In very broad terms, most of my bread baking is either traditional British, Italian or French, with the odd nod towards American ideas about things like sourdough, which normally all point back to Europe anyway. This misses out a whole school of baking centred around Germany, Eastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia that has rye flour [...]
In common with a lot of people, I buy big bunches of beetroot because I feel good about buying something that’s quite evidently been yanked straight out of the ground and that comes complete with leaves and dirt. I rarely have a clear idea about what I’m going to do with it, but still I buy [...]
Most of the bread I bake follows a fairly standard pattern. I’ve got a couple of staple recipes, one for an everyday loaf that works well for white or whole grain and any variation in between and a couple of ways with sourdough, too. The everyday loaf is the most versatile, and it can easily [...]
The more I bake bread, the more I realise that I know so little about it, the more I understand why being a baker is a calling as much as a profession. I’ve started to experiment more, recently, started using different techniques and methods to home in on the things that I really like about [...]
I made a pain au levain the other week, a French sourdough shaped like a torpedo, and full of glorious air holes, encased in a brittle crust. It was a textbook example of why ‘slow is best’ when it comes to baking bread. The levain, or starter, was set up the night before, giving it a [...]