Brilliant Bread

The way to test whether most breads are baked is to press firmly with your thumb right into the middle of the sliced loaf – if the piece of bread you pressed springs all the way back then it’s done.

You want to bake in the lower half of the oven because it tends to be a little more consistent.

Instant dried yeast is cheap, consistent, gives fantastic results and doesn’t require any special treatment. Of course, if you still want to use fresh you can, just take the quantities I specify for instant dried yeast and double

Ideally, the weight of salt should be about 2 per cent of the weight of flour in your recipe.

As a general rule, the hotter your bread dough is as it rests, the faster the yeast will work. This may mean you get bread more quickly, but it probably won’t taste very nice (the yeast produces ‘off’ flavours at higher temperatures). Go much over about 40°C, the yeast begins to die and the dough won’t rise at all. In most cases, you want to rest y

Whatever you do, always knead on a totally unfloured surface with unfloured hands. Incorporating additional flour will disrupt the texture of your dough, but the sticking of your dough to your surface and subsequent stretching will help develop the gluten quicker.

An overproved dough, on the other hand, will be very fragile and may collapse when handled. Once baked, the slashes won’t have ballooned out as they should have and the crust will be dark and easily burnt. The excessive rise will have stretched it beyond a level it can maintain, so it will probably be flat.

Another great baking surface to start off trying out is a bog-standard casserole pot. Preheat it in the oven with the lid on, then once it is hot you can slide your anticipatory loaf off your surface and into the pot. Bake for 20 minutes with the lid on (the steam build-up stops the crust forming and helps the oven spring) and then 20–30 minutes wi

Scoring is to control the rise within the oven. It is a precise, pre-emptive tear, so should stop any of the above happening. By careful scoring you can actively govern and change the final shape of your bread.