Warm Bread and Honey Cake: Home Baking from Around the World Book

From the considerable number of cakes and pastries recipes, as well as the inclusion of a spoonful or two of sugar in many of the bread recipes included (savoury and sweet alike), it seems clear that Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra adores sweets. This is the perfect book for dessert lovers.

Vanessa Courtier's beautiful photographs throughout the book are not only attractive but many are also instructional. The photo on the first page of the Flatbreads chapter was particularly exciting. The bread pictured has clearly been stamped with a chekich (bread docker) for making Persian Naan. Alas, that photo of the imprint of the chekich is the only reference to it.

There are lovely memoires (too few, for my taste) - my favourite is the one entitled "Fragrance" - interwoven throughout the collection of international recipes. However, the nations included are few: India, Netherlands, Turkey, and of course, Padrach-Chandra's homeland of Guyana, as well as Trinidad, .

Obviously, in a book with "Warm Bread" in its title, a bulk of the recipes is for bread: unyeasted and yeasted, because as Padrach-Chandra writes, "There is magic in yeast", going on with these words of wisdom:
You can never really use too little yeast; it will simply take longer for it to work sufficiently to lift the dough. [...] It is very easy - and quite pointless - to use too much yeast. The dough will billow out beautifully but uncontrollably, producing an unpredictable texture and a strong, yeasty flavour. [Yeastbreads, Cakes & Rolls]

Padrach-Chandra is quite opinionated (yay) and claims that only easy blend or instant yeast will do for her recipes, and that coarse-grained dry or cake yeast are not interchangeable because they "need to be sponged first". Slightly confusingly, yeast in the recipes always appears as "easy-blend (active dry) yeast". (Here in Canada, according to the labels on the jars, active dry yeast must be re-hydrated or "sponged". Instant yeast jars do not include "active dry" on their labels.) Still, this is a minor quibble; only the rank beginning bread baker will have difficulty understanding.

A slightly less minor quibble is that the recipe for Jamaican Hard Dough Bread that "Jamaican immigrants abroad often pine for" is a same day recipe rather than the traditional baker's two day version that uses "a starter of a firm sponge dough that has been allowed to ripen overnight" What a shame that the two stage method isn't given, in spite of the fact that it may be a little more labour intensive because both sponge and next-day dough are apparently quite stiff, making them somewhat difficult to combine. (Judging from the description of the bakers' technique of passing the sponge and next-day dough "several times through a dough brake with rollers designed to press them into each other", it seems as though the doughs could be combined with the help of a hand crank Pasta maker.)

Unsurprisingly, most of the flatbreads (being of Indian origin) are unyeasted. Having only eaten Indian parathas made by 1st generation Indian immigrants to Canada, I'm really intrigued by the differences that have evolved in the Caribbean.

Caribbean parathas have a slightly different texture to Indian subcontinental ones. [...] In Trinidad, cooks give it a good whacking and the finished look, like the shreds of a garment, has earned i the local name of 'buss-up shut' (burst up shirt). In Guyana, we clap the roti. [Flaky Indian Flatbread - Paratha]

We think we neeeeed to make these parathas, despite the fact that the dough calls for mostly white flour, sugar, baking powder, and ghee (or vegetable oil). We'll definitely opt for using ghee or melted butter.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bookmarked:
Paratha, p46-49
Dal Puri, p52-53
Meetha Roti, p53-54
Duivekatter, p84-87
Simit, p94-95
Tennis Rolls, p96
Banana Cake, p124-125
Ma'amoul, p228-229
Leaf Pastry, p272-273