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 […]

Rough Hewn

Some breads are just so physical it’s like they’ve been ripped from the landscape. From this moraine-like material … … comes a boulder-like loaf – the mighty Black Bean, Jalpenos and Coriander bread. And yet, look how light the crumb is. This is the runt of the litter (do boulders have litters?) made from left-over […]

Rank Hovis

Someone who recently did a course with me forwarded a Tweet from Alex Gooch about a Rank Hovis powdered sourdough – “Rank Hovis ‘powdered sourdough concentrates’. RANK is the word!! 15g of yeast per kg in a bakers yeast free loaf? Tossers” and a few followers added suitably self-righteous comments. This is what strikes me […]

Welcome to New Readers

Where would I be without the Real Bread Campaign? Prior to last week’s guest appearances by those big city cee-lebs Chris and Duncan, this little country blog not worthy of a mention on the Campaign site, used to clock something between 25-100 people each day depending on how active my posting’s been. Since then bakers […]

2 Campagnes

Another little experiment. As part of his bakerlauriate course, Garth was set some homework. He mixed and fermented a couple of doughs overnight and brought them in the next morning to shape, prove and bake. One of them, a pain de campagne made with flour from Walk Mill near Chester http://www.walkmillflour.co.uk/, looked very slack and […]