compartmentalise

nigella's garlic-parsley hearthbread is like a foccacia, with indian flavours. it's like a naan, but thicker and breadier.

pulsing parsley with oven roasted garlic cloves and olive oil to get a runny, pungent paste.

here's a trick i discovered. foccacia-type dough is wet, and begins like a ciabatta dough. but since you know it is intended that the final bread is drenched and anointed in oil, just go ahead and use oil to handle the dough throughout the baking process - oil the bench, oil the bowl, oil your hands. it makes wet dough a lot more manageable. and all the oil just goes to enrich the dough eventually. i like to slice up a bread like this into squares, wrap them up in parchment, and give them away.

then one day i found peanut butter and nutella sitting around in the cupboard: opened, neglected, and never going to be finished.

so i scooped them out, dumped them with chocolate buttons, a dash of cayenne pepper, and melted everything together to make a truffle fillling. thankfully, i didn't overdo the cayenne pepper - the truffle leaves a rather spicy aftertaste.

i tempered the last batch of chocolate sitting in the refrigerator. the weather has been hot, so the chocolate didn't seem to set, though i was sure it was at temper.

lining the chocolate molds with a base coat, then filling with the truffle, and sealing with chocolate again. and popping the chocolates out of the molds. i like my square mold; it gives more beautiful chocolates.

i also made bertinet's pain de mie by hand.

at 70% hydration, the french slapping way works just fine to bring the dough together. the following is a series of photos of the dough, each after 100 slaps on the bench.

so, 1000 slaps in total. and the gluten window.

the dough became super smooth after a simple shaping!

dividing and shaping the dough to fit into two pullman loaf tins. i was glad that finally there was enough dough to rise and fill up the tins just right.

true to the name, pain de mie is all about the crumb. there is not much crust to it, but the crumb was closely knit (but not in the brick-like way) and delicious.

immediately, i set about preparing to make croque monsieur with the pain de mie.

croque monsieur uses sauce bechamel. this begins as a white roux, into which milk is beaten in, cooked till thickened, and then seasoned with pepper, nutmeg and salt.

assembling the sandwiches. two slices of bread, spread with bechamel, sandwiching a slice of ham. then, more bechamel on top, followed by a thick sprinkling of cheese.

into the oven, until the cheese is all melted and bubbling. slicing through the sandwiches was so exciting!

i tossed together a simple salad: butterhead with garlicky diced tomatoes. assembled onto a plate, and it felt like a perfect dinner at a diner.