Basic White Loaf;Brown Bread;
Wholemeal Loaf
Maple syrup and Rosemary Loaf a delicate armoa of maple syrup and rosemaryMediterranean Bread a delicious wholemeal bread with added flavours of the Med and a parmesan crust.
Oat Bran Bread;Soda Bread;
About Ingredients for Bread;
Breadmachine vs Handmade;
Breadmaking - my personal history;
The first thing to say is it is so easy to make, and after you have made it you will wonder why you’ve never done it before.
A basic 800gram loaf will cost as little as 45 pence in ingredients to make. Even the cheap tasteless loaves in the supermarkets cost twice that amount these days and the flavour and quality are not in comparison.
After over 3 decades of making my daily bread I still have a fascination for it, one of my favourite things to make. Each time I pull a good looking, light textured and delicious loaf out of the oven, I have a little private moment of satisfaction and pride. There is just something about being able to provide one of life’s staples.
Yet the common loaf is made of 4 very basic ingredients, flour, yeast, salt and water. The size of the loaf is measured by how much flour you use for example a 500g loaf uses 500g of flour and should actually weigh a fair bit more, but I feel this has now gone by the wayside with the universal measurements’ used by Supermarkets.
There are hundreds of variations on this very basic recipe producing an amazing array of flavours and shapes and the reason I have dedicated a whole section to it alone.
When a not so perfect loaf comes out the oven it is usually edible and gets eaten, it is rare these days that it isn’t edible. My disasters in the flavour department have been if I forgot to put salt in the mix, vital for flavour.
Because of the amazing variations of the basic ingredients I love books on the subject, there are hundreds of them. I haven’t bothered putting all my favourite bread books in the list of books I use most in the kitchen because there are so many yet again like so many books I use them for inspiration not as a bible. Daniel Stevens and Dan Lepard, two of the bread bakers I most admire, both use percentage measure for recipes in their books. I adopted this approach myself, it makes so much sense to me because I don’t always need a large loaf. In fact my favourite bread tins make a wonderful 400g loaf.
More recently I have been experimentling with using Oat Bran with strong white or brown flour in my bread istead of using a stonground wholemeal flour. the reason for this is that there are quite a few people with diabetes in my family and oats are a lower gi than wheat. So I thought that by putting oat bran and some porridge oats instead of wheat bran it would work better for us, more filling and help keep our blood sugar levels at a steady level for longer. I started by adding a small amount of oat bran to the plain flour and increased this till I got what I thought was an acceptable level in the bread and then also added a table spoon of porridge oats which helps keep a moister loaf.
It took a few attemps increasing a bit a t a time but I'm very pleased with the end result.
