Lepard - Short & sweet: the best of home baking

THE BEST of HOME BAKING

DAN LEPARD

First published in the United States of America in 2013
by Chronicle Books LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Fourth Estate,
an imprint of HaperCollins Publishers.

Text and photographs copyright 2011 by Dan Lepard.

Some of the recipes included in this book have been previously published in the Guardian or Sainsburys Magazine .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2689-0

Typesetting by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

To David, with respect and love

Louise Haines, always inspiring and remarkable. Antony Topping and David Whitehouse, for always wanting this book to be. Louise Tucker, Elizabeth Woabank, Ione Walder and everyone at 4th Estate. David Pearson, the brilliant designer, Cynthia Inions and Kim Morphew. Merope Mills, Bob Granleese, Matthew Fort, and The Guardian , the reason the baking column exists. Sarah Randell and Helena Lang at Sainsburys Magazine , a big thank-you.

What I hope this book gives you are the blueprints for great baking at home, covering most sorts of cakes, pastries and breads that youll want to make as well as adaptable base recipes that can turn seasonal ingredients and market finds into baking to be proud of.

With that in mind, Ive combined my favorite recipes for this book alongside new ones, and added to them enough detail about kitchen science at work so that getting a really fine result will be much easier. Youll see the recipes still have simplicity and sweetness in their approach, but with the methods and techniques expanded just enough to be both extra clear and as distilled as possible.

In the past, friends and people Ive cooked with have shared their baking ways and habits with me and, over time, those memories still guide me. Though Im older now, and can also see how their personal tastes and biases got mixed with their strict advice, I still think after all that you were right, that is a good way. So maybe in turn these recipes will become infused with your skills and style, and all the better for it.

So this book is where skills and recipes meet. Chapters begin with techniques and explanations that help to turn the mysteries of baking into something practical and achievable. Recipes follow with ideas and guides for, say, tweaking a recipe to get an entirely different result or ways to swap ingredients without knocking the legs from the science that binds it together.

If youre just starting out then this book will guide you, or if youre experienced in the kitchen it might introduce new ways and tricks with old favorites. Either way, Im hoping this how-to manual will move your baking up a notch.

Being able to turn flour, water, salt and yeast into a loaf of bread is an alchemists trick that has saved me from dashing to the supermarket so many times. Say I begin making dough at four in the afternoon. By seven that evening I can have great bread and in those three hours still have time to get on with the rest of my life. This is the joy in having some well-practiced recipes for homemade bread always at hand. So often, simple ingredients like eggs, cheese or basic cuts of meat can be stretched into a good meal by adding some homemade bread, and without having to leave the house. For me, the madness of driving to the shops and standing in lines is one part of life Im happy to cut back on, and that makes room for something more enjoyable.

To make this happen, Ive always got some basic items in my kitchen cupboard: a good white bread flour, some sort of bran-rich flour like whole-wheat or dark rye, a bag of gluten-free white flour mix and some semolina. Most of the time I use fine table salt, packets of dry instant yeast, a little oil in place of flour for kneading and thats about it. Then when were done feasting, on slices of bread with a crisp, just-baked crust, a glass of wine and some grilled lamb, with soft oven-roasted tomatoes or onions, I think This is the life. I honestly wouldnt swap it for the most exclusive restaurant meal in the world.

What I want you to get from this chapter is a sense of the ease with which good bread can be made. Exact measurements can appear daunting, but they help me share with you the steps it takes to make these breads. And when Im in the kitchen, I follow my own recipes, to make sure they turn out just the way they did last time.

A gentle approach to dough making, hands-off rather than fiddling, will allow the flour and water to get on with the physical changes needed to turn from a sticky mass into a stretchy, resilient dough. Mix it, leave it for 10 minutes, knead very briefly at intervals, then leave it to rise. With practice you can add more water to the dough, and this will make the crumb extra soft. Forget about heavy-duty kneading, and knocking the dough back, that great bit of pointless punching that we were told was important but without a clear explanation why. These steps have changed my life and turned bread baking into this easy and relaxed part of my time in the kitchen.

Flour

Wheat flour is milled from a variety of wheats to produce a good soft crumb and crust. So that bag of simple-looking flour is actually a blend of different wheat grains, each adding a particular characteristic. Bread flour is not a crisp bread baking flour, nor a lively one that will have the yeast producing lots of bubbles. But its the easiest flour to buy and for that reason I recommend it.

The bread flour we buy at the supermarket is roller-milled and ultra-fine, and this is great for making a smooth stretchy dough thats easy to shape and will withstand a few mistakes. It can tolerate overkneading, water thats a little too warm, a rising time thats longer than it should be. Also, bread made with it tends to keep soft and moist for a while compared to other white flours. But the downside is that the final texture of the loaf is not as delicate and tender as, say, French or Italian bread flour might produce, and the crust and crumb can be a little tough. As for extra strong flours, these have even more tolerance and are best when mixed with whole-wheat or rye, as youll then get a more rounded and risen loaf.

Supermarket brand bread flour is very good, and spending more doesnt always mean youll get better flour. To be honest, I go cheap when I buy bread flour, then spend a bit more on the other sorts like rye and whole-wheat. I buy organic flour when I can, but thats really my stab at being a responsible and health-conscious shopper rather than a step toward quality. Ive baked tests with organic and nonorganic flour and couldnt see a difference, and if the grist (the selection of wheat varieties that are milled together to make the flour) used to make the organic flour isnt the best possible for bread making, then the nonorganic might be better.

The basic rule of thumb is: look at the label. If it says its suitable for bread making, then it is. But dont worry too much about the protein content mentioned on the side of the bag. Also dont assume that you cant make good bread with a lower protein flour, while high protein flour will guarantee you a great loaf. In the past, bakers often couldnt pick and choose the flour they baked with, so they adapted recipes and techniques to suit what was available. Most supermarkets now offer a wider range of flours than ever before, and it may be helpful if you understand how they can affect your bread making.