Day 51: cooking with the fan off
As mentioned in a few previous entries, it’s about time I got to know my oven better. Choosing cakes for this training period would be too high-risk and far too stressful and upsetting for me if each attempt failed or burned on one side – as is so common for cakes in my oven – so I thought I’d start with a more simple bake: bread and butter pudding. While the stakes are still high, especially as this is Nigella’s Grandmother’s recipe, I think a bread and butter pudding is a little more forgiving when it comes to my oven’s – or indeed its master’s – baking capabilities. It’s not that I can’t bake, it’s just that I get very inconsistent results when I do bake, and I know – in part – that this is due to the fact I don’t pay attention; I am too inexperienced to know when the bounce is just right in a sponge or the wobble perfect in a cheesecake. And the best way to become experienced? Practice.
The problem seems to come down to the fan in my oven; I refuse to - in fact, I do not - believe that the fan in my oven distributes heat consistently and evenly as it is apparently supposed to. Most things I cook in **that** oven with the fan on **always** brown too fast on the right side and burns before the rest of it even starts to bronze. Whether it’s cakes or roast potatoes - the latter being easier to take out and turn – it consistently happens. And, yes, I do account for fan ovens being hotter and reduce my temperature by 20-30°C when required.
Anyway, today I decided to try baking with the fan off (when I eventually figured out that function - following support from Twitter) with Nigella’s Grandmother’s Ginger Jam Bread and Butter Pudding; this does not suggest I don’t respect the recipe - on the contrary - it’s more that if I did set the oven to the wrong function it would be easier to fix than a cake.
Nigella’s Grandmother’s Ginger Jam Bread and Butter Pudding
There is nothing complex in the assembly of a bread and butter pudding whatsoever, and this one is almost identical to the way my Grandmother taught me, with the tiny exception of needing to make jam sandwiches first. My Nan (she would scowl me for calling her Grandmother) would butter the bread and then lay down as single, overlapping triangles (on a slight angle) into the baking dish, cover with the cream and egg mix and then sprinkle with sugar. Here, however, you make ginger jam sandwiches (yes I had to take a bite, and just the texture and taste of biting into jam and butter-filled white plastic bread took me straight back to school picnics) and then proceed to lay down in the baking dish in a similar fashion.
Before starting all of this though I had to toast a slice of bread, apply a luxuriant amount of butter, and then enjoy with some of the chunky-hot ginger jam. This will likely set the standard for all weekday breakfasts to come.
Following my seek for help on Twitter, which confirmed that I did in fact have the no-fan-function on my oven (maybe that’s standard, I don’t know), I was delighted that this pudding came out evenly bronzed and cooked throughout. No unwanted burns either; aside from the odd carbonised sultana, which is common in all bread and butter puddings I think.
Flavour musings
It's worth pointing out that I actually used white bread and not brown. This was mainly due to the fact that I didn’t have any brown bread, but did have a loaf of sliced white bread that had been in the freezer since Christmas!
I believe there is an unbeatable, comfort-inducing quality about a Grandmother’s dessert, and Nigella’s Grandmother’s Ginger Jam Bread and Butter Pudding is a supreme embodiment of that belief.
With an oven I now believe I can bake in (or a setting that makes it so), the next bake is Nigella’s Old-Fashioned Sandwich loaf; also marking the first time I have ever made bread from scratch (not counting those ready-blended mixes).
