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People have enjoyed the luxurious taste of asparagus for millennia. The Ancient Egyptians ate it. And it appeared in The Roman Cookery of Apicius in the late 4th & early 5th Century CE.

Asparagus seasonal right now but only for a short period. Also in season is the wonderfully aromatic, anise flavoured french tarragon. As with many things that are seasonal at the same time, these two ingredients make perfect partners. We grow both of these ingredients on the smallholding, so I had a ‘free’ meal in the making when paired with eggs from our chickens.

In this recipe I complemented these ingredients with some wonderfully sweet and full tasting, 24 month’s old, piave cheese. This is a cow’s milk cheese from a small area in Italy with the same name. I was lucky enough to receive some from my Twitter friend in Rome, Carla Tomasi.

The finished tart tasted really smooth, rich and special. The fragrance of the shoots, herb and cheese was subtle: our senses were gently stroked. We had the tart with new potatoes lightly dressed in wild garlic mayo and steamed brassica shoots the first day; and with lemony cous-cous and tarragon marinated tomato salad the next.

If you’d like to know how to make this tart and see some tips for how to grow your own asparagus, please read on…

Asparagus, tarragon and piave tart recipe

I found a suitable recipe that I could adapt on the Good Food Channel.

I made my own shortcrust pastry using 50/50 spelt & plain white flour. When I blind baked the case, I painted it with some beaten egg after the first bake before I put it back in the oven to brown. This helps to seal the base.

I left out the shallot, used french tarragon instead of the parsley and piave instead of the gruyere. You could use parmesan, pecorino, gruyere or well matured cheddar cheese or vegetarian/vegan alternatives.

I had about a dozen shoots of asparagus, from 1cm thick to matchstick thin. So I blanched the bigger bits first for 4 minutes in total and then added the little bits for 2 minutes at the end.

That’s it. A very simple dish that you could use as a posh dinner party piece or even make in individual tartlets as a starter with a pretty garnish.

Tips to grow asparagus

You need to think for the long term and be patient if you grow asparagus. Specially if you grow it from seed.

We planted out these crowns in March 2011 and we’re taking our first shoots this year, 2012.

Asparagus crowns grown from seed, 3 years old

They are the variety Martha Washington. We sowed them and then repotted them each year. Before we planted them we washed off all the soil & compost so that we could lay the crowns out evenly.

The crowns were placed in a trench on a ridge of well rotted compost. The compost helps to give them a good feed and the ridge also helps a bit with drainage to avoid the crown rotting.

Asparagus crowns in their trench before we covered them

We covered over the crowns and then did our best to keep them weed free. The plants do not fare well if they have a lot of competition, so you’ll need to weed and/or mulch well.

We’re harvesting now and, this first year, we’ll stop harvesting at the end of the month. This gives the plants a chance to replenish their energy and build up bigger and better roots to feed and grow well for next year’s harvest. Once the asparagus fronds turn yellow in late summer/early autumn, we’ll cut them down to a few inches above ground level and give the plants a good mulch of well rotted compost. Then we wait… for the next delicious harvest: hopefully even more productive thatn the last.

Anyway, we were rewarded with this fleeting sight. A gorgeous sunset with crespucular rays. It really is beautiful here, and we really do appreciate it.

The result was fantastic and we ate it with some very special cheese. The soaked rye chops help keep the bread wonderfully moist. Those and the sunflower seeds mean it also has a nutty texture.

The bread is easy to make as long as you do not expect the same feel and process as making bread with wheat flour. Rye doesn’t have the same gluten development as wheat, so you don’t get a big rise. The dough starts, and remains, sticky and so you have to handle it sparingly with wet hands.

It’s also best to ‘age’ the bread once it’s made for 24 hours or more so that the crumb can develop the proper characteristics.

If you would like to make this bread, read on…

Rye Vollkornbrot sourdough bread recipe

You can use any baking tin for this. The bread isn’t going to rise very much, so you don’t need a deep one. I used a 3cm deep and 20cm square tin.

Ingredients

140g rye chops
140g water, just off boiling
380g  active rye sourdough starter
80g warm water
120g organic wholemeal rye flour
15 g salt
25g sunflower seeds, lightly roasted in a dry pan
A little extra rye flour for dusting your loaf tin

Method

The night before you bake pour the hot water over the chops and mix together with a fork. Cover and leave at room temperature.

The next day, put the starter and water in a bowl and mix together. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well until everything is wet, well coated and with no lumps.

Cover the bowl with an oiled piece of plastic and leave in a warm place to prove for 30 minutes.

Oil or grease your baking tin and dust the inside of the tin with some rye flour.

Wet your hands . Take the dough from the bowl and quickly work it into a shape that will fit snugly inside your tin. Place the dough inside the tin, smooth it down and sprinkle with some of the rye flour. Cover with the oiled plastic and leave to prove in a warm place for about an hour. A rise of about 30% is just fine.

While the dough proves, pre-heat your oven to 230°C. I use a steam tray in the oven too for the first part of the bake.

Once your dough has proved, put the loaf tin in the oven for 15 minutes. Then carefully take the steam tray out of the oven and turn the heat down to 200°C. Bake for another 45 minutes,.

Then take the loaf out of the tin and pop it back in the oven for another 15 minutes so that the sides and bottom are properly cooked.

When you take the bread out of the oven, wrap it in a clean tea towel and leave for 24 hours before tucking in. This allows the loaf to finish cooking and develop a good crumb. If you cut into it too early the inside will still be so moist so it will ‘drag’ as you cut. The wait is definitely worth it.

Other posts you may like:

• White and kamut flour sourdough breads
• Felin Ganol – Tybalt Flour: Sourdough Bread
• Sourdough bread with rye and linseed
• Felin Ganol Amaretto Flour: Sourdough Bread

Felin Ganol Amaretto Flour: Sourdough Bread

Debs had made a gorgeous parsnip, cinnamon and lemon cake with some of our over-wintered parsnips. It was delicious. I had one parsnip left that Debs had not been able to use.

And I had cleared a space in our big polytunnel for a new kiwi ‘Jenny’ and for our tarragon.  (How posh is that, to have a big and a little polytunnel?) The space for these had a huge clump of chickweed in it that we’d been harvesting for ages.

And, of course, it’s wild garlic time.

So I thought that the parsnip would make a really intense sweet/savoury mash with potatoes and wild garlic pesto. It did.

I gave the chickweed a good haircut. Then I just washed it, gave it a good shake and wilted a 2 litre pan full, covered and shaken for 2-3 minutes. I dressed it with my normal vinaigrette.

I brushed the seafood with a little harissa and griddled it on a very hot ridged griddle for about 4 minutes. I then turned the heat off and covered with a saucepan lid to leave it to cook in the residual heat and steam.

The whole recipe took less than 30 minutes to prepare and had a lovely contrast of colours, flavours and textures.

So the only thing for me to add is a recipe for wild garlic pesto. Read on…

Wild garlic pesto recipe

The quantities in this recipe are intentionally a bit ‘loose’. Have a play and taste as you go. If you have a food processor, you don’t need to faff about grating cheese and stuff. If not, grate the cheese and make up in a pestle & mortar.

I tend to use almonds or hazelnuts for this type of thing. You can use walnuts and other nuts and seeds too, see what you have and like. I’ve not used pine nuts for ages as they are so expensive for me to buy.

Once you’ve made the pesto it’ll keep for ages in a jar in the fridge. Just keep the surface covered with oil. You can also spoon it into ice-cube trays and freeze it. If you make it quite thick, you can make a roll in greaseproof paper and freeze that. Then all you have to do is to cut off a chunk.

Ingredients

A clove of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped (you can use more to taste)
A handful of nuts roughly chopped & lightly roasted in a dry frying pan
A palm sized piece of parmesan cheese or other hard cheese, roughly chopped into chunks
A handful of wild garlic leaves, washed if necessary, roughly chopped
Sea salt, to taste
Extra virgin olive oil or olive/sunflower/ rapeseed oil

Method

Pop the garlic, nuts and cheese into your food processor. Blitz until you have a coarse consistency, scrape down and blitz again if you need to.

Add the wild garlic leaves and blitz again until you have a coarse paste.

Either in the processor or in another bowl gradually mix in enough oil to make your desired consistency. Season to taste with some salt.

If you wanted you could add some of the tomatoes you dehydrated last year to the mix on the first blitz.

Enjoy and let me know how you get on.

Other posts you may like:

• Wild garlic and smoked salmon carbonara
• Wild garlic and homemade ricotta pasta
• Nettle gnocchi recipe
• Italian rotolo pasta recipe with lemon thyme butter

The first nettles of the 2012 season for us.

While the spaghetti cooks, gently fry garlic & anchovies in extra virgin olive oil. Then add nettles to the pan and cover till they wilt. Season with salt, ground black pepper and lemon juice. Mix through lightly drained spaghetti with a good handful of finely grated Parmesan cheese. Delicious!

Other posts you may like:

• Nettle & Hazelnut Tart
• Nettle & brocciu pasties
• Nettle gnocchi
• Nettle & bacon risotto

Romeo, the hate I bear thee can afford
No better term than this,—thou art a villain

Now why would you name a wheat after someone who would say that?

I think this Particular Tybalt, unlike Romeo’s assailant, is more fiery in name than in nature.

This is another test bake of one of the flours I received the the Felin Ganol Mill. This particular flour is a fine grained white flour. I decided to use is as part of my normal bake of 2.7kgs of sourdough along with some Felin Ganol wholemeal spelt. Anne & Andrew say on the packet that they recommend it is mixed with 30% strong white flour. What I did was replace some of my usual strong white bread flour with the Tybalt.

Here’s the formula I used…

Tybalt & Spelt Sourdough Bread Recipe

Ingredients

750g Felin Ganol white Tybalt flour
450g Shipton’s No 4 strong white flour
300g Felin Ganol wholemal spelt flour
300g 100% hydration starter (refreshed with the FG Tybalt & FG Spelt)
920g warm water
27g fine sea salt

Method

I used the same method as my last test bake with the Amaretto flour.

You’ll see that the hydration of the dough at about 65% is my ‘normal’ hydration. I kept to this despite some information from Azelia on her blog to the effect that it doesn’t need as much water. This wasn’t just me being peverse. I wanted to see how it handled in direct comparison to my normal dough. The only difference between this and my normal formula is the replacement of some of the No 4 with the Tybalt. So I knew whatever changes I observed were down to the flour characteristics in the starter and in the main mix.

The first mix of the dough before adding the salt felt as normal.

After adding the salt and remaining 50g water, the handling characteristics of the dough were noticeably different. The dough felt ‘softer’ and didn’t achieve the same resilience through the folding process.

After the overnight retard in the fridge, the dough had puffed up very well and was still very very ‘soft’. By this time, I knew I was going to have some ‘spreading loaves’ due to the hydration of the dough. The dough felt like my normal dough with perhaps 5-10% more water.

My observation was confirmed by the shaping of the dough for the bannetons. The dough shaped well, but was not as ‘pert’ as usual. I proved the loaves for about 2.5 hours and then baked them as normal.

The loaves went out of the bannetons onto the the peel like pancakes. I had visions of taking pictures of discus stand ins. After about ten minutes in the oven  it was clear that the loaves would spring and not be completely flat.

I was expecting the loaves to colour quickly like the Amaretto did and as Azelia reported in her posting. They did not and this may be because there was only 50% Tybalt in the dough.

I baked the loaves for about 50 minutes in total. They baked out very nicely in the end, if somewhat flatter than normal.

The Result

The crust smells malty, caramelly and tastes gorgeous. The crumb is very soft and the spelt provides a good colour and slightly nutty flavour. As you can see, the crumb is light and open – a function of the higher hydration for the flour type.

I think the taste of the bread is lightly better than my normal loaf but I didn’t feel that the taste of the Tybalt came through strongly in anything but the crust.

The first loaf was gone within six hours, which is a testament to how good it was.

I’d think that next I’d like to bake a loaf with 100% Tybalt to see how it feels and tastes by itself. I’d also cut the water down by 50g or so to see what happens to the dough handling.

In conclusion, this is a flour I want to get to know better. I think it has good possibilities for me.

Other posts you may like:

• White and kamut flour sourdough breads
• Sourdough breakfast bread with spelt, fruit, nuts & spices
• Sourdough bread with rye and linseed
• Winter panzanella recipe – bread salad

What’s more, it gave me an excuse to make a food-related video to show you how easy it all is. So it was lucky I needed some mayonnaise yesterday. It was to make into a wild garlic mayonnaise to go with some juicy prawns grilled with breadcrumbs and parmesan. I’m afraid there’s no picture of the finished dish because we ate it!

If you want to know how make this, wild garlic mayonnaise or tartar sauce, please read on…

For people who keep chickens, mayonnaise is a really good way of using fresh eggs. In fact, fresher eggs mean better mayonnaise. Fresh eggs contain more of the natural stabiliser lecithin, so you are more likely to get better results. Of course, if you’re in a group that are told they should avoid raw eggs (pregnant, the very young or frail) then think about doing so.

Your major choice with mayonnaise is which oil to use. Your choice will affect the finished taste of the mayonnaise and its expense. I use a mix of extra virgin olive oil and a neutral sunflower or olive oil. This gives a rounded flavour and keeps the cost down.

Your ingredients are best if they are at a cool to moderate room temperature. If you’ve been baking all day and the kitchen feels like an oven, you will find it
harder to make the mayonnaise.

Here’s the video which shows how simple this is:

Mayonnaise with a stick blender recipe

Ingredients

1 medium egg
A large pinch of sea salt
White or freshly ground black pepper (Optional: use white if you don’t want flecks in the finished mayo)
1tsp or more Dijon mustard
About 300ml oil (I use 50/50 sunflower oil & extra virgin olive oil)
1 tsp white wine vinegar, or to taste (flavoured vinegars can be nice here) or you can use the juice of a lemon

Method

Put all the ingredients in a blender goblet, jug or the bowl of your food processor.

Allow the egg to settle to the bottom. Put your stick blender to the bottom of the container and turn on. After a while, you will see the egg & some of the oil emulsify and turn white. Make sure that this is complete before gradually lifting the blender up (and down) through the mix to incorporate the rest of the oil. This will take about a minute in total. Make sure that you have incorporated everything and check your seasoning.

Update 12th March: I’ve been asked on Twitter how long this will store. If you use very fresh eggs (safest and these work best anyway) this should easily keep for 5 days in the fridge. If the quantity is too much for you to use, then you can scale down the ingredients to suit. It’s important that you use complete egg as the egg whites help buffer the mix against the speed & heat of the blades which may otherwise make the emulsion split. So if you want to scale down by half, beat an egg and then add half. A precise amount doesn’t matter, you could use the whole egg with no problem.

Wild garlic mayonnaise recipe

To make wild garlic mayonnaise, take a small handful of wild garlic leaves and chop them very coarsely. Pop these into the bottom of the blender goblet before everything else and puree. Then continue as above.  Alternatively, add the chopped leaves at the end and blend through the mayyonnaise quickly. Don’t over-process or you may split the mayo.

Tartar sauce recipe

This is the classic fish accompaniment.

Ingredients

200ml mayonnaise
3 tbsp each of chopped capers, gherkins and parsley
1 shallot, finely chopped or small bunch chives, finely chopped
Lemon juice to taste

Method

Mix all the ingredients together and chill.

Other posts you may like:

• Wild garlic and smoked salmon carbonara
• Wild garlic and homemade ricotta pasta
• Nettle gnocchi recipe
• Italian rotolo pasta recipe with lemon thyme butter

This post is part of the 52 Week Salad Challenge. To find out more, click the picture.