Recipes

If you love the flavours on a great panettone and enjoy the ease of making monkey bread -  where a bread tin is filled with balls of dough rolled in flavouring – then this combination of the two is for you. I’ve cooked some starch with the milk so the crumb has an extra-soft texture. Easy to make and if you bake it inside one of our panettone paper cases it makes a great gift for ... Read more

The recipe is an old 1950s commercial baker’s recipe for sourdough bagels that uses a sour “old dough”, essentially a piece of dough held over from the previous mixing. As soon as I made it I thought this is exactly the method I’ve been looking for. There’s lots of room for personalising it, using a sour “old dough” mixed very firmly brings out a natural ... Read more

This Japanese bread using fresh milk, thick double cream and pure honey has an extra-soft fluffy white crumb with a slightly rich and sweet flavour: it’s sometimes called Hokkaido Milk Bread 北海道生クリーム食パン, or more simply, Shokupan. This recipe is inspired by a version from the renowned Japanese baking school Mamapan. ... Read more

This is an easy bread to make by hand that stays very soft for days without turning crumbly, making it for me a perfect sandwich loaf. For the flour I used 2/3rds roller-milled white flour and 1/3rd stoneground rye and wholemeal which gives you a great flavour and higher fibre than a regular white flour, but still keeps it light-textured. If you're looking for a Japanese-style extra-soft white ... Read more

Rich with butter, combining three delicious grains – wheat, rye and spelt – in one very delicious easy-to-make pastry. I used stoneground rye and spelt flours, packed with flavour and texture, combined with roller-milled white bread flour that allows the pastry to roll out easily. The whisky helps to deepen the flavour: you can replace it with water, which will cause the pastry will ... Read more

Have so enjoyed making panettone these last months, from super simple to the complex marvel in the video below, and though I’ll tell you more about my long road to panettone “awakening” I was only able to tackle the complex mixing needed thanks to the power and reliability of IGF Fornitalia's dependable mixers now supplied by BakeryBits in the UK. Founded in 1974 by Giancarlo ... Read more

A crisp, nutty, sugary topping for panettone, with a slight crunch from the ground cornmeal and a hint of chocolate from the cocoa. It can be made up to a week ahead and stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator. Rice flour gives a more enjoyable texture to the ‘glassa’ when you chew it – in Italy a mixture of potato starch and rice flour is often used – but if you need to ... Read more

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 ... Read more

This dish sits somewhere between a caponata, with cooked aubergine and a gentle sweet and sour (what’s known as agrodolce in Italy) flavour, the very comforting dish called peperonata made with roasted peppers and onions. Together with one of our great pasta - like Mulino Marino's Giant Spiral Pasta, or South Devon Pasta Co Hand-made Einkorn Fusilli  - it makes a delicious lunch or supper ... Read more

The beauty of malt powders, syrups and grains is how their complex flavours and colours occur directly from nature’s own transformation process. As grains sprout, sugars are created, then slow drying and toasting enhances their sweet flavour, and the result is malt. So in this loaf, whole grains and four different types of malt combine with cooked pumpkin and toasted hazelnuts to create the most ... Read more

Sometimes, I've written recipes which use specific types of flour from small millers, and it may be that they won't always be in stock. If that's the case, do feel free to substitute something similar from the BakeryBits range. Here, for example, I’ve made a walnut sourdough using Heritage Harvest flours, combining their Roller-Milled White Flour with their darker Organic Stoneground Wholemeal ... Read more

This is the basic pizza dough that I use when I want a good thin crust. And to get an extra-crisp base I bake them on a Welsh Baking Stone, place on a rack in the oven, and just shovel the pizza onto it with a pizza peel. Personally, I add a little more water than the recipe uses here to make the dough extra soft and easy to shape and toss, but try this wetter approach later when you’ve got the ... Read more

This is a three-day adventure to take you towards all-butter croissant perfection. Much easier and less effort than classic puff pastry, with much less rolling to do. This recipe only makes 6, but I’d like you to start here, getting your technique as sharp as you can, before you set up making dozens to supply your entire neighbourhood as the local viennoiserie star baker. You can do it, I ... Read more

Good morning bakers! It feels like Autumn is officially here, I have the heating on in measured doses, though I’m trying to introduce scarf and hat wearing “inside the house” as a thing. It’s the season when I’m all for comfortable baking: having all the tools at hand to make my baking stress-free. Maybe that’s what I liked when I discovered BakeryBits years ago - that they sold home ... Read more

Hello bakers! I’m hoping your frazzled lives are calming down in this new-normal Britain, kids are back to school this week, and parents are telling me that some personal ‘quiet time’ has returned. With cooler autumn days ahead, and the joys of winter comfort eating not so far away, I’m also thinking ‘can I eat better, wiser, more responsibly, while regularly munching on grilled melty ... Read more

Dan Lepard, is undoubtedly one of the most influential bakers in the UK.  His gentle, informative style gives even the most nervous of bakers confidence. Most people know Dan from eight years of writing a weekly column for The Guardian, but it's not just the newspaper that made Dan's work lead the way for home bakers baking artisan bread.  You can pinpoint the resurgence in hand ... Read more

This recipe is designed to fill the 9" USA Pan Pullman pan. Using the quantities below, you have the basis upon which your can alter the recipe to suit you. Getting the quantity just right for a pan with a fitted lid can be a little hit-and-miss depending on the recipe, exact flour used etc. This is a starting point to get pretty close and from here you can adapt it with your choice of flour and ... 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 ... Read more