Posts Tagged ‘bread’

I recently purchased Paul Hollywood’s book on bread. My white bloomer went okay, but I swiftly moved on to the rye and ale bread. I carefully followed his advice and made a nice sticky dough. turns out it was too sticky. In the proving stage, the dough just spread out horizontally until it was a cookie.

In my second attempt I cut down on the liquid I used and dusted the work surface with flour instead of oil and this time it worked out well.

Bread baking is currently in vogue in the Worfolk household. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall assures me that once I start I will never go back. I’m sceptical, because I actually do really like the supermarket bread I buy, but I thought I would give it a try.

This was super-easy to make. I made a quantity of Hugh’s magic bread dough, put it in a tin and baked it in the oven (where else would I bake it?) for half an hour. It probably would have been even better if I had let it rise more in the tin, but I have places to be.

Focaccia has turned out to be a real winner. I bake this regularly now and take it to work in pieces to eat – it’s tasty enough to eat by itself. Pretty simple to make as well.

I’ve had soda bread from the Briggate farmers’ market and it was quite good, but mine turned out rather disappointing. It was too hard on the outside and the flavour inside was too strong.

The jury is still out on the sour dough. I spent a week feeding up my starter so I am reluctant to give up on it but it has far too much flavour. Elina quite likes that, but I like the tastelessness of white bread. I have started feeding it with white flour instead of wholemeal to see if that makes a difference.

We dropped by Tesco on Boxing Day to pick up some bread. It was rather busy because while apparently the whole of Leeds was at Tesco on Christmas Eve, they can’t go a whole day with the supermarket closed and so need to get straight back in there the day after.

Turns out though that there isn’t much point visiting Tesco on Boxing Day because they don’t really stock food anymore…