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Home-baked bread

After some years of neglect, this chapter is now being substantially and significantly updated (starting 9 January 2007).
See bottom of page

I’ve gone through odd periods of making my own bread for years, but it had been pleasant but obviously home-made (in the sense of ’amateurish’ rather than ’better than shop-bought’), with rather a cakey crumb-texture (Patricia calls it ’sconey’). A few years ago we brought Patricia’s late Mum’s old Kenwood Chef mixer back from Normandy and treated it to a dough-hook (we also bought it a mincer and sausage-maker, but that’s another story), and I began to make something closer to real bread.

Nigella Lawson’s excellent book How to Eat alerted me to the fact that Waitrose (the supermarket bit of John Lewis) sell a particularly good bread flour called ’very strong Canadian wheat flour’. Unfortunately, Derby (where we lived than) is at the centre of a Waitrose-Free Zone, but Patricia and I went to Newark market to find a supplier of very special pork (who, it turned out, had disappeared to Ireland about two years previously!). While there, we decided to do our weekly shop at Waitrose, and we bought three bags of this magic flour.

I followed the bread recipe on the bag (with one serious addition), and produced my first more professional-looking and -tasting loaves. We were so impressed that we asked our lovely next-door neighbours, Gerry and Chris Scott, who shop at the Newark Waitrose once a month, to put half-a-dozen bags on their next shopping list for us.

Then we visited Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley, between Matlock and Bakewellin Derbyshire. This is a restored Victorian mill which combines the functions of a tourist attraction (gift shop, tea shop, trips round the works) and a working mill. We bought some of their flour and were absolutely gobsmacked by the flavour of the resulting bread. One of the staff told me that the flavour of the wheat is preserved better because the mill runs far more slowly than modern ones; the result is that the grist stays much cooler and the high flavour-notes don’t evaporate off.

This flour was also absurdly cheap. A 6.5-kilo bag (what we used to call a ’stone’) cost a mere £3.60. That’s just 24p a pound! Better still, I discovered more recently that Total Health in Derby sold the flour, so while a visit to Rowsley is always pleasant it’s no longer necessary to give us our daily bread. The same shop also sold 500-gram tins of Allinson’s dried yeast for £3.29 - a lot cheaper than buying the silly little tins you get in the supermarket. Before we left Derby, Total Health was taken over and supplies became less reliable, but fortunately that no longer matters to us.

Since we moved to North Nottinghamshire in 2004, we have found flour produced very ’artisanally’ - stoneground from organic wheat - at Tuxford Windmill. This isn’t too far down the A1 from Worksop, but we haven’t got round to visiting yet because they have a stall at our monthly Farmers’ Market.

The recipe below stood us in good stead until a year ago. It’s described using the Kenwood (I guess if you are trendy enough to have a Kitchen Aid mixer the same will apply, and a serious food-processor ought to do the job too). Our Kenwood will handle a double quantity (though in the middle of one such batch its gearbox fell apart!), but you should check the instructions for your machine before taking any risks - kneading bread is seriously heavy work.

Of course you can do this without a machine. As a former potter, accustomed to spiral-kneading 20 pounds or more of stoneware clay, I find this light work. However, the machine saves time. As a bit of a purist, I do like to give the dough a quick finishing knead by hand, if only to confirm that it feels right.

Further on you’ll find information on the recipe I’m using now and news of developments to come - next stop sourdough!

Ingredients

  • 600 g strong white bread flour
  • 350 ml water at about 43°C (see below)
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1½ tsp dried yeast (I use Allinsons, and I keep even unopened tins in the freezer)
  • 1 Tbsp salt (I use French sea salt)
  • 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Method

  1. Measure 120 ml boiling water and 230 ml cold tap water into the mixer bowl. This will give a temperature close to 43°C, which is important for optimum activity with dried yeast. Check with a thermometer before you add the yeast: if it’s over44°C leave it to cool a little; if it’s below 41°C, pop the mixer bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds (unless it’s a metal one, in which case you’ll have to tip the water into something else!).
  2. Add the sugar.
  3. Sprinkle the dried yeast into the water and wait 10 minutes or so until fermentation has brought a thick cap of yeast to the surface.
  4. Add 200 g of the flour and mix to a batter using the K-beater or a wooden spoon.
  5. Stand the bowl in a warm part of the room and cover with a damp tea-towel. Leave until well frothed-up. (This process is known as sponging, and I stopped doing this after the first few times.)
  6. Add the salt to the remaining 400 g of flour and mix in with your fingers.
  7. When the batter has frothed up to form a ’sponge’ of about double the original volume, add the oil and the flour/salt mixture.
  8. Cover the bowl closely with the damp cloth to avoid flour flying everywhere and mix with the dough hook on minimum speed until the dough has formed into a single piece and the sides of the bowl are more-or-less clean. If necessary, stop the mixer and scrape any remaining dough off the bowl.
  9. At this point, you need to know how a good dough feels and add either water or flour to adjust the consistency as necessary - you learn by experience, but the quantities given seem to work every time with the Waitrose flour.
  10. Turn up the speed to the next setting (this varies even between KenWood Chef models) and knead for two minutes.
  11. Detach the dough from the hook and form it into a ball in the bowl. Better still, give it a light knead for a couple of minutes by hand, if you know how. Cover with the damp cloth and leave to rise until at least doubled in size - probably about an hour. Don’t leave it to rise excessively - you may exhaust the yeast.
  12. ’Knock back’ by machine-kneading at minimum speed for two minutes.
  13. Form the ball and rise again as before. The two-rise method is my one departure from the recipe on the bag, and seems to make all the difference.
  14. Shape the dough into two loaves. I make long sausage-shapes and bake them open on a generously floured baking sheet.
  15. Cover the loaves with the re-dampened tea towel and leave to ’prove’ (rise) until they have more than doubled in size. It is
  16. vital to keep the surface of the loaves moist - if they form a crust now they won’t rise properly when you put them in the oven and your finished bread won’t be as light as it should be.
  17. Pre-heat the overn to 225°C.
  18. Sprinkle the loaves generously with flour.
  19. With a very sharp knife, make deep slashes in the tops of the loaves. With my long loaves, I make a single cut from end to end along the middle, but using about five very light strokes to cut about two-thirds of the way through the loaf without distorting the dough - it’s all a matter of touch.
  20. Bake for half an hour. The loaves should rise considerably (mine never used to because I let them dry while proving), the deep slash opening out into a shallow but decorative depression.
  21. Check how well-done the loaves are by tapping the bottoms. They should sound hollow. It’s far better to over-cook than under-cook, so if in doubt bung them back for ten minutes.
  22. To get a crisp, shiny crust, place the loaves directly on the wire oven-shelves, brush with lukewarm water containing about half a teaspoon of salt in half a pint, and bake for five to ten minutes more.
  23. Cool on a wire rack.

If you get this right, your loaves will be surprisingly light for their size with a nice open texture. When you press the cut surface of the bread with a finger it will spring back immediately. If it’s underdone, the crumb will be doughy and will not spring back - bake longer next time.

Rolls

We used to supply fresh rolls made to this recipe to our catering clients. The recipe here makes 16, which is easy because you just cut the dough in half, then in half again, then again and then once more, reforming the ball each time. Shape into neat spheres.

Flour a baking sheet generously and arrange the rolls evenly in four rows of four, leaving some space in between. Cover with the damp cloth and leave to prove as before. How long? As long as you dare, I guess. Smaller pieces rise less than bigger ones, and you want these to grow as big as possible without collapsing - only experience will tell. Mine all join together, which means you get those nice crust-free scars when you pull them apart - just right to push your thumb in when you ’break bread’.

When you daren’t leave them any longer, sprinkle them generously with flour and slash them deeply with a freshly-sharpened cook’s knife - take several gentle cuts to avoid distorting the dough.

Bake for about 25 minutes. I leave mine stuck together in sheets until they’re needed - even freezing them that way. The clients thought they were wonderful! If you freeze them, you can defrost them in the microwave and either eat them as they are (fairly soft) or give them a 5-minute blast in a hot oven.

The oven problem

Domestic ovens are a bit under-powered for baking bread, which depends for much of its flavour on browning reactions - the caramelisation and related changes that produce dark colours. The oven we inherited when we bought the new house has a lower maximum temperature (230°C) than the one we had in Derby, alas, despite being in a muscular-looking range cooker, so I may yet have to fall back on the other exciting book Patricia bought me for Christmas 2005, which is called Your Brick Oven and tells you how to build, fire and cook in an outdoor oven similar to the traditional wood-fired pizza oven...

Moving forward

At Christmas 2005, Patricia gave me a copy of Dough by Richard Bertinet, a French baker. I naturally tried his recipe and have stuck with it. It uses1 kilo of flour, 700 grams of water (he recommends weighing rather than measuring as being more precise, but 350ml will do) and 10 grams of salt. The quantity of fresh yeast is 10 grams, but he doesn’t give a quantity for dried yeast. I started with 10 grams and worked downwards, on the basis that slower-fermented bread is said to taste better.

This produces a much wetter dough (my recipe uses 20% more flour for the same amount of water) and the kneading technique is much different because the dough sticks to the working surface: you have to push you fingers underneath, tear the dough off the surface, swing it away from you, slap it violently down and fold it away from you. Repeat this until the dough becomes firmer and can be shaped.

Bertinet recommends keeping a portion of the dough back in the fridge and feeding it weekly on water and flour to develop a richer flavoured additive for your bread. However, he doesn’t tell you how much to add to your dough - and in any case it is clear that this is a sort of ’poor man’s sourdough’ process. I tried it, and all I found was that the texture of my bread was more rubbery, presumably due to the ’ferment’ having more gluten and less starch than freshly-made dough. The flavour was perhaps a little improved, but nothing to get excited about.

He also gives a recipe that he actually calls ’sourdough’, but this involves using some commercial yeast, a thing that sourdough purists deplore.

Goodbye yeast! Hello, sourdough

So, not being one to settle for second-best, on the 8 January 2007 I started a new project. Click here to keep up with the day-by-day progress of The Sourdough Project, still going strong after six years!

Home-baked bread

After some years of neglect, this chapter is now being substantially and significantly updated (starting 9 January 2007). See bottom of page

I’ve gone through odd periods of making my own bread for years, but it had been pleasant but obviously home-made (in the sense of ’amateurish’ rather than ’better than shop-bought’), with rather a cakey crumb-texture (Patricia calls it ’sconey’). A few years ago we brought Patricia’s late Mum’s old Kenwood Chef mixer back from Normandy and treated it to a dough-hook (we also bought it a mincer and sausage-maker, but that’s another story), and I began to make something closer to real bread.

Nigella Lawson’s excellent book How to Eat alerted me to the fact that Waitrose (the supermarket bit of John Lewis) sell a particularly good bread flour called ’very strong Canadian wheat flour’. Unfortunately, Derby (where we lived than) is at the centre of a Waitrose-Free Zone, but Patricia and I went to Newark market to find a supplier of very special pork (who, it turned out, had disappeared to Ireland about two years previously!). While there, we decided to do our weekly shop at Waitrose, and we bought three bags of this magic flour.

I followed the bread recipe on the bag (with one serious addition), and produced my first more professional-looking and -tasting loaves. We were so impressed that we asked our lovely next-door neighbours, Gerry and Chris Scott, who shop at the Newark Waitrose once a month, to put half-a-dozen bags on their next shopping list for us.

Then we visited Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley, between Matlock and Bakewellin Derbyshire. This is a restored Victorian mill which combines the functions of a tourist attraction (gift shop, tea shop, trips round the works) and a working mill. We bought some of their flour and were absolutely gobsmacked by the flavour of the resulting bread. One of the staff told me that the flavour of the wheat is preserved better because the mill runs far more slowly than modern ones; the result is that the grist stays much cooler and the high flavour-notes don’t evaporate off.

This flour was also absurdly cheap. A 6.5-kilo bag (what we used to call a ’stone’) cost a mere £3.60. That’s just 24p a pound! Better still, I discovered more recently that Total Health in Derby sold the flour, so while a visit to Rowsley is always pleasant it’s no longer necessary to give us our daily bread. The same shop also sold 500-gram tins of Allinson’s dried yeast for £3.29 - a lot cheaper than buying the silly little tins you get in the supermarket. Before we left Derby, Total Health was taken over and supplies became less reliable, but fortunately that no longer matters to us.

Since we moved to North Nottinghamshire in 2004, we have found flour produced very ’artisanally’ - stoneground from organic wheat - at Tuxford Windmill. This isn’t too far down the A1 from Worksop, but we haven’t got round to visiting yet because they have a stall at our monthly Farmers’ Market.

The recipe below stood us in good stead until a year ago. It’s described using the Kenwood (I guess if you are trendy enough to have a Kitchen Aid mixer the same will apply, and a serious food-processor ought to do the job too). Our Kenwood will handle a double quantity (though in the middle of one such batch its gearbox fell apart!), but you should check the instructions for your machine before taking any risks - kneading bread is seriously heavy work.

Of course you can do this without a machine. As a former potter, accustomed to spiral-kneading 20 pounds or more of stoneware clay, I find this light work. However, the machine saves time. As a bit of a purist, I do like to give the dough a quick finishing knead by hand, if only to confirm that it feels right.

Further on you’ll find information on the recipe I’m using now and news of developments to come - next stop sourdough!

Ingredients

  • 600 g strong white bread flour
  • 350 ml water at about 43°C (see below)
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1½ tsp dried yeast (I use Allinsons, and I keep even unopened tins in the freezer)
  • 1 Tbsp salt (I use French sea salt)
  • 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Method

  1. Measure 120 ml boiling water and 230 ml cold tap water into the mixer bowl. This will give a temperature close to 43°C, which is important for optimum activity with dried yeast. Check with a thermometer before you add the yeast: if it’s over44°C leave it to cool a little; if it’s below 41°C, pop the mixer bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds (unless it’s a metal one, in which case you’ll have to tip the water into something else!).
  2. Add the sugar.
  3. Sprinkle the dried yeast into the water and wait 10 minutes or so until fermentation has brought a thick cap of yeast to the surface.
  4. Add 200 g of the flour and mix to a batter using the K-beater or a wooden spoon.
  5. Stand the bowl in a warm part of the room and cover with a damp tea-towel. Leave until well frothed-up. (This process is known as sponging, and I stopped doing this after the first few times.)
  6. Add the salt to the remaining 400 g of flour and mix in with your fingers.
  7. When the batter has frothed up to form a ’sponge’ of about double the original volume, add the oil and the flour/salt mixture.
  8. Cover the bowl closely with the damp cloth to avoid flour flying everywhere and mix with the dough hook on minimum speed until the dough has formed into a single piece and the sides of the bowl are more-or-less clean. If necessary, stop the mixer and scrape any remaining dough off the bowl.
  9. At this point, you need to know how a good dough feels and add either water or flour to adjust the consistency as necessary - you learn by experience, but the quantities given seem to work every time with the Waitrose flour.
  10. Turn up the speed to the next setting (this varies even between KenWood Chef models) and knead for two minutes.
  11. Detach the dough from the hook and form it into a ball in the bowl. Better still, give it a light knead for a couple of minutes by hand, if you know how. Cover with the damp cloth and leave to rise until at least doubled in size - probably about an hour. Don’t leave it to rise excessively - you may exhaust the yeast.
  12. ’Knock back’ by machine-kneading at minimum speed for two minutes.
  13. Form the ball and rise again as before. The two-rise method is my one departure from the recipe on the bag, and seems to make all the difference.
  14. Shape the dough into two loaves. I make long sausage-shapes and bake them open on a generously floured baking sheet.
  15. Cover the loaves with the re-dampened tea towel and leave to ’prove’ (rise) until they have more than doubled in size. It is
  16. vital to keep the surface of the loaves moist - if they form a crust now they won’t rise properly when you put them in the oven and your finished bread won’t be as light as it should be.
  17. Pre-heat the overn to 225°C.
  18. Sprinkle the loaves generously with flour.
  19. With a very sharp knife, make deep slashes in the tops of the loaves. With my long loaves, I make a single cut from end to end along the middle, but using about five very light strokes to cut about two-thirds of the way through the loaf without distorting the dough - it’s all a matter of touch.
  20. Bake for half an hour. The loaves should rise considerably (mine never used to because I let them dry while proving), the deep slash opening out into a shallow but decorative depression.
  21. Check how well-done the loaves are by tapping the bottoms. They should sound hollow. It’s far better to over-cook than under-cook, so if in doubt bung them back for ten minutes.
  22. To get a crisp, shiny crust, place the loaves directly on the wire oven-shelves, brush with lukewarm water containing about half a teaspoon of salt in half a pint, and bake for five to ten minutes more.
  23. Cool on a wire rack.

If you get this right, your loaves will be surprisingly light for their size with a nice open texture. When you press the cut surface of the bread with a finger it will spring back immediately. If it’s underdone, the crumb will be doughy and will not spring back - bake longer next time.

Rolls

We used to supply fresh rolls made to this recipe to our catering clients. The recipe here makes 16, which is easy because you just cut the dough in half, then in half again, then again and then once more, reforming the ball each time. Shape into neat spheres.

Flour a baking sheet generously and arrange the rolls evenly in four rows of four, leaving some space in between. Cover with the damp cloth and leave to prove as before. How long? As long as you dare, I guess. Smaller pieces rise less than bigger ones, and you want these to grow as big as possible without collapsing - only experience will tell. Mine all join together, which means you get those nice crust-free scars when you pull them apart - just right to push your thumb in when you ’break bread’.

When you daren’t leave them any longer, sprinkle them generously with flour and slash them deeply with a freshly-sharpened cook’s knife - take several gentle cuts to avoid distorting the dough.

Bake for about 25 minutes. I leave mine stuck together in sheets until they’re needed - even freezing them that way. The clients thought they were wonderful! If you freeze them, you can defrost them in the microwave and either eat them as they are (fairly soft) or give them a 5-minute blast in a hot oven.

The oven problem

Domestic ovens are a bit under-powered for baking bread, which depends for much of its flavour on browning reactions - the caramelisation and related changes that produce dark colours. The oven we inherited when we bought the new house has a lower maximum temperature (230°C) than the one we had in Derby, alas, despite being in a muscular-looking range cooker, so I may yet have to fall back on the other exciting book Patricia bought me for Christmas 2005, which is called Your Brick Oven and tells you how to build, fire and cook in an outdoor oven similar to the traditional wood-fired pizza oven...

Moving forward

At Christmas 2005, Patricia gave me a copy of Dough by Richard Bertinet, a French baker. I naturally tried his recipe and have stuck with it. It uses1 kilo of flour, 700 grams of water (he recommends weighing rather than measuring as being more precise, but 350ml will do) and 10 grams of salt. The quantity of fresh yeast is 10 grams, but he doesn’t give a quantity for dried yeast. I started with 10 grams and worked downwards, on the basis that slower-fermented bread is said to taste better.

This produces a much wetter dough (my recipe uses 20% more flour for the same amount of water) and the kneading technique is much different because the dough sticks to the working surface: you have to push you fingers underneath, tear the dough off the surface, swing it away from you, slap it violently down and fold it away from you. Repeat this until the dough becomes firmer and can be shaped.

Bertinet recommends keeping a portion of the dough back in the fridge and feeding it weekly on water and flour to develop a richer flavoured additive for your bread. However, he doesn’t tell you how much to add to your dough - and in any case it is clear that this is a sort of ’poor man’s sourdough’ process. I tried it, and all I found was that the texture of my bread was more rubbery, presumably due to the ’ferment’ having more gluten and less starch than freshly-made dough. The flavour was perhaps a little improved, but nothing to get excited about.

He also gives a recipe that he actually calls ’sourdough’, but this involves using some commercial yeast, a thing that sourdough purists deplore.

Goodbye yeast! Hello, sourdough

So, not being one to settle for second-best, on the 8 January 2007 I started a new project. Click here to keep up with the day-by-day progress of The Sourdough Project...

Personal site for Paul Marsden: frustrated writer; experimental cook and all-round foodie; amateur wine-importer; former copywriter and press-officer; former teacher, teacher-trainer, educational software developer and documenter; still a professional web-developer but mostly retired.

This site was transferred in June 2005 to the Sites4Doctors Site Management System, and has been developed and maintained there ever since.