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.

Now you can flour your work surface lightly, place the dough on top and form it into a ball by folding each edge in turn into the centre10 of the dough and pressing down well with your thumb, rotating the ball as you go11. Turn the whole ball over and stretch and tuck the edges under12. You will come across this technique in various stages througho

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

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

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.

Ferment – some bakers use the term ‘levain’, which means the same thing – a piece of dough that has been left at least 4–6 hours to ‘ferment’ and which adds character and flavour and lightens the finished bread. A few of the breads use a ‘poolish’, which is just the name for a particular style of ferment.

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.

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.

Each chapter that follows begins with a slightly different dough recipe and, from this ‘parent’ dough, you can bake a vast variety of styles of bread really easily.