The Cocoanut

photo courtesy of Cece

A little more than a month ago, a friend and I made the trip to Brunswick Street Fitzroy. Inner-city Melburnians invest a lot of emotional attachment on this part-yuppie, part-grungy strip, and lately there has been this love-hate relationship over the inevitable gentrification of this café-studded street. Perversely, those who protest the loudest are usually the ones contributing to the gentrification. You hear complains about the “self-conscious grunginess” of the commissioned graffiti on some of Brunswick Street’s commercial establishments and the “loss of character that made the place so special”. I’m quite content with its character at the moment, but they’re more than welcome to visit my local strip Sydney Road if poverty and delinquent graffiti is what they’re after.

Anyway, one of Brunswick Street’s popular spots is Babka, a bakery whose breads are much talked about. It’s a small cosy café bustling with energy, and although I’m not a regular customer, I can attest that their egg loaf, which is essentially challah minus the Jewish identity, is really quite good. Fresh from my trip to Tasmania, I had this hitherto unbeknownst urge for meat pies, so the beef burgundy with rocket salad and kasoundi (a sort of relish) seemed the obvious choice.

We were served a basket of bread slices - a multigrain, spiced rye and a white variety, which were all really flavorsome. So flavorsome, in fact, that we didn’t mind waiting half an hour for our pies, until we were told they’d forgotten all about the pies. I was in an unusually laidback mode so I was quite happy to wait an extra 15 minutes, although the bribe that came in the form of another basket of bread slices certainly helped.

Halfway through the wait, a loud crashing noise exploded across the room and one of the waitresses was lying on the floor, with broken pieces of plates splattered all over. It must’ve been quite painful. I’ve always felt that waitressing is a rather dangerous occupation, like a circus performer in the middle of a balancing act but without the glamour and thunderous applause.

The pies eventually came and hurriedly consumed. Hot steaming meat encased in puff pastry makes a good antidote to winter, which incidentally is the coldest in a decade. We paid the bill, which was surprisingly cheap, and then we realized we were only charged for one pie. I wasn’t entirely sure if this was deliberate to make up for their forgetfulness or the staff really did make another blunder, but since I was in such a laidback mode I thought I’d just give myself the benefit of the doubt

For some reason, I wanted this bread to evoke memories of Malaysia, to the point where it would serve as a tribute to my mum and grandma, both of whom really enjoy the pleasure of soft, white bread. Southeast Asians have a propensity for soft, fluffy buns, so to replicate this texture I used a recipe for a simple milk loaf and tweaked the instructions to make it even simpler (who can be bothered with hard work these days?). The use of milk instead of water would provide a comforting tenderness to the bread which is the main goal of my second bread-making attempt.

Unlike my first bread, whose crust was thick and leathery, and whose crumb had layers of unmixed flour and tasted of excess yeast, this bread turned out very well. The crumb was dense and spongy, outlined by a perfectly formed, thin crust. The delicate, soft crumb brought back memories of eating pandan chiffon cake, a popular treat in Malaysia that simply consists of pandan flavoured sponge cake, its light airiness uplifted by the fragrant pandan aroma. To replicate this childhood experience of mine, onto a thick slice of the freshly baked milk loaf I smeared a dollop of pandan kaya, a Malaysian custard sweetened with palm sugar, with pandan juice added for aroma.

When toasted, the crumb maintains a good semblance of its fluffiness, but it is the crust that undergoes a most spectacular transformation, from an anonymous outer boundary to this light, crispy, almost fragile, brown layer that simply shatters upon the first bite.

Simple Milk Loaf

500 g plain white flour*
350g milk (I used skim milk)
20 g honey, about a tablespoon-and-a-bit’s worth
25g warm melted butter
1 x 7g sachet instant dried yeast
1¼ tsp salt

In a large bowl, whisk the yeast with the milk and honey. Add the flour and salt, and combine until you get a soft, sticky dough. Pour over the warm melted butter, and mix this into the dough. Knead the dough for 10 minutes, or if you have an electric mixer like me, you can use that instead. Simply attach a dough hook and let it do all the work for you, around 7-10 minutes.

Leave the dough in the bowl for an hour to proof. After an hour has passed, punch down the dough to release all the carbon dioxide. Transfer the dough to a loaf tin, and let it proof for another hour. The dough will rise again to about twice its size, and this time you want all that gas inside to remain. At this stage, I like to brush the top of the dough with water and sprinkle poppy seeds. This is entirely optional, and I only did it because I happen to have a jar of poppy seeds in the pantry.

Set the oven to 210ºC, and when hot enough carefully place the dough into the oven and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 180ºC and bake for another 25-30 minutes, or until the top of the loaf is dark brown. Remove from the tin, and leave to cool on a wire rack.

*I used all purpose flour, because that’s what I had at home. However, you might want to try using strong white flour or bread flour, which are more glutinous and will ‘jump’ over the top of the tin much more than normal flour.

Little did I realise I was quite unprepared for the foolish sense of excitement which overcame me upon seeing the bread inflate and double in size during the proving process. It’s like the bread was alive! (Well, it kind of is, since yeast is a living organism). This foolish thrill would later cost the bread its fully-developed flavour, as I, in my haste, started punching the bread, ridding it of air and preparing it for the second proving process, before the first one was even through.

The finished product had the visual appearance of bread, but in taste it was quite deformed. The crust was thick and chewy, while the crumb was a little too salty and had a lingering aftertaste which I suspect is due to excess yeast, a result of rushing the fermentation process during proving.

Far from being disappointed, it spurred me to do some research on perfecting the art of bread-making. If I’m going to take this first bread as an indication of the year that lies ahead, it’s not that it will be marked by over-salted failures, but rather by exciting discoveries into an art that promises unbounded potential and many happy-tummy memories

I’ve seen similar recipes that call themselves banana bread, but I think that is taking the self-deceit concept a little too far. The ratio of sugar, banana and flour in this, and those recipes, gives the finished product a moist, faintly sweet taste that is not at all bread and closer to being a cake. However, if you, like me, are obsessed with proper classification, then perhaps a more suitable description would be ‘tea bread’.

I personally enjoy this cake, oops, tea bread on its own, although if you feel like a devil you could always intrude on its purity by tainting the cake with honey and butter to spread. You could even create a twisted cake version of the good ol’ banana split and have it with ice cream and choc sundae sauce. That would be profane. But it could be good.

Moist Banana Cake
Makes 1 loaf

200 g plain flour
2 ¼ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)
75g butter, at room temperature
115g caster sugar
3 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs, beaten to mix
poppy seeds (optional)

1. Preheat a 350ºF/180ºC oven. Grease a loaf tin (21 x 11 cm).
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon into a bowl.
3. In another bowl, combine the butter with the sugar. Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.
4. Add the mashed bananas and eggs and mix well. The degree of mashing depends on your personal taste.
5. Add the dry ingredients and blend quickly and evenly. At this point I like to fold in the poppy seeds, a reasonable amount to give a slight crunch to the texture of the cake.
6. Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake for 50-60 minutes.
7. Cool in the pan for about 5 minutes, then turn out on to a wire rack to cool completely.

During Ramadan, after a whole day of fasting, I like something a bit more substantial. Recently I discovered one of the stalls at Queen Victoria Market stocks challah from Glick’s, a famous Melbourne Jewish bakery renowned for its bagels. I’ve always wanted to try this sweet bread, after a friend went on and on about how good his challah toast went with butter. If plain toast can arouse so much excitement in one person, that toast has got to be good. So I bought one to try myself, as an appetizer to break the fast with.

Challah is a bit like the French brioche, except that it’s not as rich and dairy-free. It’s usually shaped into a braid, although there are also round challahs. Personally, I prefer the braided challahs because they’re easier to cut into toasts. Soft and faintly sweet, it’s good enough to eat on its own, but when lightly toasted and slathered with butter, you have a completely different treat altogether. The slight crunch of the toasted layer gives way to a soft interior that’s stretchy and rich, without being overwhelming. It really is a good way to end a day of resisting temptations.

Mayo just goes down so well with so many things. I know it’s no longer socially acceptable to publicly endorse McDonald’s, but back in the days I used to enjoy chomping down on a McChicken, eagerly pressing on those soft buns to squeeze out the mayo and lick it in its pure state.

The cult Melbourne burger chain Grill’d serves their chips with a choice of herb or sweet chili mayo, and on breezy sunny days when you eat outside, there are few things more satisfying that dipping hot salty chips into those tiny plastic tubs of herby mayo.

I tried making mayo at home, and although I knew mayo is fattening, it never occurred to me that it was essentially all fat. Home-made mayo is at least 85% fat; that is the amount needed to sustain the emulsion of oil and egg yolks. I became so flabbergasted by the amount of oil that was going into the mixing bowl that all those happy childhood memories of licking mayo transformed into scenes of what might be the culinary equivalent of a horrow flick. How could I have dipped all those chips into this?

The thing with mayo is that it is quite deceiving in its appearance. Mayonnaise lacks the greasiness of oil that puts so many people off, and its viscosity makes it easy to pile a huge dollop onto your food, be they tuna, chicken, chips or sushi.

The experience of making home-made mayo, far from cementing my appreciation of it, has actually turned me off. Well, not really. I will probably never dip my hot salty chips in mayo again, but drizzling just a bit of it onto a pile of leftover tandoori chicken pieces is hardly insane.

The leftover tandoori is now my adult version of the tuna mayo sandwich. I love the deep red color of the chicken pieces, shredded from the bone and piled up high inside Turkish pide bread, soft and doughy in the inside, crusty on the outside. And unlike the canned tuna, the tandoori doesn’t merely serve as an excuse for mayo. I actually look forward to biting into a pile of shredded tandoori.

For me, the one thing that makes me happy is garlic. I can never go wrong with garlic. The pungent smell, the taste, the after-effects on your breath. I eat burnt garlic with as much joy as I would a perfectly fried clove; they’re all good to me. When my mom cooks her signature sambal ikan, using my favourite fish, kurau, and of course with a bit of coconut milk (which self-respecting Malay wouldn’t), she leaves her garlic cloves whole, so that I may eat it with all the flavour and juices intact.

It comes as no surprise then, that one of my favourite things to have is garlic bread. Nothing fancy, just a piece of good crusty bread, a slash of butter and crushed garlic and we’re ready to go. Dusting it with parsley not only creates an appealing visual effect, it also makes the act of eating garlic bread seem like a healthy thing to do (all the goodness of herbs packed in a lump of butter-softened bread!). A squeeze of lemon juice provides a hint of acidity that cuts across the sometimes overwhelming richness of the garlic and butter. Or, if you are the sort that loves to be overwhelmed, just add parmesan.