Enter the little Chinese charcoal brazier I picked up at Tap Phong a couple of weeks ago. I figured if it pushed out enough heat to make a huge pot of chicken curry it should get oil hot enough for frying.

After the charcoal was lit I topped it with a cast iron round bottom pan and added a generous amount of canola oil. A candy thermometer gave an indication of temperature and sure enough within five minutes the oil had reached 350ºF, the ideal temperature for frying.

Prep was really simple: A couple of sweet potatoes went through the slicer, some lovely organic broccoli got separated into little florets. The batter consisted of one egg, one cup of iced water and one cup of flour. Mix quickly but don’t overmix. The batter needs to stay lumpy for best results. Dredge the vegetables in flour, in batter and fry. Serve with a dipping sauce made from soy sauce and mirin.

It was simple and delicious. Sorry about the crappy images, my camera is in repair and all I had handy was my iPhone.

Oh look, a mise en place complete with blowtorch. What could be better?

The temperature dropped about 10º every time I added a fresh batch of vegetables but came up back to 350 in no time at all.

Last night, after a delicious mushroom risotto, Mr. Stephenson and myself decided that it was time for some bacon. Our wives chose ice cream for desert instead, but we fired up a small cast iron pan and started frying. The bacon was from the first trial run of the cold smoker, and whilst slightly over-smoked it’s still miles better than anything you can hope to buy in a supermarket.

That’s of course partly to do with the pork we’re using, humanely raised, no hormones, no antibiotics, but also do to the time and effort we put into the curing and smoking. The sweet spot for a cold smoke seems to be about a day and a half, down from the three days I smoked the first batch for. That way you’ll end up with a bacon that’s wonderfully smoky, but without overpowering the spices from the cure.

We fried our bacon with sprigs of rosemary and ate it on walnut bread with some wild fermented pickles, with the bread soaking up the fat.

Whilst we’re on the subject of fat, if the picture makes you worried about your health, let me reassure you. Between the two of us we ate really very little meat. Because bacon is so full of flavour, a little does go a very long way. In addition, bacon fat, if you start with a healthy pig, is actually very good for you. Bacon fat is about 65% polyunsaturated, with only about 11% saturated fat contained in it. It is also rich in vitamin a and e, so while you should not eat a pound a day, the occasional slice of bacon, or three, should actually be beneficial to your health.

It turned out absolutely delicious. The 36 hour cold smoke, and the subsequent hanging in the basement, means that the flavour is highly concentrated, so a little goes a long way.

Here’s how to do it

Wait for fall. You’ll need low ambient temperatures, ideally in the low sixties, for this to work. Any higher, and the meat might spoil. You don’t want frost either, a cool fall day is perfect.

Start with a generous amount of pork belly. Mr. Stephenson and myself tend to buy an entire belly, partly because the result will be delicious and freezes well, partly because, if you’re anything like us, you’ll end up giving much of the bacon away to grateful friends. A man carrying smoked pork products is a man who’s welcome in most people’s houses and a slab of home smoked bacon beats a bottle of wine as a host present.

Cure the bacon as you would for the hot smoked version. The making bacon video shows you how. I use Michael Ruhlman’s basic cure, salt, sugar and a small amount of pink salt both for flavour and to make sure that botulism isn’t an option. Dredge the belly in the cure until well covered, then put into large ziplock bags and add any further flavourings.

I made three different spice cures, one with smoked paprika, one with fennel and one with a Syrian sausage spice mix I’ve bought some time back in a Turkish store in Scarborough. Cure the meat in the fridge for three days, turning it daily. The salt will start pulling liquid out of the meat almost instantly, by the end of day three there should be a fair amount of brine in the bag and the meat should feel quite a bit stiffer.

After  three or four days take the meat out of the brine and rinse with cold water. Poke a hole in it and tie a piece of string, so you can hang it. I hang my bellies into the unlit smoker, where I leave them to dry for 24 hours. Obviously this only works when the temperatures are low enough, if it’s too warm dry the meat in the fridge.

Light your smoker. I built a smoke house during the summer, I generate smoke with a smoke bullet from porkypas.com. Truth be told it took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it, but now I get consistent smoke times – without the bullet requiering attention – of four hours and up.

And that’s almost the end of it. Smoke the bacon for about 36 hours. I tend to smoke over a weekend. I start the smoker up at about 8:00 in the morning, then keep it going until close to midnight when I give it one last fill and go to bed. The next morning I clean the bullet out, refill it and let it run for another day.

Once smoked to your satisfaction, take the bacon out of the smoker. Sprinkle the meat side generously with cracked pepper, wrap in cheesecloth and hang in a dark, cool place – a basement is ideal – for about four to six weeks. The bacon will dry out and continue to cure. When the meat feels reasonably firm, the bacon is ready to eat.

The pickles will still need some time, but the sourness is definitely developing. There’s already a depth of flavour that’s promising great things to come.

• 500 g flour
• 12 g salt
• 300 ml water
• 200 g starter (or thereabouts, it’s hard to measure starter to the nearest gram)

When I first started exploring this formula, I started out with a mixture of 300 g bread flour, 200 g rye. The starter I feed whatever I have on hand, bread flour before it goes back to sleep in the fridge, rye if I need activity fast. Ever now and then, as a special treat, I throw in a handful of wholewheat flour, which is the yeast equivalent of feeding tequila to teenagers. I am pretty certain that sourdough purist will faint dead away at this laissez faire, laissez aller attitude but so far the yeast and bacteria population of my starter seems to be both enthusiastic and healthy. Which, in the end, is really all that counts.

While we’re ruminating on the subject, sourdough is one of these things that a fair number of people get far too mystical about, at least for my personal liking. Before the development of commercial yeast not that very long ago, naturally leavened bread was the only bread there was. Which means that great bread has been produced for millenia by people who a: thought the earth was flat and b: who’s idea of personal hygiene was a bath at Christmas time, and then only if you really needed it.

What I am saying is, don’t sweat it. We’re surrounded by everything we need to create leavening cultures. All we need to do is create the environment the little critters like to move into. A clean glass jar, clean to make sure the undesirables won’t take hold before the yeasts move in, some, ideally, organic wholewheat flour and water, as well as a source of gentle acidity is all you need. The acid is ideally being supplied by fruit juice, with natural pineapple juice being, apparently, the best and most effective choice. Mix, stir, cover with cheese cloth and wait for a couple of days. Chances are that after a week or so you’ll have your very own bread starter.

Anyhow, back to the 500 g mix. Size wise, it makes a loaf that lasts us about two to three days and fits the cloche perfectly. Mixture wise (if that’s a word) there really is no end to the possibilities.

I have been blown away by the difference small changes to the 500 formula make. Add rye, the dough becomes soft and sticky. Increase the bread flour, it develops long stands of gluten. Red Fife will make for a sweet, intensely flavoured bread, spelt will introduce dark nut flavours. There is no end to the possibilities, and this is just for a very basic, naturally leavened bread.

Tonight, after the utter failure of my last loaf, I am testing out a 100% Fife loaf, all naturally leavened. I am keeping the dough in the fridge overnight, to give the yeast the time it needs to do it’s work, slowly and patiently. Will post updates tomorrow.

I started out well. Got up this morning, fed the starter and mixed 100 g wholewheat bread flour with 100 ml of water for a soaker. The idea was to tease extra flavour and structure out of the wholewheat part of the flour. Came home to very active starter which I mixed with the soaker, 200 g rye and 200 g Red Fife. With all the fermentation going on, this should have been good.

Then, when I put the dough together I added the usual amount of  water, forgetting that the soaker alone was extremely wet and that I was over-hydrating. No biggie, I thought, I just add some extra flour to get things back onto an even keel. Which I did, until the dough came away from the sides of the bowl of the Kitchen Aid, normally a sign that all is well.

When I pulled the dough out, I noticed that it was still noticeably wetter than I normally like it to be for these really quite heavy breads. No matter, I thought, a wetter dough means a lighter crust with larger air bubbles.

I was in a hurry, and as a result I didn’t think. And a result of that I didn’t notice that I was talking total nonsense. What I should have done is put the dough back into the bowl and hand kneaded it, while carefully adding flour, until it felt just right. I didn’t, because I was in a hurry. Instead I told myself that it would be fine.

Of course, for a wet dough to work, it needs a large amount of bread flour which has the ability to form long gluten strands to hold the loaf together, not wholewheat and definitely not rye. A wet rye/wholewheat loaf will do one thing and one thing only and that’s fall down onto itself and create a pancake. Which is exactly what today’s loaf did.

Balls. Cock and balls.

When baking works, it is an absolute joy. When you, or in this case when I, get cocky it’ll hit you over the head and kick your butt without mercy. Baking isn’t cooking. In cooking, a dish is too liquid, you reduce the sucker. Not liquid enough, you add some wine/stock/water. Things, generally, don’t fall to pieces just because you didn’t add 1/2 a tablespoon full of this or that. A loaf of bread can and does fail because it needed an extra teaspoon of flour and didn’t get it.

The journey continues.

You’ll need

• About a cup of very active sourdough starter. If you haven’t got sourdough at hand, substitute commercial yeast.
• 1/2 cup hand-warm water
• 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups all-purpose white flour
• 1 large egg
• Some good olive oil
• A good pinch of dalt
• Fennel seeds, about a tablespoon full
• 3 pound red or yellow onions, thinly sliced
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• Grated Parmigiano, as much as you like.
• A good handful of diced bacon

Put 1 1/2 cups flour in a bowl and the add the sourdough starter. Add the egg, 1 tablespoon oil, and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Mix, gradually incorporating flour, until a soft dough forms. Then knead, I use a Kitchen Aid for this, adding additional flour as needed, until smooth and elastic. Transfer dough to an oiled bowl and coat with a little more oil. Cover and let rise in a draft-free place until doubled, 2 to 3 hours.

While dough rises, gently heat some olive oil in a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers, then sauté the fennel seeds until a shade darker, about 30 seconds. Stir in the onions, salt and pepper, then reduce heat to low and cover. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are very tender and golden brown, 1 to 1 1/4 hours.

Preheat oven to 375°F with rack in middle.

Knead dough gently on a floured surface with floured hands to deflate. Pat out dough on a large heavy baking sheet into a 15- by 12-inch rectangle, turning up or crimping edge, then brush mustard evenly over dough, leaving a 1/2-inch border around edge. Spread onions evenly over mustard, then sprinkle evenly with cheese. Add the bacon dice.

Bake tart until crust is golden brown and the bacon cooked, 30 to 35 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

I baked another rye sourdough bread today. 300 g bread flour to 200 g rye, 12 g of salt and 200 g of active starter. It came out great, apart from the slashing I tried, which caused the crust to break in unexpected places.

Still, the flavour is there and I am finally beginning to be able to handle sticky rye dough without getting it stuck to myself and/or the entire mixer. I’ve made this bread now twice, sometimes three times a week, for some time. Every time I make it again I learn something new, but I am now pretty confident that the end result will be delicious.

There are other breads waiting for me, other recipes I am planning to explore. But they can continue to wait, for now. Part of this has to do with my wife declaring the rye her most favourite bread ever, but part has also to do with the journey of exploration. In baking, it matters whether you use 12 or 15 grams of salt. 10 ml of water make a difference to the feel and finish of a dough, something that rarely happens in cooking.

Which makes experimentation all that more interesting. Experimentation that changes things incrementally, maybe substituting whole grain for white bread flour, maybe exchanging rye for Fife. The results are always delicious, and always interesting. The aim is to, one day, find a formula that can’t be improved, that is the essence of a dark, delicious, sourdough rye.

I am looking forward to the journey.

This all started to change when Mr. Stephenson called one day on the telephone and informed me that he had found a small place in Little Italy that was selling baker’s yeast and whether I wanted to accompany him for the purchase. Sure thing, I thought and when I returned home with a sample of the fabled Italian yeast I went to work and started researching what makes good bread.

Time

Mr Stephenson, who drives a fast car, sometimes scoffs about my obsession with time. Time, for me, is a frequently overlooked but absolutely essential ingredient to many foods and has the ability to transform the mediocre into the outstanding.

Time, a good friend to people like us, is also the enemy of the food industry. Time, as we all know, is money and as a result many foods manufactured industrially have taken the results of time and tried to replicate them with chemicals, with flavour enhancers, artificial flavours, colourings, extra fat, extra salt, modified this and modified that.

The food industry has two goals: Manufacture food quickly, then make sure it has a long shelf life. Both of these needs are the antithesis of good food and thankfully we can bypass them entirely.

When it comes to bread, this is what I had always been doing: Take flour, water, a little salt, a little sugar. Mix, rise, deflate, rise, bake. The rise, I had been told, needed to happen in a warm place to get the yeast to work, so was the sugar.

My first mistake

What I have been finding out is that the above method has a snowball’s chance in hell to produce good bread. The magic ingredient, time, is missing entirely and the flour has no chance at all to release it’s flavours. The yeast feeds on the first food that’s available, the sugar, and leaves the wheat or rye alone.

What I do now, apart from frequently using sourdough starters, is give the dough time to work, give the yeast an incentive to interact with the ingredients. I use little yeast, in a cold environment, over a long time. Almost all of the bread I am baking starts life in the refrigerator, where the yeast will go to work very slowly, but with mouthwatering results.

Because I add no sugar, the yeast needs to look for nourishment elsewhere, and as a result the sugar in the grain itself gets used as fuel, breaking down the cell structure and creating depth of flavour. Many people we talk to don’t like to acknowledge the idea that the food we create is made with the generous help and support of many species of micro-organisms. Too many commercials telling them to disinfect their kitchens have done their work, hammering into their heads the message that bacteria are a bad thing and that a sterile environment is something to strive for.

This of course is absolute nonsense. While we do keep our kitchens clean, botulism is no joke, we also understand the symbiotic relationship us humans have with bacteria and other micro-organisms such as yeast, wild and otherwise. Our entire digestive system relies on the help of tribes of friendly bacteria to work and anybody who has ever taken antibiotics knows that kick-starting intestinal flora with a generous supply of yoghurt is a very good thing indeed.

What we do when we bake bread is to create a habitat that the kind of organisms we’d like to move in will find inviting. A bread dough provides shelter and food for yeasts, and in return we get flavour and rise. Not a bad exchange, especially as we’ll be killing off the entire yeast population during the baking process.

My second mistake

Most cheap bread baking machines don’t reach a temperature anywhere high enough to create a decent loaf. Baking bread needs high temperatures, 500º, with the addition of steam to create a crispy crust. Steam can be added in several ways. Commercial bread ovens inject steam at high temperatures. We can mimic that effect by keeping a pan at the bottom of the oven and filling it with hot water at the beginning of the bake. Then get a spray bottle and spray the walls of the oven to create an instant moist environment.

The drawback to this is potential mess and, especially of you’ve got an electric oven, the obvious disadvantages of mixing water with electricity. I own a very simple gas oven, so don’t have to face these issues, but I would be most cautious with a domestic electric model.

Thankfully there is a solution to this dilemma and it has changed the way I bake for the better. It is called a cloche, an unglazed ceramic bowl with a matching ceramic plate underneath. The cloche re-creates the environment we’d find in an old wood fired brick oven, or a steam injected bakery oven and loaves come out perfectly crisp, every time. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

I’ll be posting more about my personal bread making discoveries as I make them. Stay tuned.

So much so that I have no idea what to do with the bounty. My own freezer is overflowing, so I’ll either have to purchase a larger model, something that has been on the cards for quite some time, or get creative. Mr. Stephenson, are you in need of a tub of duck fat?

“Where do you find the time?”

Now, both Mr. Duess and Mr. Stephenson are far from being retired, years away from sitting quietly on their front porch, pipe in hand and feet beslipperd. Yet they like few things better than a slice of freshly baked rye bread, dipped into a humble dish of peppery olive oil. And to achieve that goal, midweek baking is frequently a necessity. Here’s how to do it:

Day One:

In the evening, take your sourdough starter out of the fridge and feed.

Day Two:

The next morning, prepare your dough. Today we used 180g rye and 320g wheat flower, with about a cup full of very active starter. Salt, water; about 300ml for a (roughly) 60% hydration of the dough. Add everything to your mixer and knead while you’re taking a shower. Take the resulting dough ball and put into an oiled bowl, cover and refrigerate. Go to work.

In the evening, remove dough from the fridge and allow to come to room temperature. Fold and stretch three times, then let rise in a banneton for two hours. After the first hour, pre-heat the oven to 500º. Bake for 45 minutes or until the bread has an internal temperature of 200º. This is the result:

The loaf had hardly risen in the fridge, and even after three hours at room temperature little had changed. The rise happened almost exclusively in the oven – the so called oven spring, where the yeast goes on one last manic feeding frenzy before being killed off at just over 140º.

Photo credit: gadl on flickr

This kind of life then leads to the publishing of a plethora of recipe books and magazines, for those of us who can still be bothered to cook, promising culinary ecstasy in 30 minutes or less. Which is of course utter nonsense and the path to disappointment and mediocracy.

The truth of the matter is that good food takes time. Good anything takes time. Time, not unlike bacon, makes most things better. Wine, pickles, cheese, vinegar, bread, sausages. Even fish, if you decide to hang it in the smoke.

The good news is that once you’ve paid into the time bank, by curing bacon, smoking fish, feeding a sourdough starter or canning tomatoes, you are then able to withdraw deliciousness. And get a proper meal on the table, in ten minutes or less. A loaf of home made bread will not just still hunger, eating it will be an emotionally and sensually satisfying experience. It will make you happy the way a TV dinner never can. A basement full of shelves groaning under the weight of preserves, pickles and canned vegetables will warm your heart on a cold winter morning. And a  slab of smoked bacon, wrapped in cheeseloth, will fill you with joy and anticipation.

And all because you’ve added time, the secret, and most precious of ingredients.