Dough

Alternatively, Leckford Estate Strong White Four, or Canadian Strong White Flour, both from Waitrose, are very good.

When you keep back your dough, put it in a bowl in the fridge, covered with clingfilm, leave it for 2 days, and add the same amount of water (200g) and double its weight of flour (400g). Mix well until you have a firm dough, then put it back in the fridge. If you aren’t going to be baking for a while, refresh it every 7–10 days. To

Plastic scraper – this cheap little gadget is like an extension of my hand. I use it all the time: the rounded end to mix the dough, to help turn it out from the mixing bowl so that it comes out easily in one piece, without stretching, and to scrape up and lift pieces of dough from the work surface. The straight edge can be used for cutting and div

If you keep back a 200g piece of dough when you make your first batch of bread, you can leave it in the fridge, ‘refreshing it’ from time to time, to develop its flavour.

have finished all but the Sweet Dough chapter with a slightly more challenging bread for you to try once you begin to feel comfortable with baking.

People are always amazed when I tell them that I work the dough by hand without flouring the work surface. Sometimes when I am giving breadmaking classes, to prove the point that you don’t need any flour, I put some extra water into the dough, to make it really sticky. No one believes that it will really come together without flour, yet it does, si

buy most of mine from Shipton Mill in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, who offer an amazing range of flours from all over the world, for use in every style of baking.

Every time you make a baguette, keep back a piece and add it to your next batch of dough; that way you will infuse more and more flavour into it each time you bake.

Working the dough – the kneading technique that most people are taught in Britain is quite different from the one we use in France, which is all about getting air and life into the dough. So, instead of using the word kneading (which sounds too harsh) I prefer to talk about working the dough.