Homemade bread

A baking revolution

Small bakeries in Britain are undergoing a revival. Like little buds in springtime, quality artisan bakeries are opening up in towns that have been bereft of a decent loaf for a good decade or more. The loaves made by these small-scale, artisanal bakers are made using the best possible flour, not just the cheap ‘white stuff’. The new breed of bakers are people who care honestly about the source of their ingredients, buying their flour from producers who farm responsibly and handle the ingredients carefully. The result is bread that’s a million miles from sliced white - loaves that are full of character and flavour.

Before the revival

Austerity and simple stodge were unfortunate but defining hallmarks of much British food in the post-war years. Bread was no exception. In fact, commercial bread-making had suffered particularly badly. Although the intention of making cheap white bread widely available to all may have been laudable, the effect was to erase our collective memory of the good, simple handmade loaf.

In the early 1970s and 1980s books such as English Bread and Yeast Cookery, by Elizabeth David, made the call for better bread on the British table. The call was taken up by restaurant chefs who took pride in the bread they made on the premises, which brought a kind of ‘home-cooking’ feel to their menus.

The rise of bread

These days, thankfully, buying quality bread is getting ever easier. On the high street and in farmers’ markets our bakers are the new artisans on the block. Because these are fragile new businesses born from a simple passion for good bread, they rely on consumers buying from them - not just to pay for the basics like rent and wages but also to help them support other small producers like millers and farmers.

At home, meanwhile, kitchen bread machines have made bread-baking seem a less daunting task for many people who may have been frightened off the idea.

Baking at home

If you’re keen to expand your baking repertoire, it helps to understand the processes that bakers use to get the best results. Here are six rules of thumb to help you make the perfect home-baked loaf:

• Water is the key to making a good dough. As a rule, 300ml of water per 500g of flour will make a firm dough with a smooth, even texture, perfect for a classic farmhouse cob. Using 350ml per 500g flour will make dough that’s much softer and easier to stretch, better for flatter bread such as baps. So that difference of 50ml of water, barely four tablespoons, will make the difference between dense, firm dough and stretchy, floppy dough. This is why careful measuring is important.

• Don’t throw in handfuls of flour to stop the dough from sticking, unless you’re looking for a leaden, heavy loaf. Flour takes time to fully absorb moisture, so leaving the dough for ten to 15 minutes after combining it will help reduce the stickiness.

• Use your refrigerator to stop your loaf from staling too quickly. A baked loaf placed in the refrigerator will stale much more quickly than one left at room temperature. But dough left to rise slowly in the refrigerator overnight, where the 4C chill merely slows rather than halts the action of the yeast, will bake to a loaf with a crumb that stays moist for longer. Most recipes will stand being covered and refrigerated immediately after mixing, before kneading, and left for up to eight hours.

• Don't just use the oven. Try rolling your favourite dough thinly on a floured surface and flip it onto a hot heavy-based frying pan.

• Make your own bread improver by creating a natural leaven. Before commercial yeast became available, bakers would use a bubbling mix of yeasts and bacteria (a leaven) to both aerate the crumb and give a sharper flavour to the wheat. Though recipes are plentiful on the Internet, the basic method I follow is: in a clean jar add 4tsp wholemeal flour and 4tsp water each day for three days. After the initial three days, remove four-fifths of the mixture each day and replace with a half-and-half mixture of flour and water. Do this until the mixture bubbles and smells pleasantly sour. Then add 150g of this mixture to every 500g flour in your recipe together with the yeast to help the loaf stay moist and give the crumb more flavour.

• If your bread comes out a bit pale and soft on the base, use an oven stone to increase the heat at the bottom. I use a heavy terracotta tile, put in before the oven is switched on, and shovel the dough directly onto that.

Bread recipes

If you’d like to try your hand at baking bread, here are a few recipes to get you started, from basic loaves to flavoursome saffron bread and flaky buns.

• Maize bread
• Quick white loaf
• Rice bread
• Simple milk loaf
• Sweet saffron bread
• Wheatgerm bread
• White potato stottie cakes