Bread

It seems everyone's having a go at making bread these days (or at least stripping the supermarket shelves of bread making ingredients), and lately I have been too.  Actually I've been a bit of a baker on and off for quite a while.  In my going-to-work era, I used to take sandwiches for lunch, and often I used to make my own bread for them.  Admittedly I used a bread making machine most of the time, which pretty much reduces the craft element down to deciding what sort of flour to buy, but I still got a slightly smug feeling of wholemeal righteousness out of it.

Eventually the breadmaker mysteriously stopped getting its part of the process right, and took to delivering the classic sunken brick loaf every time, despite all-new ingredients, microscopic measurement accuracy and kindly waves of well-intentioned bafflement.  Looking back from this distance it seems pretty obvious that it wasn't warming itself properly during the proving stage, but at the time I was just baffled, and the lovely Jackie (who generally has to absorb such bafflements) forced me to throw the thing into the small electrical skip, along with all those other sad, every-so-slightly-broken things, for the sake of a peaceful life.  We are still together, and happier than ever, so it obviously worked; but really - is such strong medicine ever really justified?

Possibly with the guilt of this episode weighing on her (but much more probably not at all), she nevertheless made up for it a few years ago by giving me a splendid book with the jarringly straightforward title "HOW TO MAKE BREAD".  It was written by South African man who looks as if he should be a Norwegian jazz bassist or something, and it has lots of lovely pictures and nice clear instructions and is altogether wonderful.  It includes instructions on how to make Armenian flatbread the way they do at the Savoy (he used to work there) and baguettes made with a poolish, and all sorts of other wonders.  The poolish method, as I'm sure you already know, is the traditional way to make baguettes, "whereby a wet sponge is left to ferment overnight before adding the rest of the ingredients".  So if you are scared off by recipes in which item 2 starts with "The next day, in a (smaller) mixing bowl...", or even by the very idea of deliberately leaving a wet sponge to ferment in your kitchen overnight, you might want to look elsewhere.

Anyway, I made some rather good ciabatta using this book a while ago, and so I thought I'd have a go at something else - by making it up as I went along instead.  Before we had the breadmaker I used to have quite a lot of success with a "minimal proving" method, where most of the proving (or proofing, if you are a Norwegian jazz bassist) happens in the tin, so I thought I'd adapt the ciabatta recipe, and use some wholemeal flour, and change the proportions completely, and make it in a (larger) stainless mixing bowl, but using his bowl-on-bowl covering technique, along with my really-quite-warm top oven proving (proofing) system, and let it rise and then just throw it in the oven in the mixing bowl.  This was the result:

What you maybe can't see here is that I had to chisel it out of the tin with a machete, and the resulting mess is - well - quite tough, really.  Fortunately, anything that's remotely like bread can always be recovered by toasting it, adding avocado and sprinkling it with black pepper, thus:

Very good, though I say so myself.  Alas, nobody has had the nerve to go into the scullery yet, where the mixing bowl has lain a-soaking since last night's chiselling.  Presumably, since it's stainless steel, I will be able to recondition it with the angle grinder if necessary.

So what's the moral of this strange tale?  Perhaps it's that the advice of a world-class artisanal bread maker does have some value after all, and it really is worth spending the whole day getting up every ten minutes to fold your dough exactly twice, orthogonally, before eventually laying it ceremonially into the folds of your dampened-linen proofing cloth in your parchment-lined proofing dish to gestate, while you are splitting teak logs into perfect 1/4in kindling sticks to fire the ancient stone baking oven in the fairy cave at the bottom of the magic grotto.  While fermenting a couple of sponges in the scullery.

But I think it's more likely to be that there's a lot to be said for simply having a go.  And also that it's always advisable to have an avocado ready, just in case it's needed.