How To | Vintage Savoir Faire

Want to learn how to bake bread? Video tutorial.

January 31, 2012 By Amanda 13 Comments

IMG 5601 Want to learn how to bake bread? Video tutorial.

Do you know how to bake bread? Have you wanted to learn?

Baking bread is one of those things that sounds so intimidating at first. When I mention I’ve been baking bread at the weekend, I inevitably get reactions like “Wow, you know how to do that?” or “You must have a lot of free time.”

Au contraire.

I’m a bit obsessed with baking, and especially with baking bread. I truly believe that cooking more is the key to good health. Have you ever looked at the side of a packaged bread wrapper? There are a whole bunch of ingredients, including lots of unpronounceable chemicals (never a good sign). You know what’s in my bread? Flour, water, yeast, salt, and sometimes olive oil. That’s it.

Then there’s another element to bread baking, the intangible stuff. It’s comforting. It’s satisfying. It’s such a sense of accomplishment. It smells amazing. You can even use breadbaking as meditation.

I wish I could come to your house and teach you how to bake bread. But until I can spend my days as a globe-trotting good food teacher, I’m experimenting with the next best thing: video.

So here it is, my very first video which shows you step-by-step, how to bake bread.

Would love to hear your feedback and ideas for future videos. Happy bread baking!

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Filed Under: Food Tagged With: baking, bread, how to, tutorial, video

5 reasons why you should cook more

March 3, 2010 By Amanda 2 Comments

The definition of cooking has changed in recent years. Is reheating a can of soup cooking? How about putting a frozen pizza in the oven? Or making mac&cheese from a box? I suppose technically, yes, you are “cooking” the food, however, our grandmothers would not recognize this as “cooking”.

I truly believe we all need to learn how to cook. Each and every one of us.

Feeding ourselves with healthy food is crucial to our well-being and survival.

We need to know where our food comes from.
We need to know what’s in our food. (This is a huge problem today – have you read the ingredients on a prepared food package recently? Yikes.)

We need to be able to tailor food to our tastes.

And we need food that won’t cost us an exorbitant amount.

It all comes down to cooking.

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Filed Under: Food, Health Tagged With: cooking, how to

Stop buying expensive tea bags and make your own herbal tea!

February 5, 2010 By Amanda 5 Comments

Since moving to London, I’ve had tea on the brain. Browsing through all the fancy tea shops is almost as fun for me as a trip to Sephora*.

In addition to the lovely proper teas, they have a great assortment of herbal teas: peppermint, nettle, raspberry leaf, liquorice. Yum! Unfortunately herbal tea is a bit of a misnomer. There’s no tea in these, just herbs. The proper name for them is herbal infusion. Call it what you like, but I think we should all have more of them in our daily lives.

If you’re not a fan of herbal tea yet, you might want to give them another try. They’re caffiene free of course, but more importantly, you get some herbal goodness with every cup.

But the problem with herbal tea bags is that quality herbal teas are expensive! You can’t customize a pre-made tea bag for your own tastes. And (if you care about organic/pesticides/or even getting what it says on the tin) you can’t tell what’s inside those little baggies.

I never realized how cheap and easy it is to make your own herbal teas that taste even better than the ones you buy!

Let’s start by making a thyme infusion. Why thyme? Well, simply because you probably have it in your spice rack!

Thyme is also tasty, easy to grow, very common, useful in cooking, and has traditional uses to soothe respiratory infections like colds/flus.

How to make Thyme Tea

Ingredients:

Thyme (dried or a handful of fresh)
A covered container for brewing & straining (I use a french press. You could also use a traditional tea pot, or even a separate container and kitchen strainer)
Hot water
Mug

How to make Thyme Tea, Instructions.

1) Put some herbs in your brewing container – about 1 tsp dried herbs per cup of water. For fresh herbs, use more. Generally this is pretty laissez-faire – try it, if it’s too strong, use less next time.

2) Pour over water that’s just off the boil.

3) Very important – COVER. You need to cover your brewing container while the herbs are infusing. This traps all of the volatile oils in the tea, rather than evaporating in the air.

4) Infuse around 5 minutes. (This depends on the herb … if you want medicinal benefits, you may need to steep it longer so look it up in a herb book.)

5) Strain and serve. Put the left over soggy herbs in the compost.

Mmmm hot fresh herbal infusion. How does it taste? Well, it tastes like thyme (no big surprise there). OK, admittedly, it’s not my favorite infusion – but I love it when I have a cold and my throat starts feeling scratchy. It’s especially good with some honey and a squeeze of fresh lemon! If thyme’s not your thing, you can try this with almost any herb that you normally eat: sage (also great for cold/flu!), mint (helps digestion), chamomile (relaxing), nettle (wear gloves! very cleansing, the fresh is good in spring/autumn only). One of my absolute favorites is fresh lemon verbena leaves which I have growing in a pot on my patio! Once you start making infusions, you’ll see possibilities everywhere.

Have you made your own herbal infusion? What’s your favorite kind of herbal tea that we could recreate at home? Would love to hear your experiences.

* If you’re not obsessed with beauty products, Sephora is my favorite beauty store with zillions of products and testers of everything! Unfortunately it doesn’t exist in the UK, which is saving my wallet quite a bit.