Long time no sklep! What can I say, it’s been a busy year. Much sklepping, little blogging.

Lots to catch up on, however – first up is spelt, orkiszowe, which after kale and coconut oil has been one of the top superfood trends of the past couple of years. These spelt flakes come in a package small enough to fool you into thinking you will use them all up, and not come across two-thirds of the bag wastefully abandoned in a far reach of the dry goods press behind the quinoa (exp October 2014) after the spelt thing has gone over.

I bought mine at Streatham’s Bartek, http://bartek-express.co.uk, not too expensive at just over a quid for 400g. The flakes can be used for making porridge, or putting in bread mix or muffins. (Or, in Poland, for making a type of vodka.). Italians call it farro, and spelt flour makes a pretty good cake.

Though it’s relatively novel in the UK, spelt has been used in Europe for centuries – one strain of the grain, Triticum spelta, var. bingensium, was named after Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, mystic…

And composer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dehwp_dRlYQ

She was also a capable botanist and the world’s first ever health ‘n’ superfoods maven. She thought spelt was easy to digest and good for the sickly, like a sort of medieval Complan.

These are already butch jumbo spelt flakes, and once made up into porridge with a mixture of milk and water, they swell a lot. For the first attempt I just bunged everything in a bowl and microwaved it for a few minutes. Not a success: it tasted… Teutonic. Texture-wise it was tough, like chewing dry corrugated cardboard chips.

The second batch I left to soak overnight, and cooked more gently in a saucepan. It had soaked up all the liquid I gave it overnight, so pumped more in before cooking, and added the obligatory generous pinch of salt: aids the fight against insipid food and supports the Polish salt industry. I gave it a good 10 minutes, after which the texture was soft and the taste was very good: nice and malty. However, spelt flakes don’t collapse and coagulate the way porridge oats do. So instead of making a smooth and unctuous porridge like your Scottish or cornmeal version, they collapse, but stay stubbornly separate. Pleasant for a change, particularly with fruit on top, and lashings of syrup.

And what syrup.

No, not maple, the hip dollop of choice on the granola of our times. Syrop Trzcinowy means sugar syrup, zlocisty means golden – but dark golden, as though someone had gone to the trouble of liquidising a bag of soft dark brown sugar. Much cheaper than maple syrup, much runnier than and not nearly as powerful as treacle, it comes in a useful squirty bottle so you can put it on pancakes, use it in baking or dribble it all over your fingers and lick it all off.

Was about to consign the spelt flakes to the space behind the quinoa in the cupboard, but now might get through them quite quickly.

There are novel items to be had in the Polski Sklep, and when I was browsing this week I spotted Hortex Zupa ogorkowa…. Gherkin soup! In the freezer section! That sounded like a good idea, quite sharp and perky, and only £1.09.

Who knew you could freeze a gherkin?

Easter is the time for sour soups in Poland, but to make the authentic version you need to boil a big fat sausage and use the water for soup stock, or make a rye flour sourdough starter and then start lobbing in sausage, its stock, hard boiled eggs, chunks of sausage and assorted veg. So this must be the Lite version. You could definitely jazz it up with the eggs, sausage and whatnot and make a very passable sort-of white borscht.

Sour power

The ingredients are cubed potato, shredded carrot and Hamburg parsley (pietruszka in Polish), chopped gherkins, dill and salt.

Hamburg parsley (or parsley root, as it’s sometimes called) is interesting stuff – it looks a bit like a pallid parsnip, but has a distinct flavour of its own, and you eat the root (though the young leaves are good chopped up in salads). It isn’t sold in any supermarkets in the UK, so if you want it you have to grow it – a couple of the UK seed catalogues, including Marshalls http://tinyurl.com/nu3dfjf, sell it. It’s a winter vegetable, so probably getting toward the end of its season now, but will keep an eye on the local Polski skleps towards autumn to see if they’re stocking the fresh stuff.

I couldn’t quite make out if you were meant to defrost the soup mix before cooking, but it seemed to work OK when half-thawed, which was as long as I could wait. Incidentally, there are those who might think frozen vegetables are inferior and that fresh is always best. They would be wrong – modern blanching and freezing techniques can zap a carrot in a coat of ice faster than Elsa, and properly stored, its vitamins will stay locked in until you cook it, while unless you’re grafting away on an allotment, or paying over the odds at a farmer’s market, the veg you bring home from the shops will gradually lose nutrients until you get round to using them, no matter how well they’re looked after.

This being a basic soup mix, it’s not entirely hassle-free: as well as a litre of water, you have to add chicken stock cubes, a bay leaf, whole allspice and some back pepper. Careful with the salt, it’s already added and the chicken stock will add more. Simmer for 20 minutes and serve with a dollop of sour cream and some chopped dill on top. I didn’t have any dill so parsley had to stand in, and I used a mixture of double cream and yogurt instead of sour cream.

Crunchy soup

What fine stuff! It all tasted very fresh, the dill and Hamburg parsley lifting the flavour right out of the ordinary. The texture of the root veg was excellent, not at all frozen-mushy. All this, and crunchy gherkins too. Frozen food processors of Poland, we salute you. With the sausage-and-egg additions, it would make a pretty substantial meal, without much effort.

Other popular Polish soups include one featuring tripe and another, duck blood. Made, traditionally, with the blood of live ducks. If I see those (the soups, not the ducks) in the freezer section, I’ll let you know…

OK, this looks pretty eww, doesn’t it?

Brawny

It’s Salceson cwaniak, which translates as “brawn”. Most Polish shops with good delikatesy (charcuterie) counters sell several types. I bought almost 100g for 69p.

Old-style English brawn usually features yummy facemeat, hock, trotters, tails; whatever bits of the pig are available. It’s pinker when the meat used is brined, brown if it’s fresh. The two Scottish versions, potted hough or potted heid, feature beef shin or sheep’s head and are, like most Scottish food except herring, cabbage and raspberries, very brown.

Salceson cwaniak is very hammy, like the French jambon persillé (without the persille) or that standby of trendy pig-fetish restaurants everywhere, ham hock terrine (£6 a go, though no doubt very good, at East London’s highly rated Brawn restaurant, http://www.brawn.co). True, some rye bread, a crunchy gherkin or two and a good smear of mustard would make it look cuter, but it’s so good on its own that it doesn’t need a support act.

And if you’re worried that adding a new type of cured meat product to your diet will, as almost-daily headlines insist http://tinyurl.com/m4sshjw, send you to an early grave, read what Rob Lyons, author of top read Panic On A Plate, has to say on the topic: http://tinyurl.com/kvqzgw7 . The people who know what’s best for us is… us.

No apologies for returning to the topic of bread, as this week I have been laughing in the face of low-carb diets with Chleb Wiejski. country bread. I found it at Streatham’s Bartek, where they keep it in a Perspex-lidded bin, wrapped in cling film. You buy it cut into a quarter or half, or if you have a whole houseful of builders and plumbers to feed, as a massive whole loaf, but £1.15 buys you a sizeable quarter chunk of sourdough rye bread with a slightly floury top and a nicely chewy undercrust.

Chleb wiejski – country bread

My Polish mate Agnes, being from the Polish countryside, had never tasted it, of course, but thought it was excellent. According to her, “They don’t make stuff like this in Poland any more, just in London, for homesick Poles, who never ate it at home in the first place!”

If you’ve ever eaten bread from Poilane (www.poilane.fr), well, it’s very much in that style. Only I think it’s much better – it seems very fresh, has a more distinct flavour and the texture is closer. On the rare occasions when I’ve bought Poilane in the UK, it’s tasted a bit past its best, the texture has been a bit too leathery and bitter and the crumb has been full of holes. Très artisanale, no doubt, but that’s expensive air you’re buying there – of course for the locals in Chelsea and Belgravia, sites of the two Poilane shops in London, that’s probably not an issue.

Poland 2, France 1

You get the odd hole in your Chleb Wiejski, but nothing like the lace effect of the Frenchy stuff, which means that the butter stays on your toast (and it makes the best toast I have tasted for a long time). Not sure how easy it is to find it in other Polish shops in the UK, but look for a big bin with huge slabs of bread inside and you’ve probably found it.

You’ve probably spotted Kubus carrot juice, possibly even tried some – Tesco and Sainsbury, among other supermarkets, now sell it in their Polish food sections. It comes in various combinations including carrot/apple/peach and carrot/apple/raspberry, and is v popular with kids, but I had to try this one, a combination of carrot, kiwi and banana.

Looks scarier than it is

(I do not know how they got the carrots to go that colour, but two of the ingredients listed on the label are copper and chlorophyll. Ingenious.) For something that doesn’t come from the chiller section it tastes fresh, and though it looks Hallowe’eny it’s rather good. The strongest flavours are of kiwi and banana, not carrot, if that’s an off-putting thought. If your children don’t like it, mix with vodka and ice and drink it yourself.

Today we commemorate the life of Casimir Pulaski, all-round ferocious fighting machine and hero of the American Revolution! http://tinyurl.com/7wosfxs. My husband has just returned from a business trip to Chicago, where they have a public holiday in his honour on the first Monday of every March.

Rebel with a very good cause

Pulaski was born on March 6^th, 1745, trained to be a soldier from the age of, ooh, about eight, and fought his way around two continents in the name of freedom. He’s worth reading up on. He said of America, “I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.” He died for it (of a battle wound, of course), but the King of Poland, hearing of his death said, truthfully, “He died as he lived – a hero, but an enemy to kings.”

Back in south London, Agnes and I went Polski Sklepping at Bartek on the Streatham High Road this week: http://bartek-express.co.uk doesn’t have much more than the address and contacts, but they have a jolly Facebook page, www.facebook.com/BartekExpress.

Making the Streatham High Road a lot nicer

They’ve just had their third birthday and were doing a pretty brisk trade on a sunny Thursday morning. The shop is bright and modern, and had some interesting fresh produce, including…

Green and spiky – ogorek gruntowy

Ogorek Gruntowy, aka pickling cucumbers! Thanks to the wonder of agricultural polytunnels you can now buy these bristly little beauties far earlier than their usual summer season, and these were really fresh, with their flower ends still on. Still a bit expensive at £6.99 per kilo, though, so we’ll be leaving the pickling until later this year. Meant to ask Agnes if you can eat them unpickled, but they look a bit thorny for that.

Proper Polish pickled cucumbers are preserved in brine, not vinegar, and you can buy special pickling salt that keeps them crunchy.

I’d bought some of this sea salt on a previous sklepping trip. At 99p a kilo, it’s cheaper than most of the stuff you’d buy in UK supermarkets, though it’s not claiming to be 100% Polish – the origin actually isn’t specified on the pack. But who cares: if any country should know about salt, it’s Poland.

Poland is home to two of the world’s oldest salt mines, The Bochnia (http://www.kopalniasoli.pl/en) and Wieliczka (www.wieliczka-saltmine.com), near Krakow. These days they’re a health spa and a stunning tourist attraction – take a look at the cathedrals carved into the rock salt by the workers – rather than a huge industrial enterprise, but they still produce a little mineral-rich salt (by the evaporation method, as the flood-prone tunnels are too dangerous to work now. They were too dangerous to work then, but people did it anyway). The salt contains Iodine, Selenium, Magnesium and Calcium, if you feel your levels need topping up.

You should be able to find Wieliczka salt in most Polish shops, but you can also buy it online at www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/e-shop/s/table-salt .

The producer of the stuff I bought, http://www.osole.com.pl, not only produces rock salt for pickling (it’s apparently important to use the non-iodised stuff), but salt with lots of lovely added nitrates for curing sausage and ham, should you come across an obliging pig.

It comes in a pack like the one on the right, but pink, which is a hint: you use this not only to preserve your charcuterie, but to make it look edible. If we didn’t use it in meat processing, everything from pork pies to hot dogs would have that I-am-on-the-edge-of-giving-you-botulism greyish-brown look. Well, make mine pink, please. And salty.

Well, I used up last week’s sourdough rye starter to make pancakes, and they were amazing. Forget the bread, make these instead. You have to make part of the mix using your sourdough starter the night before you want them, but it’s no hardship. There are lots of recipes online – try to find one that uses a little sugar (or just add some yourself) and melted butter.

Meteorologically speaking, it’s spring on Sunday, (did you know that Met Office workers went on strike this week? http://tinyurl.com/qzt99xr. It’s because their pay has been frozen… ), though the forecast looks wintry for the first half of the week, at least: http://tinyurl.com/p82l6j5.

So, for this reason, and because it’s been London Fashion Week, hooray for Gareth Pugh’s Boadiceas, http://tinyurl.com/oarvgnj, who clearly prefer their meat on the bone and raw, we thought we’d eat dumplings while we have the excuse.

Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me- oh my-oh

It’s best to get friendly with the people from your local Sklep and ask how your pierogi should be approached. There are lots of different types, with fillings that include cabbage, cheese and plums – not all in the one dumpling. I would have cooked these in water, like ravioli, but that would have been altogether wrong. You fry them in a not-too-stingy quantity of butter for about 7-8 minutes, until they go nicely brown and crispy, a bit like gyoza. Don’t move them around too much, or they won’t crisp up – just keep the heat gentle and turn them over once or twice.

These pierogi have a smoked sausage and potato filling, according to the packet, and they’re coated with herbs – dill and thyme – and yellow mustard seeds. The dough wasn’t too hefty, the golden crispy bits on the outside were delicious and the coating gave added interest. But these things are cheap, as you can see from the impossible-to-remove yellow label, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the filling was on the scanty side: you could just about detect a sausage flavour and potato texture. So they won’t make a substantial meal: not even much use for a quick kids’ tea – mine was hollering for more and threatening to report me to Jamie.

However, I think I may just have found the perfect beer snack…..

Poland is an important grain growing and exporting country, and Polish shops stock a much wider range of flours than your average supermarket. Wheat varieties are broadly the same as those grown throughout the EU, depending on their suitability for region and climate.

Maka pzenna means wheat flour, and like most European varieties, it’s graded in terms of the proportion of protein it contains. For cakes, you want Tortowa, though unlike UK-style self-raising flour it doesn’t contain raising agents. Lukusowa is the equivalent of plain flour, Chlebowa is strong bread-making flour, Sitkowa, with 15% protein, is very strong flour, and Rasowa is wholemeal. Zytnia is rye flour, and oswiana, oat flour. For spelt flour, look for “orkisz/orkiszowy” on the pack. Don’t do what I did, and buy two bags of rye flour by mistake – there are so many brands to choose from that I developed flour bewilderment.

Polish rye flour. So good, I bought it twice.

Polish bread, chleb, is a massive subject. With sour/fermented flavours so popular in Poland, with pickles and sauerkraut, sour cream and even sour rye soup, there’s a lot of sourdough bread on sale. Most of it village-this and country-that. But while the taste is good, the texture and freshness can be variable. There are several big-scale Polish bakeries in London, including the Cracow Bakery www.cracowbakery.co.uk (in Enfield, though the label on the small Cracow Bakery rye loaf I bought said Purfleet), Polish Village Bread in Hayes ( www.polishvillagebread.co.uk ) and the Polish Bakery in Wembley ( www.thepolishbakery.co.uk ).

They distribute country-wide, so the staff of life has to be built to last. One recommended to me last time I Polski Sklepped was a small spelt-flour loaf: will try and report at a future date. (The rye loaf, by the way, was fine but not earth-shattering: it was made with wheat flour and a rye sourdough starter, with a dob of caramel to make it cosmetically peasanty. The sour taste was there, but the texture was slightly leathery.)

The virtue of Polski Sklep bread is that it’s much cheaper than the equivalent you’ll buy in your local artisan bakery ( we have one of these nearby, but at £2.75, their rye boule is an occasional treat ), or from a farmer’s market, where between £4-6 for some sort of rustic loaf is not unusual. It won’t beat a Chorleywood Process loaf on price, but it won’t cost much more, offers a bit more substance if you choose carefully and should taste better.

If you want to try to make your own sourdough bread, read Jeffrey Steingarten
( http://tinyurl.com/lwwx65m ) on the topic first: or, indeed, listen to the Fall’s M5#1: http://tinyurl.com/o7pceoc.

The devil makes work for idle hands…. and in the 21^st century, home-made sourdough bread has become a tiresomely worthy worldwide cult that has fomented a million websites. While I figure the noble scone is worth ten minutes of my time, I’d rather leave breadmaking to the professionals. Toiling over starters and kneading and proving, with or without mechanical aids, is just too Medieval. The notion that bread was always better in the past is a fallacy, anyway. Google “ergot poisoning” and you develop a sudden gratitude towards the EU grain prairie farmers and their nice, modern fungicides.

But as I had two stupid bags of rye flour sitting around, I thought I’d better try it, as Thomas Beecham ( http://tinyurl.com/onnkrt4 ) suggests, just the once.

The Sklep loaves I’d bought were made with rye sourdough starter and with white bread flour, but with the Zytnia invasion taking over the kitchen, industrial quantities of rye flour were called for. I checked a few online sourdough baking forums for proportions and techniques, but there are termagants out there who demand standards of suffering and commitment to The Starter so intense they make Terence Fletcher ( Whiplash www.whiplashmovie.co.uk – JK Simmons for Best Supporting Actor next week! ) look like Bambi.

So I retreated to the haven of the beginner’s sourdough bread recipe at The Kitchn, ( http://tinyurl.com/mh9b9vj ), substituting two generous cups of Młynomag ( http://www.mlynomag.pl ) rye flour for two of white.

The starter roared off obligingly, and given the way it sucked in its daily doses of water and flour and gained mass I worried that a black hole was forming on top of the fridge. Once it was ready to use it had the consistency of condensed milk and smelled like powerful silage.

Fridge top event horizon

( As I write, it’s still still brooding away up there. Can’t decide whether just to chuck it, or try sourdough pancakes at the weekend, then chuck it. Will move to a family vote. )

Making the recipe was simple enough – it uses dried yeast to help the rise, while I used a modest slice of drożdże, below – fresh yeast, another item a good Polski Sklep will have in the chiller cabinet.

But with work to do, the sun shining and kids to entertain at half-term, hovering over the dough with a timer was out of the question, so it got slapped about…

Before…

bunged in a bowl and abandoned for the best part of a day.

During…

It rose, twice, and when baked, surprisingly turned out not to be a weapons-grade brick.

And after

It even tasted good. The crust belied its gnarled appearance by being pleasantly chewy and the inside crumb had an even, well-risen texture, not heavy or soggy.

Almost like Greggs’

The sourdough wasn’t overwhelmingly stackyardy, allowing the nutty rye flour flavour to shine through. With a generous application of very nice Polish butter – Sobik, from Poland’s southern highlands, 59p for 100g…

According to the manufacturer’s website, this butter has a close association with hyraxes

… it all tasted very artisan.

The whole point of bread

Not doing it again, though.

Today, my Polish friend Agnes took me to Tooting’s biggest Polski Sklep, Delight, on Mitcham Road. It’s the south London outpost of a mini chain, www.delight-wedlinka.co.uk, with other branches in Greenford and Neasden (Neasden! You won’t be sorry that you breezed in! I miss Willie Rushton: http://tinyurl.com/m2t42o3 )

As with many Polish shops, frustratingly, you can’t see in from outside. It’s sizeable indoors, with tall shelves, big chillers, a small bakery section (bought-in bread only) and a biiiig counter, running all the way round the back of the shop, of inviting fresh deli produce. There’s a good-looking fruit and veg section, and…. pickle barrels!

Not that you could get close. The place was heaving with men, women, infants and babies, and a bit sticky. “Oh,” said Agnes, “did I not tell you? Today is Tłusty czwartek, so it will be very busy. Everyone is buying lots of food, especially…” (at this point, a small man in a boiler suit edged past us with an entire baker’s tray of massive, shiny sugar-glazed doughnuts, and I began to get the picture) “…these!”

Tłusty czwartek, Fat Thursday, is the last Thursday before Lent. We make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday to use up the eggs, butter and milk before Lent: Polish people like to get their partying in early. The doughnuts are called Paczki, and though they look similar to the Brit version, the taste, and particularly the texture, is quite different, being lighter, spongier and less fat-drenched (so you can eat more). This is thanks to a shot of preserving alcohol (http://tinyurl.com/lz8peam) added to the mix – apparently this prevents the dough absorbing too much fat while it cooks.

We bought lots. Ours were sugar glazed and filled with a generous blob of thick, sharp-tasting rose petal preserve, but creamy/custardy and fruit fillings are all popular too. Just the job for a gloomy February Thursday.