There is nothing more frustrating than making a loaf, baking it and finding your bread stuck to the tin or baking tray. Been there, done that. There are a number of reasons why it happens. It is good to understand these and try to use tactics to overcome them. Develop your dough well If you
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I often get asked which flour is best for making bread. It is both an easy question to answer and a difficult one. The reason for this is that I could just tell you to use bread flour, also known as strong flour and that’s the easy answer. If you look at the shelves of
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Subscribe for bread tips, advice & recipes If you make sourdough bread there will come a time when you have to throw away some of your sourdough starter. This is inevitable. If the refresh is fairly recent (less then 24 hours at room temperature and less than 3 days in the fridge) then I urge
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It can be difficult to make a bread with a soft crust, especially if you have a fan oven as it tends to dry out the crust making it crisp. Annie asked me how to make soft crust dinner rolls. So I have experimented with the various techniques that help bread to have a soft
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When you have a sourdough starter there are times when you find yourself having to discard some if it. These sourdough discard chocolate brownies are a great way of using it up. I use my discard in my yeasted breads – it doesn’t do any of the rising but adds flavour. I fry it in
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Bread dough changes when you add fat or sugar to the ingredients. Bread can be made from just four ingredients, flour, water, yeast and salt. You can use those same four ingredients and shape it differently; add different amounts of water; use a different flour; bake it in a different oven and you will get
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Understanding baker’s percentages helps you to understand how to adapt a bread recipe and how to change a recipe from one loaf to multiple loaves. But, for me the most important thing baker’s percentage helps me with is to understand the hydration of the dough. Or, in other words, how much water I should add
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Sometimes it can be confusing when faced with the dilemma of which yeast to use and how best to use it. Should you use fresh yeast, and how much? What about active dried? Is that different to easy-bake? I answer your questions in the video below: Fresh Yeast This variety can be hard to get
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Making a new loaf out of an old one I always have crusts of loaves lying on my bread board and so I often make a new loaf out of the old one. I got the idea from James Morton’s Brilliant Bread book. He calls it The Revival Loaf, I am calling it the Recycled
Understanding the stages of bread making helps make the process easier. When you start making bread the whole thing can be a bit confusing. You aren’t sure when your bread should be left to rise; or when it should be shaped; or when it’s ready to bake. Following the twelve stages of bread making as
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