When I posted about my attempts to make the Welsh fruit bread bara brith last year, I mentioned so-called osmotolerant yeast: yeast specially developed to cope with dough with a high sugar content. At the time, this sort of yeast was only readily available through commercial wholesalers. Since then, Bakery Bits have started selling ‘Saf read more…
If you have a healthy rye starter, making a 100% rye loaf is easy. This is what is called ‘black bread’ throughout central and eastern Europe, although it isn’t actually black. There is no kneading involved – the point of kneading dough is to develop gluten, but the gluten in rye dough is too weak read more…
Although, as I said in my last post, making rye bread is easy, it does require a starter instead of baker’s yeast: a mixture of flour and water in which naturally-occurring yeast cells have begun to ferment and reproduce. Making a starter is not difficult in itself, although whether it is successful is, to some read more…
Today, wheat is one of the most widely grown cereal crops, and most of the world’s flour is milled from wheat. The bread that most of us are familiar with is made with wheat flour. It wasn’t always this way. While wheat naturally thrived in the warm climate of the Mediterranean basin, further north, in read more…
Years ago I bought Richard Bertinet’s book Dough. The book has acquired quite a reputation on the back of the ‘slap and fold’ technique of working dough, which Bertinet illustrates in a DVD that comes with the book. It is a useful method, although I would credit Bertinet with popularising rather than inventing the technique, read more…
I’ve finally uploaded the two missing chapters of the book, ‘Shaping’ and ‘Cooling, Storing and Serving’. Both are still in need of expansion, and the chapter on shaping needs some illustrations, but the basic structure of the book is now complete. I’ve also added an online glossary that I hope will be useful. This too read more…
About that multigrain loaf: while it’s a challenge to get out of bed most days, I have managed some baking over Christmas and New Year and have worked out, more or less, the recipe I used for the multigrain loaf I posted a while back. The first step is the sponge – this builds up read more…
I’ve not posted for a while, and the reason is that I’ve been in hospital, on a psychiatric ward. Not for the first time. This is a blog about making bread, and not about mental health. But it occurs to me that you can’t blog on any subject – not honestly – and leave yourself read more…
I often adapt recipes, for all sorts of reasons. It may be that I just make a substitution for an ingredient I don’t have or can’t easily get hold of. Sometimes, if the recipe is a complex one, and I’m feeling lazy, I’ll approach it in a more reckless manner than usual, throwing together what read more…
I’ve always been a bit sniffy about crispbreads and wafers, but for a long time I had been meaning to try out Dan Lepard’s white bean wafers from his book The Handmade Loaf (one of my favourites). I recently got round to it just after having a sudden desire to make tapenade, something I hadn’t read more…
