If you bake simple white bread (using the foundation dough) every few days, one way to gradually reduce the quantity of fresh commercial yeast in your dough and edge towards bread leavened by natural yeasts, is to keep back 400g of dough when you reach the dividing stage, ready to prove it. Place the portion of dough in a bowl, covered, in your fri

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

As a rough rule of thumb, for a plain white dough I would use 720g of water per 1kg of strong bread flour (this is more than some recipes, but will give you the nice soft dough that you need to use my technique). However if you substitute very strong flour, I would use up to 800g water.

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 –

From then on, bakers began to abandon the technique of bashing and kneading, in favour of a new method, using a much softer dough. Once the ingredients were mixed (le frasage) with a greater quantity of water – still in a big trough which could hold 100 kilos of dough – the dough was usually left for a while (an early example of the autolyse method

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

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.

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