Dan Lepard - The Handmade Loaf: Contemporary Recipes for the Home Baker

To my partner David and my parents Nancy and Ray

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Mitchell Beazley, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Limited, Endeavour House, 189 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JY.
www.octopusbooks.co.uk
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

Octopus Publishing Group Limited 2004 Text & photography Dan Lepard 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publishers. The author has asserted his moral rights.

ISBN 978 1 84533 742 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

While all reasonable care has been taken during the preparation of this edition, neither the publisher, editors, nor the authors can accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use thereof or from the information contained therein.

Commissioning Editor: Rebecca Spry
Executive Art Editor: Yasia Williams-Leedham
Design: Lawrence Morton
Photography: Dan Lepard
Editor: Hattie Ellis
Production: Sarah Rogers
Index: John Noble

THE HANDMADE LOAF is about making the most of what we have; about appreciating what grows in the soil, what is local, and being economical and resourceful with it. We have so much, too much, that we can buy, yet the basic labour of doing, the making with our own hands, is what enlivens us and makes us feel human. Someone once asked me why I bother mixing and shaping bread by hand. I didnt have the words to answer them, nor could I understand why they didnt just know. I will not let my fingers be reduced to simply button-pressing, dial-twirling or switch-flicking. There is no instrument in my bag of bakers tools more useful and adaptable than my two hands, and as long as I can use them to make and shape bread, I will.

While travelling through northern Europe, I have met people who bake bread in a considered way: bakers who adapt their ingredients according to what is plentiful or scarce at different times of the year. Some bake with wood-fired ovens, some with gas or electric. Some let machines assist them, some bake free-hand. Solitary bakers, and groups of bakers. Many of the recipes that Ive written for this book reflect the techniques they use, as well as each bakers response to the ingredients he has at his disposal.

I havent raided these bakers personal recipe books, for if I did I couldnt give each community the space it deserves, and nor could I speak their languages well enough to be sure my translations were accurate. But by watching, living, and baking with them, I have distilled the breads we baked into new recipes which walk in the footsteps of those bakers and bring us closer to their traditions. This is the most honest way in which I can convey the breads and methods I encountered, with recipes bakers in other communities can use.

Two steps, though, are significantly different and somewhat heretical. There are no recipes in this book in which the dough is kneaded for 10 minutes on a floured surface, and all the recipes begin with an initial resting period after the ingredients are first combined. After this rest, the dough is kneaded lightly on an oiled surface to combine the ingredients and get the mass even. All the oil does is allow the timid baker to handle sticky dough in a comfortable way, and inhibit the baker from throwing in handfuls of flour in a panic. In time, a scraper and the merest dusting of flour will allow you to achieve the same result. These stages combined with a gentle manipulation of the dough during an extended rise, giving the yeast time to ferment and aerate make the soft, sticky dough malleable and easy to shape. All ingredients are weighed, even the water, as this is easy to do with a good set of scales and helps me to translate the handfuls I encountered into something accurate.

The photographs that illustrate the recipes show the actual loaves I baked, made using the instructions given. Most, but not all, were baked (and photographed) in my home, in a gas-fired domestic oven. The temperature dipped up and down during the day, as my neighbours heated their houses or cooked their meals. The thermometer that I hung inside the oven became essential, and told me at what time of the day I was likely to get the oven hot enough, and Id schedule the baking around that. However, the breads in the natural leaven chapter were baked and photographed at a restaurant where I work, Locanda Locatelli, the home of our best Italian chef, Giorgio Locatelli. These breads were baked in an electric deck oven, a type some readers will have in their bakeries. The resulting pictures show that the difference between these loaves and the others in the book is not so great, although they are a little better. Good bread is more about dough quality than anything else. Photographing the book myself was the answer to a problem. So often I have wished for a photographer to be there with me as I baked or worked with other bakers. But budgets dont often stretch to that (bakers are less costly than photographers), and for this book I wanted to show you what I saw, usually with the intimacy that only a solitary traveller can encounter. And the baking clan being what it is, I was accepted as a baker in places where a photographer might have stumbled. The bread was the key, and opened the doors and homes of many extraordinary and talented bakers around Europe. Given the chance, I would write a book about each of them.

In many of the places I visited, home-baking flourished alongside the small independent baker, occasionally in a symbiotic relationship. Bakeries would supply flour, grains, and yeast for home-bakers, and in return the home-bakers would buy bread and sometimes share home-grown ingredients with the bakeries. But always the home-bakers would support the local bakers, buying bread to supplement their effort. I know the effort that goes into a good loaf, and this book doesnt hide the time and thought it takes. So every time Im in a bakery I remember that, and buy a loaf when I can. If I have too much, then I know I have enough to share.

In this book, weights are primarily given in metric, an old and easily understandable system of measurement, and one that helps clarify the reasoning behind the recipe.

I beg you to resist any reservations you have about metrication and embrace it as a helpful system. A kilo is a kilo is a kilo wherever you are and that will always hold true, no matter how much kitchen cups and fluid ounces vary. There are imperial fluid ounces and US fluid ounces, Australian cups and US cups, but a gram is the same in Melbourne, Houston or Edinburgh. Our governments insist we use precisely calibrated weighing systems in commercial transactions, yet there is often no clear way of knowing exactly what the units stand for on domestic measuring jugs, cups and spoons. Metric measurement also allows for greater precision when translating very personalized recipes. If a bakers recipe is measured in handfuls, I weigh the quantity their hand can hold in grams to get a precise idea of what the weight will be and thus stay true to the recipe. In this book liquid is measured in grams so that all ingredients can be weighed together in a single jug or bowl.