The French Basque & Gascony · Bread
Talo
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
A quiet dish that lets its main ingredient speak: season well and stand aside.
Ingredients
- 300 g fine white maize flour, neither coarse polenta nor nixtamalised masa
- 6 g fine salt
- 330 ml water at 80C (176F)
The skills inside
Griddle & plancha workSteaming: basket, leaf and lidResting dough: the pause that does the work
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the flour and salt, pour the hot water in all at once and stir with a spoon until it gathers into a mass.
- Knead it in the bowl as soon as you can bear the heat, a minute or two, until it is smooth and takes a fingerprint without cracking at the rim; rest it covered for fifteen minutes.
- Divide into six, roll each into a ball, and press between two sheets of baking paper into discs 2 mm thick and about 18 cm across, patching any split edge with a wet thumb.
- Cook on a dry iron griddle over medium high heat for one to two minutes a side, until pale gold freckles rise and the disc puffs in patches when you press the centre with a folded cloth.
- Stack them under a cloth as they come off so their own steam keeps them pliable.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
Resting dough: the pause that does the work 71 recipes
- It actually rested, covered, for the time stated, not cut short because the rest of the schedule was tight.
- It rolls and shapes without fighting: it stays where it is put, and it does not spring back or shrink on the bench between passes.
- The surface is smooth and supple rather than dry, cracked, or skinned over.
- It is at the temperature the next step needs: cold where the fat must stay solid, cool and relaxed where it must be rolled thin.
- Baked, it holds the dimensions it was shaped to rather than shrinking back from the edges of the tin or the rim of the dish.
Where it goes wrong The rest was skipped or shortened, so the gluten was still tight: the dough fought the pin and sprang back thick and uneven, then shrank down the sides of the tin in the oven.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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