Mid-level baking

When you move away from roller-milled flours from imported grain and start using stone milled flours, especially using grains grown in a variable and wetter climate with a mixture of wheat varieties, you’ll notice characteristics that both improve the flavour and colour but also give a different consistency to the dough that might puzzle you at first. This is my go-to method for handling these ... Read more

Get excited about Focaccianaan! A fantastic dough that combines Mulino Marino's Strong Wheat "Furia" Flour with their Sapori Antichi flour – a stone-ground organic blend of Farro (Spelt), Rye, Khorasan Kamut, and Einkorn wheat, plus Organic Italian Chickpea flour. This one dough can be used to make many differently shaped and baked breads. Shaping one dough into sticks, rolls, loaves, buns ... Read more

We’re a big fan of Italy’s legendary Mulino Marino flour mill and their excellent Organic Farro Integrale (Wholemeal Spelt) Flour. Packed with flavour, a beautiful honey colour to the crust and crumb, and easy to use if you follow a few tips here. The secret to getting a light 100% spelt or wholewheat loaf is somewhat connected to watching your expectations and not treating it exactly ... Read more

When is a pancake not a pancake? When it’s a Staffordshire Oatcake! If you’re unfamiliar with these you might think that oatcakes are always crisp round biscuits, but these oatcakes are soft and tender, and were once long ago much more common, with variations found all over England, Scotland and Wales.  Here I’m using a Welsh bakestone to make them, as a Staffordshire ... Read more

Crisp with a tender crumb all thanks to beautiful Mulino Marino Type 0 Manitoba "Furia" flour from Italy. One of the world’s great millers producing exceptional ... Read more

With our BakeryBits Handmade Heavy-Duty Stainless Crumpet Rings you can be cooking perfect crumpets at home, and with our sourdough recipe you can add ever more flavour than the supermarket ones. Most crumpet recipes use a combination of yeast and baking powder but we’ve found that the best flavour is achieved with a combination of ripe or even spent 1-2 day-old sourdough with our Bioreal ... Read more

A slice of toasted wholegrain Pumpernickel-style sourdough, spread with butter and the best honey is one of my favourite ways to start the day. Add in hot coffee and I’m in heaven. Bake this delightful loaf in our 23cm USA Pan Pullman Pan - this is a square-sided bread tin with a slide on lid to make square slices. If you don’t have white rye flour you can easily make it by taking one ... Read more

A classic pub-style hot meat pie, with chunks of beef and mushroom in an ale-rich pan gravy. The beef for the filling is tossed with a dry mix of spices, brown sugar, sliced onion and wholemeal flour, which holds all the rich juice from the meat as it cooks. Really important to bake it at a low temperature in a sealed container: my way is to wrap it in a non-stick paper, then in foil tightly, ... Read more

These are great everyday soft rolls that taste perfectly plain and straight-up, nothing brioche-like about them, even with the small amounts of different ingredients added in. The extra ingredients beyond flour, water and yeast all help to somewhat imitate the “improvers” bigger bakeries add to get the same soft light result, but easier to get hold of for the kitchen or small bakery. ... Read more

Get one of our very sturdy finger roll tins, known as a USA Pans, Finger roll, Hot Dog, Bun tin, and make these great bread rolls extra-soft and light with just a smidgeon of cooked potato, cream, milk and butter. Makes ten large finger rollsMethod Have the cooked mashed potato ready and leave to one side. Put the water in a mixing bowl and whisk in the yeast until dissolved. Then beat in the ... Read more

Fresh carrot juice gives these buns a rich golden colour, extra flavour, and sweetness, and helps to keep them soft for several days. You could use other vegetable juices here, like tomato, beetroot, or a mixture, and a home-juicing machine makes this very easy. Otherwise, you can often buy fresh vegetable juices at the supermarket. But the heart of these delicious buns is the flours used, and a ... Read more

Such a great flavour, and relatively easy to make once you get the hang of folding flour into a very aerated whisked egg. What the semolina does is absorb moisture from the mix during baking which means they dry very quickly in the oven. This makes them perfect for soaking up liquids, from the fruit and jelly in a classic trifle to the coffee in our Tiramisu recipe. Here I’ve added nutmeg to ... Read more

For the very best breakfast you need a great English-style muffin, baked on a griddle inside muffin rings. So, if you get one of our BakeryBits custom-made Welsh Baking Stones and a few of BakeryBits Handmade Heavy-Duty Stainless Crumpet Rings, you'll find that making them becomes addictive and a pleasure. The crumpet rings help the muffin to rise as they keep the muffin’s edges soft, and ... Read more