I have a thing about books. I have lots of them, and I acquire new ones far more quickly than I can read them. Mostly I buy secondhand for reasons of economy. Sometimes, when the target is obscure and out of print, it’s the only option. After years of searching and procrastinating, I have finally read more…
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…
Bara brith is a fruit-bread from Wales, the name translating as ‘speckled bread’. Although it sounds distinctive, there are so many different versions that there is very little anyone can definitively say about it. Some make it with yeast, others treat it more like a cake and use baking powder. It may include eggs and read more…
‘Man shall not live by bread alone’, which is why I like to go off-topic from time to time, and today I would like to offer you a paean to one of my favourite dishes: poached eggs. Unfortunately, poaching eggs is a tricky business. Of course, you can use any one of various implements designed read more…
Dan Lepard’s column in Saturday’s Guardian featured banana cake, one of my favourites. Lepard advocates using very ripe bananas, with which I agree, but also mentions something interesting that I’d not known before. Apparently, bananas become more alkaline as they ripen, which interferes with the ability of the baking powder to do its job. As read more…
Whenever I get into conversation about baking with someone, I very often hear them say something along the lines of ‘I once tried making bread, but it came out rock hard.’ I haven’t subjected this observation to statistical analysis, but I’ve heard it so many times that it seems to me that inedibly tough crusts read more…
