While I was in Den­mark earlier this month I ended up watch­ing the morn­ing magazine pro­gramme on the equi­val­ent to ITV. One of the lead stor­ies that day was on how to bake the world’s best bread. I am quite fussy when it comes to bread; one could describe me as a bread geek.

Earlier this year I got back in to bak­ing my own bread. As a stu­dent liv­ing in Eng­land, buy­ing what I con­sider the best bread can be both costly and time-consuming. The typ­ical Eng­lish bread bin con­tains a pre-sliced, very chewy (and gen­er­ally white) loaf. While I can put up with this when it is toasted, or when some­thing with a strong fla­vour and enough tex­ture to hide the bread’s awful chewy-fluffy-tastelessness is applied, I gen­er­ally avoid this type of bread. The whole­meal altern­at­ives, pro­duced in the same way, are slightly bet­ter (there is some fla­vour, but the tex­ture is the same) but the only real pos­it­ive side to this style of bread is the extreme longev­ity (i.e. it takes forever to turn stale).

What is it that I look for in a bread? This is prob­ably not a ques­tion most people take time to con­sider in their daily lives. The first issue to con­sider is the flour — whole­meal or white. White is (for me) some­thing to save for spe­cial occa­sions, rather than a day-to-day bread for lunch or accom­pa­ny­ing a meal. My gen­eral bread recipe uses a blend of whole­meal and white flour which pro­duces a good tex­ture; I find pure whole­meal bread can be a bit too dense.

The next factor in bread qual­ity is the tex­ture. I have already explained my dis­like of the sliced Eng­lish bread, which primar­ily stems from the tex­ture. What I look for is a spring in the loaf which is countered by a sat­is­fy­ing crunch in the crust. Chewy can be fine, if the bread springs back and does not stay squashed — as is the case with most sliced super­mar­ket loaves. I am not a great fan of bread which turns to crumbs the moment a bread knife gets within a centimetre.

A third qual­ity of bread which I con­sider is the taste. I don’t like my stand­ard loaves to have a very strong fla­vour like Rye or sour­dough vari­ants, but con­versely a taste­less bread is a little dis­ap­point­ing. I can remem­ber super­mar­ket “French” bread sticks hav­ing a bit more fla­vour than they do nowadays, but gen­er­ally the Italian style loaves have a nice flavour.

You might by now be won­der­ing what the recipe I use for day-to-day bread is. I must admit, I don’t like spend­ing large amounts of time knead­ing. There­fore I often use a bread machine to do the mix­ing and then fin­ish rising and bak­ing in a sep­ar­ate tin (this gives a far bet­ter taste, crust and shape than the machine’s low tem­per­at­ure bak­ing). One recipe I tried and hold in high regard is one from the Guard­ian by Feli­city Cloake: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/jun/10/how-to-bake-wholemeal-bread. This method requires repeated knead­ing for short peri­ods, but cre­ates a really good loaf. The stand­ard loaf I make is sim­ilar, using sun­flower oil instead of but­ter, and I vary between using molasses sugar and plain white sugar. I don’t nor­mally add the vit­amin C tab­let, but it does cre­ate a slightly more open tex­ture with whole­meal flour.

Today I baked the “World’s Best Bread” for the first time. I say today, but the pro­cess began last night with the ini­tial assembly of ingredi­ents for the twelve hour rest­ing period. This morn­ing the dough was full of air bubbles and had grown con­sid­er­ably in size. The next phase of rising involved dust­ing the fol­ded dough with flour and a little tex­tural sup­ple­ment (in my case poppy seeds) and pla­cing it on a tea towel for a fur­ther hour or two. As I was slightly time con­strained I lim­ited the time to an hour, but the dough had risen sub­stan­tially enough in that time and did not spring back after pok­ing. In the mean time I took the phen­olic handle off my big Le Creu­set (see this post) and pre­heated it to the max­imum oven temperature.

What came out of the oven smelled great, but then I am accus­tomed to that hunger-inducing scent from past bak­ing efforts. The loaf pro­duced a sat­is­fy­ing hol­low noise when tapped and had a bit of give. This reas­sured me that the loaf would not be hor­ribly dense. When I placed the dough in the hot pan, I did not take time to even it out in the base, and to my sur­prise it did not fill the width of the pan. Next time I may try to pro­duce a per­fectly round loaf, but I quite like the rus­tic shape of this first try.

The tex­ture revealed when mak­ing the first slice was much lighter than my usual loaves. Large air pock­ets fea­ture through­out, but the over­all bite ‘gives’ just the right amount. It reminds me of the tex­ture of a good ciabatta. The crust nicely browned for the final 15 minutes in the oven and has a good crunch, bet­ter than my usual attempts.

The fla­vour is cer­tainly good. With such a simple recipe there is not much to alter the pure wheat taste. This loaf has a really nice taste of… wheat. It reminds me of how rye bread has a power­ful sour scent and the flour provides the main taste. I have already men­tioned that my pref­er­ence is for a wholemeal/white blend but that will wait until the next time. This white loaf is slightly darker in col­our than I am used to (do they bleach the super­mar­ket loaves?) but tasted great with cheese, homemade apple chut­ney and apple but­ter.

Would I recom­mend you try this recipe? It is cer­tainly worth the effort to bake it at least once. I used a cast iron sauce­pan but if you don’t have one (yet) then it should work in a lid­ded Pyrex dish or a stain­less steel oven-safe sauce­pan, but not neces­sar­ily as well. My main cri­ti­cism is that it takes a bit of for­ward plan­ning. The best tim­ing is depend­ant on your work sched­ule. The ini­tial pre­par­a­tion takes 5 minutes, but then you need to wait 12–18 hours before rising and bak­ing. I star­ted in the even­ing around 10pm and the loaf was out of the oven at 12.15pm the next day, and that was hur­ry­ing things slightly. Clearly if I was work­ing away from home dur­ing the day this would not be such a good sched­ule, and I would prob­ably have to do the bak­ing the next evening.

For my day to day “sand­wich” bread I will prob­ably stick to my wholemeal/white blend with sugar and oil, but if a trial run of this recipe with whole­meal flour added works well I could end up converting.

In case you missed it, here is the link to the recipe once more.

Edit: I’ve now tried the whole­meal vari­ant which turned out really well, although I added a little brown sugar and adjus­ted the water/flour con­tent. The res­ult­ing bread had a very good tex­ture, and is def­in­itely an improve­ment over my earlier 50/50 white/wholemeal attempt.