Welcome Bakers

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I have baked bread for some forty years in different settings which include Scottish cottages and their wood fired stoves, small yachts crossing the Atlantic and an attempt at Dutch oven baking on a small hob on the floor of a bedsit in Oxford, long before I knew what Dutch oven was. ‘So if I just put this pan over it like this?’... Luckily the corner shop sold bread.

There is so much conflicting information available to the home baker that about twenty years ago I began to bake every loaf as a test bake, making notes and logging  the results. I tried every technique I could find and each result was compared to my standard baseline recipes. 

I began to read more deeply using professional texts and published research papers. Neither are ideal because they are heavily skewed to commercial production baking, but there was plenty of transferable knowledge and the methods and underlying principles are the same.

 What I found, in part, is the following: 

• Home baking carries many traditional ideas, some of which matched the flours and technology of a bygone era which no longer yields such good results. 

• There were methods which have been transferred from commercial baking which were not so appropriate to the home setting.

• There are a lot of ideas which can only be described as wishful thinking. 

These articles attempt to set out some of the underlying principles of baking bread at home, to bust some of the myths and to sanitise some of the commercial influences which are more to do with cutting corners to keep production costs down, rather than producing a good quality loaf with good flavour.

These articles are not the last word, dough is tolerant of a wide range of methods and it will still produce a good loaf. So the caveat here is that the baker’s choice is always the final arbiter. Some of those choices are about fitting baking into our schedule.

I hope they are useful and at least give some new insights to those that seek them. 

Good baking to you,

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Kevin