Bread Ahead School. - Baking school: the Bread Ahead cookbook

Matthew

My mum for always encouraging me, and my children, Sam, Ophelia, Keanu and Iman.

Justin and Louise

To our mums and dads, William and Sally Gellatly and Roy and Pamela Reynolds.

FIG TREE

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Fig Tree is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2017

Copyright Matthew Jones, Justin Gellatly and Louise Gellatly, 2017

Photography copyright Issy Croker

Lammas Day photography copyright Al Richardson,

Historical photographs on chapter openers copyright Getty Images,

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

ISBN: 9780241978788

At Bread Ahead we simply love baking, cooking and eating.

Bread Ahead started in September 2013, when Matt Jones was offered amazing premises at Borough Market to start a new bakery. Matt had been baking for years, first in restaurants, then founding Flour Power City Bakery in 1999, and he asked Justin Gellatly to be his head baker. Justin had been baking for the previous decade at St John Restaurants and St John Bread and Wine, and, luckily for Bread Ahead, Justins wife, chef Louise Gellatly, came too.

With just three of us, we began our days at 3 a.m. and baked merrily away to produce breads and other delights for our stall at Borough Market. Back then, we didnt even have a kitchen porter, so at the end of a long shift we had to wash up and clean everything before starting work again (none of us miss that now!). As time went on we started to supply bread to local restaurants within Borough Market. In February 2014 we opened the school and started our baking classes, then we took on another baker, a teacher and a couple of kitchen porters and never looked back. Today we have a team of over twenty bakers, seven teachers and ten kitchen porters, and there are Bread Ahead bakeries in four more London locations as well as our Borough Market bakery school and stall. On the wholesale side of things, there are over 100 restaurants and hotels that depend on us for their daily bread, and we are now teaching over 300 students a week. Its certainly turned into a busy little bakery!

We have learned over the last three years from our pupils exactly what people want to learn at a bakery school, and this book reflects the courses that we run: Baking Techniques, Sourdough Baking, Flatbreads, Puff Pastry, Doughnuts, and our wonderful regional baking course English, Italian, French, American, Nordic, Eastern European and Great British Baking as well as a terrific Gluten-free Baking course.

We originally planned to run two groups of twelve people a week at Bread Ahead, so Matt called up an old friend who used to work for him, Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, a fellow baker and teacher; we invited our friends and family to the school and taught them how to make bread, and in the process we developed the structure and format of our teaching and classes.

Things kicked off fairly quickly, with classes being booked up months in advance, so it was time to bring in another teacher full-time and we were lucky to find Master Baker Aidan Chapman, who really helped us develop the Bread Ahead school and its classes.

A couple of years down the line, we now run about 25 different classes, 7 days a week. We needed a head teacher, and again we were very lucky to find Master Baker Manuel Monade, whom both Matt and Justin had baked with before. We now all teach in the school, which the three of us really love, and we are always encouraging our bakers to think about teaching as well.

In the bakery school, we just use domestic kit, including the ovens we use Miele ovens, which we think are the best so everything we teach can be brought back to the comfort of your own kitchen.

We now regularly teach over 300 people a week, and in addition to this we work with local schools and run education packages for the next generation of bakers.

We also have Barry Cummings, our other full-time teacher, who has decades of experience within the baking world, as well as many guest teachers including Sim Cass, star baker of the famous Balthazar Bakery in New York, Adriana Rabinovich, who is at the forefront of gluten-free baking, and Hilary Cacchio, a real sourdough expert.

And we are looking forward to many more people teaching at Bread Ahead in the future.

We have written this book as a practical, realistic guide for bakers at all levels. We like to see our approach to baking as modern, unfussy and as simple as possible. We use natural, honest ingredients and, above all, concentrate on creating deep, satisfying flavours, the sort of food that is a truly memorable experience. When it comes to our range of breads, we stick to simple recipes and develop natural, robust flavours. We achieve this with long fermentation and bake at high temperatures to get a rich crust with plenty of singe and it is all about that crust!

Though we run a bakery, this book is all about baking at home. With these recipes, we will show you what can be achieved with some very basic household equipment and a generous amount of enthusiasm and commitment.

We have developed and tested these recipes at home, with the attention to detail that will deliver consistent reliability for all your baking needs. This is a book for everyone: whether you want to master the perfect sourdough, or simply whip up some flatbreads for friends one evening. We will take you on an educational journey and give you a deeper, richer understanding of modern baking. We want you to love baking in the same way we do.

The book is divided into chapters based on the courses that we run at the Bread Ahead Baking School, from regional baking (British, French, Italian, Eastern European, and so on), to techniques for sourdough, puff pastry, our famous doughnuts, and much more besides. We would like to fill your hearts, kitchens and homes with the same glorious smells that pour out on to Cathedral Street each day and night from our place down at Londons Borough Market.

Happy baking!

Matt, Justin and Louise

At the end of the day, really good baking requires experience and practice, along with discipline, good work ethics, consistency, planning and commitment. At Bread Ahead we have been at it for a while now, so here are five basic rules that will help you get the results you dream of.

Dont start baking without a cup of tea, an apron, a nice tidy kitchen and the radio on.

Try not to chop and change when it comes to flour and other basic ingredients. To achieve consistency its imperative that you use the same flour each time, as you need to get a feel for the flour and develop a relationship with it. After a while you will get to instinctively know the moisture content and structure.