Without a doubt, the most important trend in the resurgence of baking with care is the increasing use of small mills by keen home bakers and professionals alike. Better nutrition and stunning flavour are the obvious benefits. Less visible, a renewal of local grain growing and closer links between...
The fight between brown and white, good for you versus good for us, has been going on for a long time. Brown flour certainly ought to be more nutritious, and these days, even the elites are choosing brown bread over white. Maybe that’s why sales of “whole grain bread” have more than tripled in t...
Sourdough — whatever you call it — is the original leavening agent for breads around the world. At its simplest it is just a piece of the last batch of dough, set aside to ferment the current batch. But it can be so much more than that, a stable little ecosystem of species that support one another...
If you bake bread only occasionally, you’re probably just grateful for little packets of dried yeast. This episode is not about that. There’s just not that much to say.
When it comes to Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, however, the role of yeast in human affairs bubbles away below the surface...
Flour, water, salt and yeast; the basic ingredients of a loaf of bread. What happens when you mix them up and then heat them is a complex casade of chemistry, biology and physics. Most of the more subtle changes take time and can’t really be rushed. That’s why slow bread is better than fast bread...
