I don’t like offering advice unless it’s in a field in which I consider myself an expert, and there are precious few of them. I can give you comprehensive guidance on where to park, eat and drink near West Brom’s ground – Stoney Lane and the Soho Tavern, if you’re interested. I’m also good on choosing urinals for domestic use – get one with a lid. But other than that, in the expertise department I’m a bit short. So I try to stay in my lane, because there will always be plenty of people who know much more than me about the matter at hand.
Recipes are a good example. The Guardian alone has dozens of great cookery writers, so how dare I muster the temerity to throw a little something of my own in the pot? The temptation is great, as I forever yearn to be asked how I’ve made something. If I cook something that seems to be going down well, I ache for my victim to ask if I would mind sharing the recipe. Should they not ask, if they’re making all the right satisfied noises as they masticate, I have been known to shyly mutter something about emailing them the instructions. Tragic, really. I’m rarely asked to make good on this offer.
And yet here I am, unbidden, daring to share with you a recipe. I’m sorry, needs must. Because every now and then something comes along that is so absurdly simple I can’t believe I didn’t know about it. I assumed I must be the only person in the world who isn’t in on the secret. But I’ve yet to come across anyone I’ve shared it with who has had a clue about it either. To be fair, a number of them have tried it once and only once, for the very good reason that they didn’t like it very much, but even they have had to acknowledge that it’s a dashed clever idea.
What it is, is a bread (kind of) that you can make in 90 seconds. Well, that’s the cooking time. The prep takes 30 seconds, a minute tops. Which is quite something. Especially when I compare it with the time I spend making sourdough – going from that ecstasy of faff, stretching out over many hours and days, to knocking something up in less than the time it takes me to refresh my starter.
I came across it when I last committed to losing some weight. The only way I can reliably, and relatively painlessly, shift some timber is by giving up bread. The more I eat it, the more I eat. That’s just the way it is. I’ll still bake it with the same enthusiasm, for others; I just don’t eat it. And that’s the other thing with this 90-second bread – because it’s made from almond flour there’s next to no carbs in it. When I first saw it somewhere on the internet, I thought it must be a spoof. But no.
All you do is put three tablespoons of almond flour in a mug, along with a bit of salt and half a teaspoon of baking powder. And mix in an egg and a tablespoon of olive oil or melted butter. Then you microwave it on full power for 90 seconds. And out of the mug pops an alarmingly yellow, strangely shaped cylinder of something approximating bread. It’s roughly the shape of one of those mini cans of tonic water. Weird. Tastes a trifle weird too, to be honest. But slightly weird bread is better than bugger-all bread. And look, the quickest I can possibly come up with a sourdough loaf – not including days on end dicking around with the starter – is 12 hours. That’s 720 minutes – 288 times longer than this takes. And nice though my sourdough is, it’s not 288 times nicer than my strange little yellow log. So give it a try – it’s got to be worth a couple of minutes of your time.
