Crumb

tell people to forget the terminology and just think of wet water, which everyone finds very funny. But what I actually mean is that it is completely neutral. You feel nothing in particular when you put your fingers into it. This is the temperature you need your water to be when you mix dough by hand. In the recipes in this book, if the ingredients

Put the flour in a large bowl, break up the yeast on one side of the bowl and place the salt on the other side. It is important to keep them apart as they are both powerful and if mixed together the salt will suck all the moisture from the yeast and they will both ‘die’.

You can experiment with most of the yeasted recipes in this book by substituting some of the fresh commercial yeast with some ferment, in a ratio of 10g of ferment to 1g of fresh commercial yeast. So if a recipe calls for 20g of commercial yeast, try just using 10g and adding 100g of ferment, then, as you feel more confident you can keep increasing

The reason I suggest leaving the dough to rest until ‘just under’ rather than double in size, which is the usual instruction, is that I find it helps people to pay attention and guard against reaching this deflating stage.

The dough will feel very sticky at first, but trust in the technique, take your time and keep mixing until there are no dry bits and the sides of the bowl become clean all the way around with no flour showing. The temptation is to rush this stage, but the more work you do in the bowl the better.

In France, and indeed across much of Europe and elsewhere, most people made bread at home then took it to a local bakehouse to be baked in a communal oven. Usually they would carve their initials or a design into the surface of the dough so that the baker could identify everyone’s loaf. It is a practice that still happens in some countries today –

Instead of kneading the dough, I prefer to talk about ‘working it’ in a way that incorporates as much air as possible and, rather than ‘knocking it back’, I have a more gentle way of folding it into a ball.

All the recipes in this book use strong bread flour and the quantity of water in the recipe is calculated for flour with this level of protein. However, one of the most common slip-ups people make is to use a very strong flour instead, without realising that this requires far more water to be added when mixing the dough. Without that additional wat

if your body is cold you put on a jumper, have a warm drink and try to keep your room cosy, and if you are too hot you do the opposite – think of looking after the dough in a similar way and the more you bake the more you will find yourself making those kinds of small adjustments automatically.