owlrigh

There aren't too many times that I get a craving for a particular type of food, but when Ben and I sailed down the coast last year, I started itching for bread. My boat isn't particularly fast, and at the time we were slowed down in our progress down the coast because of bad weather, stuck along the stretch between Mackay and Gladstone where there isn't much in the way of civilisation. This stretch of coast is home to the Broad Sound, where you get up to 9 metre tides and rushing currents.

We'd only just managed to come away from Broad Sound itself; late at night the wind died, as it usually does in light breezes, and much to my nervous surprise, the engine wouldn't start due to flat batteries. I had a cheap generator on hand, and we connected it to the starter battery in the faint hope it would work. Flapping about for hours,the island behind us grew larger and nearer, but before we ended up on its shores the battery charged up enough, dawn came upon us, and with the engine and puff of breeze we just managed to combat the fierce current and get away.

After that heart-rendering morning all I wanted to do was sit down with a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Upon rounding into the entrance of Island Head Creek, however, we found that cup of tea but was sadly out of bread, which we'd eaten all of during the night.

Liveaboard yachties all down the ages have cooked bread in what is commonly termed as a "dutch oven". What yachties use as that, though, tend to be a pressure cooker without its pressure gauge in place and inside, a trivet and a cake pan. I had all these things and decided, seeing as the weather had turned against us soon after we dropped anchor, to make a loaf of bread.

I used to see my mother make bread in a similar fashion when on Pampero II, and so I figured it wouldn't be too hard -- although she had an aluminium round thing with a hole in it, which worked well. I had a yachtie cookbook with all sorts of cakes and breads, and so, without further ado, I went to it.

My first attempt didn't rise, I would suppose due to bad yeast, and so I went on again. It's rather hard to control for temperature when making things in this fashion -- "medium flame on a methylated spirits stove" -- what I have -- is somewhat open to interpretation depending upon what you consider "high flame", I reckon. The second one rose, looking much better.

Ben was my guinea pig and was eating some, putting a brave face on it

"Tastes good!" he said, suddenly followed by "ow! It cut my lip!"

So that ended my experiments in dutch oven breadmaking.

Last week I borrowed a book out from the library, The Handmade Loaf, by Dan Lepard, and the photographs and recipes in it were inspiring -- especially that of the recipe for sourdough starter. All I needed were rye flour, white flour, yoghurt (soy, in my case), and currants -- all of which I had on hand! And water, clearly. So, for the past week I have been carefully feeding my proto-sourdough starter, and as of today it was considered, according to the book, usable in a bread. A workmate lent me a 240V benchtop oven last year; I even have a proper oven on hand!

When I came home yesterday I found the starter had oozed all over the carpeted shelf it'd been resting upon. This was most vexing, and I put it down to having not put the lid down properly or some such mindlessness. And so, after I had mixed the dough together and used up a huge amount of starter, I fed it again with flour and water and screwed the lid down good and proper.

I went out to do the washing and had just come home, a couple of hours later, to sit down and relax when I heard an odd noise. I happened to lay my eyes upon the starter jar -- and the lid was almost round and popping! I grabbed the jar, held it over the sink, and turned the lid -- and POP! An explosion of fermented dough went all over the sink, my hands, and my clothes. It was oddly reassuring that the yeasts were actually working.

The sourdough bread was reminiscent of my breads of yore, all tough mouth-cutting crusts and flat, with a gummy sort of inside, although it was evenly porous. No yeasty aftertaste nor sourdoughy, either, the former of which is good but the latter not so good. I was horribly disappointed -- my bread looked nothing like the photographs in the book, dammit, getting me all hopeful and being dashed by my incompetence.

This time, at least, it as I who cut my lip, and not Ben.

It's been two years that I have been vegan and now I, reluctantly, have to say that this is not the truth of me anymore. It is probably quite impossible to stay from any kind of animalistic eating upon a yacht. All of this has nothing to do with me purchasing these foodstuffs, for I haven't; every bit of food upon the yacht is of plant origin -- originally.

It's with some sympathy that I recognise that people not so very long ago were of the opinion that critters just spontaneously generated in foodstuffs. They'd put away a perfectly good bale of flour, beans, spices, and then come back to open the thing up and find that it'd been infested by some bug of choice. This seems to be true of life upon a yacht. I open up something I only put away a month ago and find ... critters.

( They're EVERYWHERE! )

My cooking ability, in the way of people who can throw ingredients together at random and come up with something excellent, is just about nonexistent. I have cookbooks. They get used, unlike most people's collections.

I was treated mostly to my brother's fare upon moving onto the catamaran. Boiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, meat, rice. I didn't eat the meat part. This grew so boring I opted out of eating his meals fairly early on, started doing my own meals, and then gradually took over the cooking.

Cookbooks are not altogether infallible; a couple of times I eked out a recipe and looked at the end product in amazement, for it had about the same kind of bland tastelessness that all of my cooking, without assistance, will turn out like on its own. One of my first hits upon an excellent recipe occurred while my brother was down in Brisbane and my father and I were on our own.

It was an aubergine and potato curry -- eggplant and potato -- and when I tasted it I nearly scarfed down half of it myself. The day my brother came back I made it for him as well, looking at my dad beforehand to make sure he didn't object. He didn't.

My father is meagre with his praises. "Not too bad," means that you're on the way to a sure-fire winner, and if he says nothing you can be sure that it's at the very least edible without anything offensive to it, but even if you pump him for feedback it's just not going to eventuate.

( Reaction other than mine, and the recipe. )