Bread

I’ve been shamed in to even more baking. A horrified beautician was aghast at my breadlessness. “But everyone can make bread!” she whispered. She has a point but then again that’s what everyone said about biscuits and look how that turned out.

Bread is something I had already thought about after handing over twenty odd quid in a week to Pret for a baguette. If I could master bread I could make sandwiches! Of course normal people go to the shops and buy a loaf of Hovis but I’m not one to make life easy for myself.

For a small brown loaf you need:
285g of wholemeal bread flour
1 teaspoon of yeast
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of clear honey
200ml of hand-warm water
1 tablespoon of olive oil

The water needs to be warm enough to activate the yeast but not hot enough to kill it. Stick your finger in and if it’s as warm as you are that should do it.

Put the flour, yeast and salt into a bowl, give it a stir and make a well in the middle. Mix the water, honey and olive oil together and with a wooden spoon work this in to the flour bit by bit until it’s all quite wet. I thought mine seemed quite soggy but the end result was a bit heavy and dry so you can be quite generous with the liquid.

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and leave somewhere warm for at least an hour so the dough rises.

As I’m basically six at heart things magically getting bigger on their own is marvellous.

Heat the oven to 200°c / gas mark 6, grease a bread tin and spoon the dough in, levelling it out. I don’t know why you don’t knead this as when I asked my mum (who was showing me how to do it) she howled "You just don’t NEED TO!" and I left it at that.

Put the bread in the oven for forty minutes. To check that it’s done slide it out of the tin onto a clean cloth and rap your knuckles on the bottom. If it sounds hollow it’s ready.

Now I just need to start liking sandwiches…