Pumpkin bread with walnuts and sage

This rich bread made with pumpkin and walnuts is more like a cake. It is very easy to make, ask me for the recipe, if interested.

Why I bake my own bread

started making bread about two years ago. It had been in the pipeline for a while, within my general trend of opting out of processed food, but the tipping point came in May 2014. As we drove down a stretch of the Adriatic between Istria and Montenegro, I noticed that in Croatia it is apparently legally required to display bread ingredients in a visible, readable fashion. Going through long lines of unpronounceable chemical compounds has tripped off the final alarm in my brain. Back in London, I discovered that supermarkets guard such information for their dear lives: from Iceland to Waitrose, none shows what exactly they put in their bread. It took me an arduous, drawn-out email exchange with M&S to get them to reveal what they put in their baguette.

As I started digging around, I found out that the Chorleywood bread process, invented in the UK in 1961 and then spread all over the world, puts speed, bottomline and efficiency ahead of compatibility with how humans digest their food. It turns out that the bastards only let the dough to proof for a few minutes, barely allowing the yeast to break down things that the human stomach is not well equipped to process, such as gluten and various sugars. The latter-day pandemic of  the celiac disease, when people get adverse symptoms from eating bread and pastry, might well be credited to that wondrous innovation introducing the values of capitalist production into your digestive system. 

That's how I got converted into hand-made bread. My two specialties are largely inspired by the wonderful custard-running Gino d'Acampo. Every now and then I diversify and try other recipes, but my two mainstays, week in, week out, still are pagnotta con finocchietto, farmhouse loaf encrusted with fennel seeds, and pagnotta ligure con patate, Ligurian rustic loaf with potatoes and rosemary. I do modify and jazz up the recipes, with quite splendiferous outcomes, so please feel free to contact me, should you fancy a recipe. All pictures here are of my home creations.

Burns supper: haggis and deep-fried Mars bar

ondon is one veritable "travel dining without moving" destination. If you wait patiently enough dangling your feet in the flow, all cuisines of the world will come sailing by you. Just grab and enjoy.

It has been six years since I started thinking of going to Scotland. Besides the obvious tourist attractions, I was naturally curious about Scottish cuisine; so much the more that it did not seem likely to come across it anywhere outside its country of origin, even in London.

Well, turns out I was wrong. The time to enjoy Scottish food could not have come at a more appropriate time: the Robert Burns night, the celebration of the life and works of Scotland's dearest son, an 18th-century poet apparently responsible for, by crude estimate, half the Scottish poetry out there.

The centrepiece of what is known as the Burns supper, to which I was most kindly invited, was haggis. Contrary to the belief evidently widespread on the Stateside, it is not an animal but a sheep's stomach stuffed with chopped offal, oatmeal, onions and spices, boiled or baked in the oven. To many it may sound a very odd choice for a celebration meal, yet, just like the rumours of the rampancy of sheep-shagging in Wales, the many a negative review of haggis I had heard proved grossly exaggerated. Served with mashed potatoes and turnips ('tatties and neeps'), and traditionally washed down with copious amounts of whiskey, it is a straightforward, hearty and filling fare, a perfect match for the cold winter weather out there (the Robert Burns day falls on the 15th of January). 

Customarily, an eight-verse poem would be recited over the haggis before carving  it, we did with but the very first one, yet pronounced in an authentic Edinburgh accent (which made the meal ever more delicious):

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

By way of dessert, we partook in another Scottish tradition known as "deep frying ye ole bonnie Mars bar". It is very much what it says on the tin: dipping pieces of Mars bar into batter and deep frying them in hot oil. Whoever came up with this must have been a big fan of hot fat and sugar. Now I am the last one to oppose to sweet and high-calorie fat things, but some sacrifices are worth it and some are not. The hollandaise sauce is worth every whopping dollop of butter it is made from. Japanese tempura, feathery and crispy, is a highlight of one's meal as well as easy on the stomach. All the sugar you put into a rhubarb pie pays back manifold in terms of deep sense of satisfaction that hits you the second the pie hits your palate. Deep-fried Mars bars have none of those redeeming qualities. It is just as gooey, repulsively sweet and un-chocolatey as it is in its original form and shape. 

P.S. Apologies for the picture quality. I said it before and I will say it now: smartphones are shit as phones, shit as computers and shit as cameras. Good luck chasing your fave gadget's latest version.