Product Development

Bet you’ve often wondered about the rigorous scientific process we go through in designing a new bread. Phone rings just as I’m opening a bottle of wine. Shall I answer it? Naaaah. Probably just Laithewaites again asking for Mrs Wilson. My latest reply is, she’s in rehab. Little later think, I wonder if someone’s died? […]

Da – daaaaaa!

Never mind the royal Boy George, this is my new baby and I can assure you it has been christened. 36 quid in advance sales – only £764 to go to break even.

Intermission

They say that the two most stressful situations in life are moving home and the breakdown of a relationship. They have never sat waiting for a book to come back from the printers. I don’t mean from the publishers. I mean when you’ve put up your own money, it’s all your own work, there’s no […]

Logs

I don’t believe them but they’re forecasting heavy snow in November. No harm in taking chances though so I phone up our log merchant and place an order. Of course, our log merchant, is the multi-talented Jay Butters of Trefriw (these are just off-cuts from his boomerang production) so he also brings: in addition to […]

Pâte Fermentée

Never really got the hang of pâte fermentée (the addition of a proportion of mature dough to a new dough). If a recipe calls for it I put it in but without really thinking it through. Is it to add flavour to a commercially yeasted dough or a hang over from when old dough was […]

Wholemeal

You can’t beat good old wholemeal for a basic loaf with flavour. Come and do a bread course in sunny Snowdonia. Of course, Rick would throw me to the bread police for using a white starter but it’s as wholemeal as I get.

Was it Noddy or Big Ears?

With the fading memory of old age, I can’t remember which of our heros owned the car. The reason for wondering is the fabuloso crab and pear fougasse I made for the first course of our anniversary meal: Nul points for design – looks like the radiator of the car owned by whichever of Enid […]

Guess the Weight

No, smartarse. The bread not me. At La Tupina, the famous Bordeaux restaurant, they have a small log-pile of long loaves stacked on a grid over the stairs down to the wine cellar. The steps extend into the room so the grid is about eye-level when you’re seated at your table. After all these years […]

I Fought Bordeaux & Bordeaux Won

or, It Must Have Been the Wild Turkey. Just back from a few days’ indulgence in Bordeaux – just. We needed to get away for a short break and, you wouldn’t even class us as living oop North, but the last flight this year from Liverpool-Bordeaux was last Tuesday and the final flight back on […]

The Hill Bakery

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of attending the launch party of a new London microbakery, Adam Newey’s The Hill Bakery near New Cross Gate – wrong side of the river, I know, but nothing’s perfect – http://thehillbakery.co.uk/ Pretty perfect apart from that: But then he’s got one of these beasties: which in my view is […]