It's probably pretty obvious by now that I've become obsessed with bread baking. I've never been a massive fan of bread - probably because supermarket bread tastes like chewy sawdust. When I discovered (in my 6 week Little Portland Street Cookery School course) that I could bake bread from scratch, easily and with not many ingredients, and create a completely different food than those crumby (sorry) loaves they sell in the grocery store.... well I was hooked.
I've been reading everything I can get my floury hands on lately about real, artisan bread. We've been inundated with every type of bread in our house lately as I bake loaf after loaf, much to The Husband's delight.
Speaking of The Husband - he's always been a bread fanatic. He could eat an entire bloomer in one sitting. Trouble was, bread gave him bad indigestion. That is, supermarket bread gave him bad indigestion. Since I've been baking it at home, without stabilisers, gums, enzymes and other nasty things I can't pronounce, he's able to eat as much of it as he wants with no gastro repercussions!
So this week, I decided to take a day off work, and treat myself to a day in Dorset, at Panary Bakery training school, run by Paul Merry - longtime bread guru, and a bit of a celeb in the bread world. It's in a fantastic setting - in Cann Mill outside of Shaftesbury, where they stone grind Stoate's flour.
And what a day!! I was picked up from my b&b at 6:40am by Paul, and whisked over to Panary to start creating the day's orders. I learned an incredible amount about how bread is made in an artisan way, on a large scale. We made dozens and dozens of loaves of bread... London Bloomers, rye sourdough, spelt, white sourdough, baguettes, walnut loaves, olive loaves, four seed loaves....
The day went by so quickly, and there was barely time for a break as we mixed the dough in the giant mixers, let everything rise, learned to shape dough into tins, rolls, and even got a little preview of a Jewish Wedding roll.
My favourite bit was probably putting everything into the oven on a pizza peel. How I'd love to have a big hot oven in my kitchen with loads of racks, and a big peel to shove it all in on!
There are so many things you learn onsite in a bakery that a recipe for home bread baking would never tell you. I know now how to test rising dough to find the exact moment when it's ready to be shaped. Never again will I blindly follow a recipe that tells me to "let the bread rise for 2 hours." There are so many factors in the length of time dough takes to rise, that you could never predict it in a book!
Paul is such an excellent teacher, and it's obvious that he knows an incredible amount about the craft of artisan bread. I was sad to leave at the end of the day, and momentarily contemplated texting my boss my resignation and staying in Dorset to spend the rest of my life baking!
The only thing that made me get on that train back to London was the huge cardboard box of bread I was lugging, and the lip-smacking grin of The Husband when he picked me up at Waterloo and laid eyes on it.
Take a day out of your life (or two, or three) and go spend some time down at Panary with Paul Merry - you'll come back inspired and riddled with professional bread baking knowledge! Visit Panary Bread Courses for more info. Go!
