Special things are worth preserving and sitting down to a cup of tea the other morning I saw birds in my newly fruiting fig tree. Ahhhhh. I love figs, and it’s the first year it’s fruited (I banned the husband from pruning it so there’s a pretty good crop!) So I raced out in my pajamas to chase away the birds and save my figs. I now pick them slightly early to beat the birds to the prize. I really should just get a net, another trip to the hardware store, dangerous place that and expensive once you’ve perused the shelves and aisles for everything else you might possibly “need.” Might be best to avoid it, but I will keep rescuing my figs. From someone who doesn’t always have success in the garden, I would recommend planting a fig tree. You might get lucky too.
Povitica, what is it? Well it is in the bread section of the recipe book, so I am making bread of sorts, Eastern European sweet bread as it turns out, but reading the recipe ahead made me scared of what was to come!!! It was nothing I had ever done before. Here is Paul’s Povitica recipe if you want to give it a go btw. https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/povitica_92623
I made the dough by adding flour, sugar, salt, yeast, melted butter and beaten egg to the free standing mixer fitted with the dough hook and then added the seeds from 1/2 vanilla pod along with lukewarm milk. I mixed this for 8 minutes to make a soft smooth and stretchy dough.
I tipped the dough into an oiled mixing bowl, covered and let rise for one hour, until doubled in size. Now time for the scary bit…
I spread a clean bed sheet over the workbench and dusted it with flour. Then turned the risen dough out onto the sheet and rolled it out using a rolling pin to a large rectangle of 50-30cm. Then after dusting my hands with flour, I eased them underneath the dough and stretched it out, bit by bit, to about a metre wide!!! It was amazingly pliable and didn’t break, surprise surprise. I wasn’t expecting that.
I made the filling by melting butter in a pan with milk. Then put alot of walnuts, sugar and cocoa powder in a food processor along with the seeds scraped from the other 1/2 of the vanilla pod. I blitzed this to a sandy powder and added egg yolk and the milk/butter mixture.
Now it was time to spread the paste out onto the thin dough, without tearing!! Challenging. My daughter said I looked like a Nona from Jaime Oliver’s trip around Italy!! Once I had achieved this difficult task, I rolled up the dough.
I then placed one corner in the bottom of the loaf tin and eased the roll around the tin in a U shape. I put the tin inside a plastic bag and left it to prove for an hour.
I then egg washed the top and baked for an hour in a medium oven. After cooling I should have drizzled the loaf with a lattice of icing sugar mixed with water, but forgot to see this part of the recipe until just now. Woops, it didn’t need it anyway but I added icing to what was left of the loaf, just for fun. This bread was an understated masterpiece.
