Ómós Digest #130: Baking with Direction
Wholesome Baci di Dama cookie recipe. By Cúán Greene.
Hello all,
The Ómós Digest is 100% reader-supported. Please consider supporting this continued writing, research, and expanding our amazing team by upgrading to a paid subscription for €5 a month or €50 a year. Let’s get into this week’s newsletter!
We're about to embark on unfamiliar territory for this newsletter…the land of baking. While I have previously dabbled in the sharing of recipes involving flour, butter and sugar, I’m very aware that there is a whole cohort of Substack newsletters out there committed to the sweeter things. However, in recent weeks, I have a reignited energy for baking - more significantly those of the handheld kind - and over the past few months, I’ve been trying to introduce more wholegrains, nuts and seeds into my diet as a way of improving gut health. As a result, I’ve dedicated spare hours in my days to testing various cookies with added fibre and have really enjoyed the process. Although the danger of baking so much confectionery could lead to the over-indulgence of them too (especially for a sweet tooth like me), instead my baking has resulted in a wonderful opportunity for gifting. I learnt this from Cissy Difford, who last Christmas very unexpectedly presented me with the most thoughtful box of home-baked biscuits: 4 varieties, each beautifully wrapped, along with a jar of whiskey caramel and an intriguingly delicious blackcurrant and cacao nib jam (which we’re sparingly savouring). In my mind, a box of home-baked goods, wrapped in a bow, is one of the most thoughtful gifts you could receive.
1st turn
A fortnight ago, I had the opportunity of visiting Stockholm, where I stayed in the exquisite 22 bedroom hotel named Ett Hem. One step through the arched front gates and you are immediately transported into their world; one full to the brim of sumptuous Swedish design, beautiful hospitality, and jar upon cookie jar of buttery Swedish biscuits. The hotel is designed to feel like a house and has multiple communal living and dining rooms, kitchens and courtyards, where you really have free reign. Pour yourself a drink at the honesty bar, treat yourself to a slice of cake in the kitchen or relax in the sauna. On the side tables of landings, in breakfast rooms and the lounges, are jars with assortments of freshly baked goods for you to reach for at will. I thought it was a lovely touch and made one feel at home (‘ett hem’ means ‘at home’ in Swedish).
2nd turn
There’s no denying that I have a compulsive personality and this period of fanatic baking reflects that. Just to solidify the statement, this week, I’m staging in a bakery in Glasgow called two.eight.seven. I’ll be working for free for a week in order to learn from two very talented bakers. I had the good fortune of stumbling upon Sam and Anna Luntley’s bakery last autumn, on my way to the beautifully isolated restaurant and rooms of Inver on Loch Fyne. two.eight.seven is a special place, which I am sure I will be able to recount more about in the coming newsletters (by the time you read this, I’ll probably have my hands deep in dough). For now, I can share that Sam trained at the acclaimed Coombeshead Farm and Anna worked at Inver - two restaurants with an undeniable sense of place and purpose. Speaking of purpose, two.eight.seven really is a bakery with intention, but in that wonderfully effortless way, intimately connected through years of dedication to hospitality and the attribution of great taste. Subsequently, I had to reach out to see if they would take me in for a short stint. This reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with a friend who works in the tech industry. He asked if I could explain the whole staging process in hospitality. In questioning, he stated that if someone proposed to stage or intern at a tech company for a fortnight, there’s absolutely no way it would happen (even for free). While their industry has long been recognised as open source, the proposition of allowing potential rivals to discover your secrets is unfathomable. The same would have been the case in restaurants up until a few decades ago. Conversely, in recent years many fine dining restaurants have received bad press for their exploitation of ‘stagiaires’ or interns, not only allowing them into their kitchen ‘to learn’ but actually exploiting free labour and modelling it into business operations. The opportunity to learn and discover a new cuisine and culture while developing skills was replaced by interns spending long hours on mundane tasks, getting little out of the process. This is not to say that all internship programmes are negative or that free internships should be abolished altogether. In my case, I am inspired to learn. I want to gain insight from Sam and Anna’s experience to hopefully inform me and better educate me about how to better build a bakery programme for Ómós. Offering my labour for a short period of time, in return for their time, knowledge and experience seems like a fair tradeoff (I’ve done it ever since I was 14 years old). Let’s hope I’m not stuck scrubbing bannetons for the week.
3rd turn
This leads me to our knife sharpening event last Saturday in collaboration with Ishi knives and Indigo & Cloth. It was such a wonderful experience and opportunity to thank our paid subscribers for their committed support. The event was a big success and it was fantastic to see everyone so enthusiastic and eager to learn the eternal skill of knife sharpening. What’s more, Filip received a whole collection of knives to sharpen, which could be collected at Indigo the following week. With that, we began the morning with a welcome filter coffee by Sweven Coffee Roastery, paired with two varieties of cookies that focused on the theme of wholesomeness. The idea was that a heavy use of wholegrains, nuts and seeds felt more fitting for the morning (and allowed one to somewhat forget about the volume of sugar and butter holding each cookie together). This however is something that interests me. My first experience trying pastries of this variety was at Roundwood stores in Co. Wicklow, where one of my former employees Jake McCarthy (who worked at Coombeshead) steered his wholegrain studded ship. Everything from the croissants and cookies to the brioche and bread carried this underlying wholesomeness; a product of substituting white flours with those milled from heritage grains.
“Ben (chef and owner) at Coombeshead certainly tipped me in that (wholegrain) direction but I kind of just did it on my own. I’m not the biggest fan of very white pastries, I think they all have a funny taste of protein which you get in strong commercial white flour. I was using a proportion of wholegrain from Oak Forest (mills) as it’s the only stone mill in Ireland. I think it was mostly wholegrain emmer I was using but some einkorn on occasion, although it’s much more like a rye than a wheat. I can’t really comprehend why everyone’s taste is not geared more towards wholegrain as it’s far more delicious and tastes of something rather than of strong processed flour but anywho.”
– Jake McCarthy (who is now back baking at Coombeshead farm)
Final turn
At Indigo & Cloth, two varieties of cookies were on offer. One was a blend of pumpkin seed meal and spelt, shaped into a thumbprint cookie. I added some lemon zest, juice and almond essence, along with a scattering of pinhead oats to a recipe that usually only includes almond flour. The cookies were not dissimilar in texture and flavour to pistachio; the pumpkin seed meal acting as a cheap and more sustainable alternative to the more conventional almond flour. The second biscuit was a Baci di Dama, a sandwich cookie made using organic roasted hazelnuts, glued together with a dark chocolate salted ganache. The biscuits are crumbly, nutty and roasty. They contain a small amount of all-purpose plain flour of which I used Wildfarmed, a grain company with a purpose, producing flour using sustainable farming practices across U.K farms. There’s no reason why you couldn’t substitute for spelt flour though. On the day, one of our subscribers actually noted that the cookies felt wholesome which was a result.
Over the coming weeks and months I hope to continue this intentional route into wholegrain baking. There’s something that feels self-nourishing about it. Over email, Sam, Anna and I have been talking about fig rolls. I’m looking forward to developing a version that incorporates wholewheat somehow, without it tasting like a fruit crunch Belvita. For now, please find below my recipe for Baci di Dama, a super crumbly hazelnut and chocolate sandwich cookie from Italy.
