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Having blisters on your crispy crust on your bread that cracks when you squeeze it is so satisfying you'll just want to slice it up and devour the whole lot. I have tried a few different methods and found that there are a few simple tips that will help you obtain a nice crackly crust.   Create tension in your dough with the final shaping before placing it into your banneton or baking tin. ... Read more

You’ve got the right flour, spent time mixing it, shaped it correctly, and the rise looks good, then you try slashing the loaf with a knife and it drags and looks ugly. Well, we’re here to help you avoid that and finish your loaf as well as you started it. BakeryBits was the first UK company to offer French dough slashing blades for sale in the UK to the  public, and since then ... 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 ... Read more

If you want holes in your bread then there are quite a few factors that affect how you exaggerate and enlarge them. So at BakeryBits we hope this discussion of the factors involved will help get you on the right track. But it's also fun and interesting when you get into it. You will see that many of these points conflict, so that’s where you have to decide what is more important to you. Do ... Read more

"The branded Panibois boxes really help to carry our strong brand across to our customers. They also make portion control easy, and show off the focaccia at its best advantage."Peter Cook Baker & Founder Peter Cooks Bread  Worcester, England  Images courtesy Peter Cooks Bread You can have your Panibois cases customised with your logo for an additional 3p per case. There are a ... Read more

Using BakeryBits decorative sugars What are they? Not all white sugar is the same. You’re probably familiar with different brown and unrefined sugars, the coarse demerara sugar crystals and “coffee” sugar (even larger brown sugar crystals). But did you know that the same is true for white sugar? At BakeryBits we do a range of different white sugars especially made for baking, with ... Read more

Fuel Saving Baking: 9 tips to help reduce fuel costs We hear you! You have these great skills, you're baking terrific breads, you have a good oven and our amazing flours, everything you need… and now you need to watch your fuel bill. What do you do? At BakeryBits, we’ve been wondering: what would fuel-smarter baking be like?  So here’s our BakeryBits guide to reducing fuel costs! 1. ... Read more

What is a sourdough starter? A sourdough starter is a slow-rising mixture of flour and water, containing both yeast and bacteria, that together produce gas bubbles, a sour flavour, and a bright acidic aroma. Using it gives the bread a distinctive flavour, an irregular aeration, and a slightly waxy appearance to the crumb. The yeast and bacteria contained in the sourdough starter mostly come from ... Read more

There are times when want the heartiest, chewy, jaw-aching crust on my bread with a slightly waxy, vaguely dense crumb (open-texture optional), but other times…well, I like bread a little more insubstantial. In a world once filled with cotton-wool bread, in days gone by (ok, the 1990s), I used to long for the sturdy muscle of a great sourdough, laced with rye and wholewheat and felt sad ... Read more

Get the flour you want with a Mockmill Bespoke milling is the hottest must-do in artisan baking today, and a Mockmill - a home tabletop electric grain mill - allows you to mill exactly what you want when you want it, giving you the ultimate control over the final grains – what millers call the grist, as in the saying “grist for the mill” – that will become your flour. ... Read more

Hot-cross buns are a favourite of mine and although I like most Easter foods – Simnel Cake, Easter Eggs, and those chocolate crispy cakes with mini eggs on to – I am completely obsessed with hot-cross buns and bake these for an extended Easter period. Who know, perhaps even into Summer. A rich yeasty glazed bun that toasts to perfection, packed with flavour and amazing fruit, that just needs a ... Read more

Every month I’ll get a message from someone crying out in desperation “HELP, my sourdough starter isn’t working”. Or that’s not bubbly, and occasionally the worry that it might have died altogether. On the latter it’s fairly unlikely that you have every killed it, these yeast and bacteria that make your starter are pretty hardy and just need a few comforts in life to keep them happy. ... Read more

If you put wheat flour, water (and some salt, if you like) in a bowl, mix it well, roll pieces of it thin and cook it on a hot metal bakestone you’ll get one of the earliest forms of bread, what’s known as unleavened flatbread. Easy to make, utterly delicious: today there are many people who make and enjoy this bread pretty much the way it was made hundreds of years ago. Perhaps the flour ... Read more

Does this happen to you? You make a cake, or see a cake on a café menu, get very excited about what it will taste like… then drat, you find the cake flavour is underwhelming, lacking the spark and oomph you thought it would have based on its description. You, or the baker at the café, might have used the very best, finest, or dare I say it, most expensive ingredients but still it tasted flat. ... Read more

Here at BakeryBits we embrace vegan recipes whenever we can, and help veganise ("veganize" with US-spelling) recipes, as it allows us to put more of the world’s extraordinary vegetables, fruits, grains and seeds in our diet, rather than ever being denied great food. For many of us, our baking and cooking approach can get stuck in a groove. Food traditions are built on habit and to some ... 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 proofing basket or 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 ... Read more