A baker life

I just want to say from the outset that it was never my intention to become a bread bore. The web, a natural home for obsessives, hosts a million amiable nutjobs with an exhaustive knowledge of hydration ratios or a personal sourdough culture with a pet name that they grew from their own belly-button fluff. I hope I am not one of those. But in the last few months, with no real effort on my part, it seems that I've slid into making my own bread. It was an occasional thing at first, then suddenly there was no more commercial bread in the house and then, bang; I'm an accidental home baker.

The argument about flour 'improvers' in most supermarket bread is well rehearsed elsewhere (perhaps best, if also most hectoringly, in Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery) so I won't go through it again. Suffice it to say that you've probably noticed how a decent artisanal loaf goes as hard as a rock the second day after you buy it while a loaf of even the most premium supermarket stuff will stay soft until it's covered with a thick pelt of mould. I noticed it a couple of years back and started wondering if I might make the odd loaf instead of joining the rest of the chattering classes in cutting out carbs altogether.

Like a good foodist, I immediately read up, consulted the websites and began struggling with sourdoughs, bigas, poolishes, fresh yeasts and stoneground flours and within a month had decided that being neither a yoghurt-bothering earth mother with forearms like hams nor permanently welded to an AGA this wasn't going to happen. I didn't want to become a baker. I just wanted the family to have some toast in the morning without ingesting the unspecified additives that give a loaf of bread the same half-life as strontium-90. So I bought a breadmaker.

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