Equipment

I'm writing this in the run-up to Christmas, and if you're like me, you're probably wondering what to make beyond the usual mince pies and some fantastic loaves of bread: a big ol’ fruit cake, maybe, or a yule log? Perhaps you're also finding that it gets trickier every year to find the right gifts for the budding bakers in your family, or something to hint that you'd be more than happy to receive? Hoping to solve two problems in one go, I had... Read more...

A crisp home-baked baguette, with all the character, complex flavour and crunch that you might otherwise have to travel to France to find, is a dream for many bakers. Of course, you can make baguettes with your local bread flour wherever you live, but the particular characteristics that French millers give to their premium darker bread flours through the wheat varieties they mill gives the loaves made from it a deep rich colour, a delicate beige ... Read more...

Brioche is a simple yet versatile bread, perfect for making into different shapes and providing a good base for additional flavours. We've teamed up with Angus McCaig, Head Chef at The Holt, Honiton, to create an authentic brioche baguette recipe. You can make a 'plain' version, but here we've used our Aroma Panettone essential oil together with Candied Rainbow Mix peel to take it further, and give a distinctly delicious orangey-citrus flavour. ... Read more...

Back in 2003 when I was writing my sourdough book "The Handmade Loaf”, I travelled to Sweden to understand rye crispbreads better, making my way to the organic Roslagsbröd bakery. There, huge dimpled rollers were part of a wheel-and-belt old school apparatus – fascinating in its complex Heath Robinson ingenuity – which squished and extruded the sticky grey rye dough into pitted sheets that were cut into rings and baked. The machinery made ... Read more...

Your transition from hobbyist to baking maestro... The rite of passage that signifies the change from happy home baker to budding artisan bread maestro begins perhaps at the moment you start to unwrap the banneton that you finally decided you had to order from BakeryBits. This is the day you start to craft the shape and crust of your bread more finely, and from that point onwards, your baking will never be the same again. Especially on those ... Read more...

We're all familiar with recipes that specify flour, water, starter etc in grams, ounces, cups or spoons. But what if you want to make the recipe a little - or a lot - larger? Doubling a recipe using mental arithmetic is usually easy enough, but can still lead to annoying mistakes (at least, in my experience!). However, increasing the original recipe by a more complicated amount, such as 3.75 times larger, is much more prone to error. Bakers ... Read more...