Bread Making and Baking

“Give us this day, our daily bread” – A line we are all familiar with I imagine, perhaps because we had to recite it in assembly every morning for the first ten years of our education, and then in the school chapel thereafter for those of you who attended an institution where either nuns were in charge, or the figures in loco parentis dictated you had to spend the first hour of your day murmuring betwixt the buttresses.

Of course we cannot forget Sir Cliff Richard’s uplifting rendition of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, which as it was a couple of thousand years out of copyright he decided to rename ‘The Millennium Prayer’ and sang, no, wafted out on Top of the Pops, twice, over a score of predictable orchestral monotony backed up by a gospel choir almost as ethnically diverse as the “save the world” video montage projected behind.

I’m not a cynic; I just don’t like the song and don’t trust someone that doesn’t age at the regular rate. When I was fifteen my mother bought me a Cliff calendar for Christmas, within were various photos of the knight himself be-straddling Harley Davidson motorbikes draped in the Stars and Stripes, most probably taken in his garden in Surrey for a generation of over 70s to swoon over. All credit to the guy, over five decades in the business means his original songs are falling out of copyright, he needs to get his royalties somewhere and if that means shooting a faux-American Gregorian time keeper on his driveway then so be it. Fortunately for me however it has not become an annual tradition in my house, I will hold onto it though, who knows, when Cliff finally pops his clogs in 2090 it may be worth something.

SO, our daily bread, and it is daily. Take sandwiches for instance, far too often we focus on the filling and forget the walls when really they are what locks everything together. A bowl of soup is just baby food without a crusty buttered roll; and toast, what would toast be without bread? Air, that’s what.

Last week I watched the ‘Great British Food Revival’ with Michel Roux Jr, as he implored us to stop buying processed supermarket bread and have a go at baking our own. I was implored, along with my mother, so we went to the local bakers and ordered some fresh yeast having already experimented with the ‘dried active yeast’ they sell at Tesco, which is crap incidentally. It turns out that you need very little yeast to make a loaf of bread, but can only order relatively large amounts from the bakers. Hence a large proportion of yesterday and this week was and will be spent kneading, folding, crumbling, dusting and of course eating - the result pictured is my attempt at Michel’s ‘sweet sandwich loaf’ flavoured with Golden Syrup. A few weeks ago I was loitering around the offices of Eat Me Magazine in east London and was lucky enough to shake hands with the man himself post interview, I’d like to think some of his magic has passed onto me, like Voldemort and Harry, without all the evilness and parcel tongue.

The bread tasted fantastic still warm and smeared in a healthy dollop of salted English butter, give the recipe a go at -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sandwich_bread_loaf_93879