Bread Making

Freshly baked bread

They say that baking bread is good for your health and that it makes you a better person. Ok maybe they don't say that, but I have been practicing the art of baking bread for about ten years now and I love it. I can't claim to have made amazing bread for the whole of that time period though. Certainly for the first three years I made very hit and miss "loaves" of "bread". It's fair to say that I wasted a lot of flour, water and salt in those days, but I learned a lot, which is the main thing.
Perhaps I should say that my main focus has always been on baking Rye sourdough and am quite proud of my ten year old mother who just needs feeding regularly and likes a cold dark place to sit and ferment (Obviously I'm referring to the yeasty, fermenting starter and not my actual mother).
As I've said it took a while to get it right. I had been following some recipe I found online which involved kneading, what always turned out to be (in my case), an incredibly sticky, un-kneadable lump of wet flour. I would then bake it and end up with a largely inedible (although I tried), lump of "bread" type stuff.
Dark days.
But then I discovered the secret, which I will now share with you.
You don't knead it! You make a porridge like mix of carefully weighed out ingredients and pour it into the bread tin! Who knew?!
But those days are behind me now. Today I can consistently turn out a good looking and very delicious Rye sourdough pretty much any time I please. I'm proud of my loaves too.

I have had a go at wheat sourdough as well. I did this great one day course at the Thoughtful Bread Company in Bath, and learned to make huge and really tasty loaves of soft, white sourdough bread. It's quite a lot more labour intensive and time consuming than the Rye, with a load of kneading and then some waiting followed by more kneading and then more waiting. The whole process takes all day and is the kind of thing you might do alongside doing the housework for example. The results however can be well worth the time and effort and, like anything, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
But aside from all of the feel good factors and stories of failure, there are other benefits to home baking. For one thing, you have complete control over the ingredients giving you a potential health benefit. I can't say for sure if baking your own bread saves you money, when you take into consideration the gas burned to heat the oven, but you are spared having to dispose of the un-recyclable plastic bag that most shop bought bread comes in. It does makes your house smell great (for a bit), which is always good but especially good if you own an aging dog, as we do.
But above all, at least for me, it's about the satisfaction of seeing your family enjoy the fruits of your labour, learning new skills and eating more marmite.

And if you really can’t be bothered or just don’t have the time, you can always order through Thoughtful Bread https://thoughtful-bakery.myshopify.com/collections by 2pm each Monday and collect from Batheaston on Wednesdays, just type BatheastonWED at the checkout.