The Handmade Loaf: The Book That Started a Baking Revolution

Name: The Handmade Loaf: The Book That Started a Baking Revolution
Author: Dan Lepard
ISBN: 1784723347

by Dan Lepard

I put the books in chronological order in terms of when they came into my life. When I first got Dan Lepard’s book, I was very passionate about food. I always have been, but over the years I became interested in more than just, ‘Oh let’s go and find some great flavour sensations and try something I’ve never tried before.’ It became less about taste and satisfaction for myself and more about the stories behind how food is made. Dan’s book was a real eye-opener for me because I didn’t know an awful lot about bread when I picked it up. It was the photos that drew me in at first: Dan is a photographer. I thought, ‘This looks great!’ “It’s a bit like learning to ride a bike. At first, it can be a bit of a challenge, but once you get the hang of it you think, ‘How was I ever unable to do this?’” But then I started flicking through it in the bookshop and thought, ‘Wow, this is really different.’ It was the first book I’d come across that said you could get a world of bread from three or four ingredients—rather than saying, ‘Here’s a basic dough that you make in half an hour. If you want a different bread you throw in some cheese or some herbs or some chilli or you tie it in a knot.’ It was the first book I came across that didn’t pretend that the same dough shaped in three different ways is three different types of bread. What it’s about is using different techniques to transform the same ingredients into fundamentally different breads. Then you can also look at different flours to change the bread that you’re making even more fundamentally. The general impression I was left with was, ‘Wow! Making bread isn’t just about extra ingredients. It’s about skill and knowledge and time.’ This book was also the first time I’d seen anyone challenge the received wisdom that to make bread you must add sugar to yeast and water, and you must put dough somewhere warm to rise, and so on. That certainly was my personal experience growing up, the few times I did make bread and in the recipes that I had seen over the years. You can make bread that way, but none of it is strictly true. You certainly don’t need to add sugar to any loaf unless you’re using it for a specific characteristic of the bread—say, you’re making brioche or another sort of sweetened, enriched dough. Then you’re using sugar for the taste. But if you’re just using sugar because you think that the yeast needs to feed, it absolutely does not. Everything yeast needs is in the flour itself. Yeast is perfectly set up to send enzymes into the flour to break starch down into simple sugars that it then feeds on. In fact, if you put too much sugar into a dough, the yeast can actually struggle because that’s not how it works. (There are special, osmotolerant yeasts for sugary doughs). When it comes to temperature, the 20th-century tradition of home baking particularly was that you have to put the dough in a warm place. Back as a kid, it was always to put it in the airing cupboard. That’s not necessary either. You can actually prove dough in a fridge, and a lot of professional bakeries now have what’s called a retarder: they put dough in the fridge to ferment slowly overnight. Also, this idea that you have to rush the whole process into half an hour or an hour—again, that’s probably not the best way of making bread. It depends on the brand. Fresh baker’s yeast is just one type of yeast. It’s been cultured, it’s been purified, so you get a very consistent result and it works pretty quickly, depending on how much of it you use. Traditional, dried active yeast doesn’t have additives but it’s almost impossible to buy on the shelf these days. I can’t remember the last time I found it. When the Real Bread Campaign started, there were two brands that you could buy without additives; one has disappeared altogether because they stopped making it, and the other one has switched over to putting additives in. Now most of the quick, fast-acting yeasts have got additives in them, which basically pushes outside our definition of ‘real bread’.

Recommended by

Chris Young

"I put the books in chronological order in terms of when they came into my life. When I first got Dan Lepard’s book, I was very passionate about food. I always have been, but over the years I became interested in more than just, ‘Oh let’s go and find some great flavour sensations and try something I’ve never tried before.’ It became less about taste and satisfaction for myself and more about the stories behind how food is made. Dan’s book was a real eye-opener for me because I didn’t know an awful lot about bread when I picked it up. It was the photos that drew me in at first: Dan is a photographer. I thought, ‘This looks great!’ “It’s a bit like learning to ride a bike. At first, it can be a bit of a challenge, but once you get the hang of it you think, ‘How was I ever unable to do this?’” But then I started flicking through it in the bookshop and thought, ‘Wow, this is really different.’ It was the first book I’d come across that said you could get a world of bread from three or four ingredients—rather than saying, ‘Here’s a basic dough that you make in half an hour. If you want a different bread you throw in some cheese or some herbs or some chilli or you tie it in a knot.’ It was the first book I came across that didn’t pretend that the same dough shaped in three different ways is three different types of bread. What it’s about is using different techniques to transform the same ingredients into fundamentally different breads. Then you can also look at different flours to change the bread that you’re making even more fundamentally. The general impression I was left with was, ‘Wow! Making bread isn’t just about extra ingredients. It’s about skill and knowledge and time.’ This book was also the first time I’d seen anyone challenge the received wisdom that to make bread you must add sugar to yeast and water, and you must put dough somewhere warm to rise, and so on. That certainly was my personal experience growing up, the few times I did make bread and in the recipes that I had seen over the years. You can make bread that way, but none of it is strictly true. You certainly don’t need to add sugar to any loaf unless you’re using it for a specific characteristic of the bread—say, you’re making brioche or another sort of sweetened, enriched dough. Then you’re using sugar for the taste. But if you’re just using sugar because you think that the yeast needs to feed, it absolutely does not. Everything yeast needs is in the flour itself. Yeast is perfectly set up to send enzymes into the flour to break starch down into simple sugars that it then feeds on. In fact, if you put too much sugar into a dough, the yeast can actually struggle because that’s not how it works. (There are special, osmotolerant yeasts for sugary doughs). When it comes to temperature, the 20th-century tradition of home baking particularly was that you have to put the dough in a warm place. Back as a kid, it was always to put it in the airing cupboard. That’s not necessary either. You can actually prove dough in a fridge, and a lot of professional bakeries now have what’s called a retarder: they put dough in the fridge to ferment slowly overnight. Also, this idea that you have to rush the whole process into half an hour or an hour—again, that’s probably not the best way of making bread. It depends on the brand. Fresh baker’s yeast is just one type of yeast. It’s been cultured, it’s been purified, so you get a very consistent result and it works pretty quickly, depending on how much of it you use. Traditional, dried active yeast doesn’t have additives but it’s almost impossible to buy on the shelf these days. I can’t remember the last time I found it. When the Real Bread Campaign started, there were two brands that you could buy without additives; one has disappeared altogether because they stopped making it, and the other one has switched over to putting additives in. Now most of the quick, fast-acting yeasts have got additives in them, which basically pushes outside our definition of ‘real bread’."

Baking Bread · fivebooks.com