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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

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