book, Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, published by Signal Books (2011) and available through bookshops and on Amazon.

St David’s Day Tiessennau Mel (Welsh honey cakes)

Thank goodness for ‘mel’ – the apparently pronounceable conclusion in the bewildering nectar flow of this multi-syllabic Welsh recipe. I still don’t know what tiessennau means (from Google translate it emerges in English as ‘tiessennau’) nor how to pronounce it (a shame as it means that when I go to a Welsh bakery I’ll be unable to ask for one of these cakes), but mel must be sister to French miel, cousin to Serbian med, long lost relative of Albanian mjalte. And these are fabulous honey cakes in any language.

I have no leeks, daffodils, dragons or rugby players in my house today to celebrate Wales’ patron saint’s day, but I’m happy to show my solidarity through these baked treats. They’re made in muffin tins but they’re as dark as parkin, as sticky as gingerbread.  I’ll be making them again, though I’ll try amending the recipe I used this evening as it seemed unnecessarily complicated – the American approach to combining flour, sugar and butter, by melting it the fat then adding to the dry goods seems like it would be quicker than this creaming (and the mild muffin rebel in me wants to see if it’s really necessary to separate the egg and whisk the white till stiff; I’ve ignored this over-elaborate element of muffin recipes before and had no problems).

Mwynhewch eich bwyd!

Ingredients:

0.5 cup butter

0.5 cup brown sugar

1 egg, separated

0.5 cup honey

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

0.5 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

0.25 cup milk

icing sugar

 

Grease muffin tins (not forgetting to grease around the top where the ‘muffin tops’ will easily stick). Cream the butter and sugar until light. Beat in egg yolk and honey gradually. Combine flour with cinnamon and bicarb of soda; add to butter mixture, alternating with milk. Beat egg white until stiff and fold into batter. Fill muffin tins less than halfway and sprinkle icing sugar on top. Bake at 200 degrees for 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Top cakes with more icing sugar if desired.

This is my adaptation of the recipe in Honey, I’m Homemade, edited by May Berenbaum.

 

For more adventures in honey producing and honey-eating, see my book, Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, published by Signal Books (2011) and available through bookshops and on Amazon.

National Trust honey – sustainable living at Swan Barn Farm

‘The simple action of putting honey from a local beekeeper on your toast in the morning can have knock-on benefits across the countryside.’ This is advice from David Elliott, the National Trust warden at Swan Barn Farm near Haslemere in Surrey, and having spent an enjoyable morning reading his blog, I’m prepared to take his counsel. He’s clearly a man who knows stuff, about the countryside and all kinds of things I’d like to learn. How to scrump and then scrat apples for cider, how to build with straw bales, how to make sloe gin, how to weave a hurdle, and where to find wood sorrel (you can make it into tea and sweeten it to make something like lemonade). He uses phrases like ‘hand-cleaved sweet chestnut laths’; you listen carefully to the recommendations of people like this.

So this morning I am putting honey on my toast – and not just any honey, but the honey from one of the hives that David himself manages. Having never met the man, this is the closest I’ll get to his inspiring project on Swan Barn Farm, which is made up of 100 acres of ancient woodland and meadows as well as a small orchard (think bees) and ponds and streams. The estate includes a camp for accommodation of volunteers who come for working holidays and a building under construction and showcasing sustainable, low-carbon living. It’s this that has had me reading the blog (oh, say ‘hand-cleaved sweet chestnut laths’ again), as the new building is constructed from materials sourced on the estate, and has been designed together with Ben Law, (as seen building his house on Channel 4’s Grand Designs). I’ve learned about breathable lime (mix it with animal hair), about roof shingles and solar power, triple glazing and newel post morticing, and the biomass boiler.

The Swan Barn Farm sustainable building project - photograph from http://swanbarnfarm.wordpress.com

All this busyness, and the volunteer work to build a colony, creating the materials from the natural resources found on the estate, the harvesting and storing, brings bee metaphors to mind. I wonder who learned from whom…

Either way, you can tell that Dave’s bees have been industrious. The honey is delicious, with a buttery aroma and a mellow, not oversweet taste with a spicy edge. Maybe it’s the sorrel.

As Dave said, all our bees do essential work for our countryside. But some bees are even more important than others, and I get a glowing feeling, that’s more than just a blood sugar rush, to think of the bees and the volunteer teams that are helping to keep projects like Swan Barn Farm thriving.

 

My Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo (2011) is published by Signal Books and available through bookshops and on Amazon.

Travels in Turkey’s honey

In my last post I promised I’d talk more about the honey I brought back with me from Istanbul. Of course, I brought back lots of honeys – those circulating in my bloodstream still from sampling in the market, the honey trapped in pixels on my camera, as well as the honey stuffed into my rucksack.

While I was in Turkey I tried sweet fruit ‘sausage’, made from grape pulp around a walnut, the whole cylinder rolled in honey for preservation.

sweet 'sausage' of grape pulp around walnuts, rolled in honey

In the open space between the two old giants of Istanbul, the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya, who crouch like sumo wrestlers eyeing one another stonily across the square, I drank honey served with salep. This thick, milky, warming winter drink is made from powdered orchid root, mixed with cinnamon and honey, and sold from vast steaming copper urns.

the delicious drink, salep, made with milk, orchid root and honey, sold from steaming urns in Istanbul

And in the market I saw honeycomb cut from hollow log hives, the round slabs looking like luscious cheeses.

Honeycomb cut from hollow log hives, at the Istanbul spice market

The honey I brought home with me is a simple multifloral from Izmir. It’s free-flowing, and the colour of the old copper urn that the salep drink was served from. Its taste is herbal – drawing, I would guess, from sage and thyme flowers. It’s evocative of somewhere Else, a country where you stop to savour your food, where I was inspired to take rich photographs of ordinary things, a magical land where you can have honeyed drinks from orchid roots prepared for you in the shadow of ancient palaces.

I know I’ve only scratched the surface though – have done no more than scrape off the wax covering of the honeycomb. Turkey has a long history and a broad geography of honey production, and I want to learn more. I’m tempted by the honey tasting walking tours I’ve read about in Northeastern Turkey, led by local women who are beekeepers (the project is close to its target for funding but still needs donations this weekend on Kickstarter – read about it and bee tempted). I know I’m going back to Turkey somehow.

 

Other honey adventures are narrated in my book, Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo (2011, Signal Books), available through bookshops and on Amazon.

How the Bal-kans got its name. Bal and apricots for breakfast in Istanbul

Honeycomb for sale at the Istanbul spice market

I’m writing this at Istanbul airport, on my way home after a mini-break of honey. Honey has been a fine golden thread running through our meals and our shopping, and connecting me here in the Ottoman capital, with the food I’ve grown used to in Pristina. If you’ve lived in Kosovo then on a visit to Turkey there are plenty of things that seem strangely familiar, or familiarly strange. Along with some of the customs and architecture, and the domination of coffee and hospitality as the grammar of each day, one of the things that made Istanbul feel half-known to me was the vocabulary. From learning Albanian and Serbian I discovered there were little nuts of recognizable vocabulary in the honey flow of mystifying Turkish. (I was most pleased with myself when I rang down to the reception of our hotel to ask for an extra duvet. The ‘English’ – in fact, of course, borrowed from England’s own occupiers a millennium ago – word confused the receptionist. Could we have a ‘quilt’ then? No, she didn’t know that word either. In desperation I tried ‘Albanian’. Did they have a jorgan?

Ahh, a yorgan! It arrived at our room a few minutes later).

Pots and plates and cushions and carpets, puddings and pistachios, ‘come on’ and ‘slow down’, ‘again’ and ‘not at all’, ‘just so’ and ‘that’s enough’, aubergines and guns, the word for customer, the word for guest… all were left in Kosovo by the Ottomans and were greeted by me as old friends as we bumped through the crowds of foreigners here. It turns out I know quite a lot of Turkish. And there’s been one word I’ve used repeatedly over the last few days in the markets, in the restaurant and, most recently, as I sat down to breakfast this morning.

The word bal, the first syllable of the name for the peninsula where we live, is the Turkish for ‘honey’. I knew this because the story goes that when the Ottomans arrived in the Balkans, they saw immediately the rich, fertile land, with its luscious wildflowers, and they knew this would be a land of honey, and named it as such. Only later, as they fought to subdue the territory, did they realize that this region, a land of blood, had another side. And so the Bal-kan peninsula gained its second syllable, the Turkish word kan, meaning ‘blood’.

Angelina Jolie and I have both seen the powerful resonances in this etymology – me in my book, Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo, which was published last April (yes, long before any announcement of Angelina’s film) and she for her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey which premiered two months ago.

As a vegetarian I prefer my meals to contain more honey than blood, and this morning, after a short appetite-whetting walk to Aya Sofya, I sat down to a honey-soaked bowl of apricots. Cut with spoonfuls of yoghurt, the golden fruit gleamed in its honey anointing and it tasted fabulous. It was an appropriate farewell as I prepared to leave a country which seemed steeped in bal. But of course it wasn’t really goodbye – there are some things you can take with you when you travel, and stashed in my rucksack was a pot of honey… watch this space.

My Travels in Blood and Honey; becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo (2011) is published by Signal Books and available through bookshops and on Amazon.