Vanessa recently set up Juniper & Rose Kitchen Garden School, a cookery school dedicated to affordable, ethical and inspirational courses. Whether you’re a sourdough novice or an experienced baker looking for tips to help bake the perfect loaf, Vanessa’s Learn to Bake Sourdough full day course at her kitchen school in Northamptonshire is the perfect way to master the skills of baking artisan loaves.

We’ve teamed up with Vanessa to offer one lucky baker a place on her Learn To Bake Sourdough course*. To enter, simply answer the following question:

What are the three core ingredients in a sourdough bread?

Then send us your answer by:

Like BakeryBits on Facebook and Share our post about Juniper & Rose from the BakeryBits page along with your answer as a comment.

Or alternatively, email us your answer at competition@bakerybits.co.uk with ‘Vanessa Kimbell competition’ as the subject line.

*Place must be used within 12 months of notification of winning. Deadline for entries midday 28th June.

These muffins can be put together in a matter of minutes – they are incredibly easy and oh-so-tasty. The ground almonds and coconut make them incredibly moist, while the streusel topping provides crunch.They are quite versatile too – leave the desiccated coconut out if you prefer and replace with oatbran or flour. Hate white chocolate? Replace with milk/dark chocolate or raisins or leave out altogether. If you don’t have spelt flour you can use plain or wholemeal flour instead.  Do use coconut oil if you can – apart from being healthy, it lends a lovely fragrance to the muffins.

I had some Panettone ‘Panettoncino’ 70mm cases leftover from making mini Panettone at Christmas and  decided to put them to good use again. These sturdy little paper cases don’t require the support of a muffin tin – you simply fill them halfway with batter and place them on a baking tray. They also look very pretty – with or without a ribbon!

Ingredients (Makes  6 large muffins)

• 100g ground almonds
• 100g white spelt flour (or a mix of white and wholemeal)
• 50g dessicated coconut
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 150g soft light brown sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 large ripe bananas (riper the better)
• 80ml virgin coconut oil, melted (or vegetable oil)
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp almond extract (BakertBits Mandorla Dolce)
• 50g white chocolate, roughly chopped
• 50g pecans, roughly chopped

Streusel topping

• 60g white (or wholemeal) spelt flour
• 60g brown sugar
• 30g butter
• 50g pecans, roughly chopped
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt

Directions

Preheat your oven to 180 C/ 350 F. Put your Panettoncino cases on a sturdy baking tray.

To prepare the topping put all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse briefly until the mix resembles breadcrumbs.

Put the coconut oil, bananas, eggs and extract in a food processor and pulse until liquidised. Put the dry ingredients in a large bowl and stir together with a fork. Add the banana mix and fold together with a wooden spoon, making sure you scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl. Finally, add the chopped white chocolate and pecans and mix until just combined. Do not overmix the batter – that’s the secret to successful muffins!

Divide the batter evenly between the Panettoncino cases (only fill halfway) and sprinkle about a tablespoon of streusel on top.

Bake in the centre of the oven for about 25-30 minutes. The muffins are ready when firm on top and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Eat warm from the oven, as a tea time treat or grab one for breakfast on-the-go.

Article Source: supergolden bakes
Images: ©supergoldenbakes

The unexpected cold snap has got us craving hearty snacks, and luckily Paul Hollywood has a few straightforward tricks under his rolling pin. Here Britain’s favourite master baker shares his recipe for a proper malt loaf. Exceptionally easy with a rich flavour, this loaf has a light texture and is more like a risen bread than the dense ready-made versions you find in supermarkets.

Method (makes two loaves):

Grease two 500g loaf tins with butter. Place the butter, sugar, malt extract and treacle in a small saucepan and heat gently, stirring, until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool.

Mix the flours together in a large bowl and add the salt to one side of the bowl and the yeast to the other. Scatter over the sultanas. Pour in the cooled malt syrup mixture and the warm water and mix well with a wooden spoon until thoroughly combined.

Turn the mixture out onto a floured surface and knead gently but thoroughly for a few minutes to bring the dough together. Divide the dough in half. Roll each piece into a sausage, the length of the loaf tins, and place in the prepared tins. Put each tin in a roomy plastic bag that won’t touch the top of the dough as it rises. Leave to prove for 2 hours until the dough has risen above the top of the tins.

Meanwhile, heat your oven to 190°C. Bake the loaves on the middle shelf of the oven for 25–35 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. As you remove the malt loaves from the oven, brush the tops with the warmed honey to glaze. Leave in the tins for 5 minutes, then carefully tip out and place on a wire rack to cool. Slice the malt loaves and spread with butter to serve.

To celebrate the launch of his latest book, Bread and namesake TV cookery series, due to start on BBC2 next Monday, Paul will be sharing a selection of over 40 recipes and personal tips in two easy-to-follow booklets, free inside The Telegraph this Saturday and Sunday. For more information visit: telegraph.co.uk/hollywood

My earlier attempts left quite a lot to be desired – unless you’re the sort that enjoys chewing on concrete, but now, most of the time, my bread turns out pretty well. However as I’ve basically taught myself at home, from reading books and asking Patrick every 5 minutes for advice, I knew there was a lot I was missing, many things I was probably doing wrong and also a heap of stuff that I was just guessing at without the technical knowledge to know how not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

When I heard that we were being offered a place on Angus’s bread class at The Holt in Honiton, I jumped at the chance as Angus has trained at some of the best and most respected Bakers, including at The Bertinet Kitchen.

To start with can I just say that I think Angus is the epitome of calmness in that you just can’t imagine him getting stressed under any circumstances (an ideal quality when teaching amateurs!). He managed to find the time to bake all of the bread in the ovens, demo the techniques, spend a lot of time helping everyone on the course, yet he didn’t look in the slightest bit flustered and left everyone feeling like they’d had a great time.

Anyway, on to the course itself.

The first thing Gus showed us was your bog standard supermarket sliced white loaf of bread, to illustrate the difference  between this gloopy, alien substance, to the hopefully more bread like things we were going to produce during the day (fingers crossed).

Angus is a big fan of the Bertinet method of kneading, difficult to describe here, but you basically pick up the dough, stretch it and throw it back onto the surface and then push it around the table with a dough scraper.

You can see the technique here in ‘Dough‘ Richard Bertinet’s book, which comes with a DVD demonstrating the technique. Although the book is one of my favourites and the DVD is a great idea, I have to confess that I’ve not been using this method as I just couldn’t get my head around how to do it properly.

It turns out that having someone demonstrate it to you, in front of you and then help when you keep getting it wrong, makes all the difference! It’s not the most logical way to knead dough when you’ve been doing it the ‘conventional’ way for years, but after a while (and a lot of dough flying across the room), it really does work.

We started making white dough, with just the usual 4 ingredients, nothing else. Angus guided us through the process from crumbling the yeast into the flour, through the kneading process and then onto the proving and shaping. We made; Fougasse, (definitely need to work on my shaping skills on this one) white loaves and rolls, all of which turned out surprisingly well, in fact my girlfriend thought the white loaf was the tastiest I’ve ever made!

After we’d tried the basics with a lower hydration dough, half of the class were given a bowl with what looked like water, with a bit of olive oil and flour chucked in (80% hydration), it looked like it was going to be impossible to work with, the other half were given a granary, rye and white flour mix.

I was working with the 80% hydration mix, which to say the least was on the sticky side. However, with a bit of perseverance and a little bit of dough flying across the table and sticking to my fellow students (sorry about that), the dough actually formed beautifully and looked fantastic.

Meanwhile the other half of the class had achieved equally impressive results with their dough. Again, the dough was left to prove and we then went on to make; Round loaves, baguettes (illustrating again that I need to work on my shaping), Ciabatta, Focaccia and Picnic Bread all with lots of direction and help from Angus.

All the way through the course Angus took the time to help each and everyone of us, guiding us when needed and showing us how to improve our techniques, all of which resulted in an amazing pile of gorgeous bread which we hardly made a dent in for our lunch, with the remaining car load taken home by all of the students to no doubt suitably impressed family!

Will the class go back to that floppy supermarket bread? Who knows, but thanks to Angus there is every chance that they’ll become as passionate about ‘real’ bread as he is.

Thanks again Gus!

]]> http://blog.bakerybits.co.uk/?feed=rss2&p=893 0 http://blog.bakerybits.co.uk/?p=893 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BakerybitsBlog/~3/JSsFY3iMiJs/ http://blog.bakerybits.co.uk/?p=852#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:06:31 +0000 Ben http://blog.bakerybits.co.uk/?p=852 If making Panettone sounds like a lot of effort to go to for Christmas .. you’d be entirely wrong. This straightforward recipe from food writer Vanessa Kimbell may not be the 3-day process that the original recipe comes from, but as she says in her house it took about three minutes to devour so she recommends making two at the same time!

This is an easy recipe but can be just as complex in character as the complicated one .. if the right ingredients are used. For me the essence from Bakery Bits just knocked up the flavour, and the new candied peel was honestly almost too delicious to pop in the mix. It took quite some will power to not eat the ingredients before they got in the bread.

Listen here to Vanessa discussing how to make panettone and the right ingredients with fellow foodie, Carmela Sereno Hayes.

This bread is best eaten the same day.

Time to prepare: 35 minutes
Time to rise: 1 hour
Time to cook: 50 minutes
Freeze: Yes

Ingredients

12g yeast
400g strong white flour
6g salt
110g caster sugar
1tsp panattone essence
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 medium eggs and 2 egg yolks
130ml milk semi skimmed
150g butter at room temp
80g cranberries
80g sour cherries
80g raisins
80g mixed rainbow peel

Directions

1. Warm the milk and pour in the yeast, mix well.
2. Sieve the flour into a large mixing bowl, add salt mix.
and make a well before pouring in the milk and yeast and two eggs.
3. Combine and make a dough. Cover and set aside for half an hour for the gluten to relax.
4. In the dough mixture add in the sugar, panettone & vanilla essence and the remaining two egg yolks. Add in the cubed soft butter and work into the dough.
5. Combine thoroughly. Knead onto a floured board for a good five minutes or transfer into your stand mixer.
6. Place the dough into a clean bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm to rise for 2 hours.
7. Once risen, tumble the dough out onto a lightly floured board and knock back and knead in the dried fruit and mixed peel.
8. Put the dough into your prepared tin. Cover and set-aside for a further hour whist you preheat the oven to 190C.
9. Place into the oven for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to 180C for a further 25-30 minutes. Once cool dust with icing sugar.

Recipe and image kindly supplied by Vanessa Kimbell, Northampton Cookery School.

Visit: www.juniperandrose.co.uk

Vanilla extract is a ubiquitous ingredient in cakes – it’s an ingredient in virtually everyone’s kitchen. Why not make your own? It is really, really easy to do and you can customise it too.

The extract takes about 8 weeks to make – no heating or factory processing needed here. The first thing you need to get is some attractive bottles so that you have something on your shelf or to give away that look good. I used 250ml push-cap bottles which are available from your local cook shop (I got mine from Wendy’s Cookshop in Honiton) as they are just the right height for a vanilla pod.

You need two ingredients:

Vanilla Pods

Naturally, the better the vanilla, the better the essence, so we use our vanilla pods grown by subsistence farmers in the Totonac region of Mexico – which is where vanilla originally came from before being grown on an industrial scale in other parts of the world.

Alcohol

Next, you need some alcohol which dissolves the vanillin from the pods which is the active compound that gives vanilla its flavour. IT should be something strong, around 40%, I’ve used vodka which gives little or no flavour to the extract and also rum which, when mixed with vanilla, gives a heady aroma which I find hard to stop sniffing.

Method:

Easy. Take about 4 vanilla pods – more if you want a stronger flavour – and slice them along the length to allow the alcohol to penetrate and get the flavour out. Put the pods into the bottle and fill with your choice of alcohol. Close the cap, and that is it. The rest is a waiting game: the bottles will darken over the next few weeks so that in about 8 weeks, they will have taken on a much darker colour.

Treat yourself to a hot chocolate with a slosh of rum-based vanilla extract for a fabulous winter-warmer.

There are days you just don’t get a moment to bake. This recipe for soda bread is one of the fastest baking tricks on the planet. I challenge anyone to take more than five minutes flat to get it into the oven. Make no mistake: the speed of making it doesn’t mean you’re compromising on the taste. On the contrary, the pace of its creation should be counterbalanced by the speed to eat it – which really is best soon after baking.

It’s a perfect one to make if you’ve nothing in the house for breakfast. In minutes the kitchen is filled with the smell of fresh baking and the air with aromatic caraway. As you slice the crunchy crust you will notice that the warm dough is dense. It has a solid satisfying eat to it. Still warm, dripping with butter and smothered in plum jam for me it is best served with a good, strong cup of hot tea whilst listening to radio four.

Makes 1 good-size loaf
Prep time 4 minutes
Cooking time 25 minutes
Suitable for freezing? Yes, as soon as it is cool from the oven

• 500g of plain flour
• 11/2 tsp caster sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1tbsp caraway seeds
• 450ml buttermilk

1. Preheat the oven to190˚C/gas mark 5 a good 10 minutes before you start making the bread.
2. Sift all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl
3. Add the buttermilk. Mix well but don’t overmix. It will go claggy and heavy if handled too much.
4. Turn the bread out into a lightly oiled bread tin.
5. Bake in the oven for approximately 25-30 minutes. Check to see whether the loaf is baked by slipping a knife into the centre. If it comes out clean, then it is done; if not, then return it to the oven for another 5 minutes and check again. When the loaf is baked all the way though it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
6. Serve warm from the oven.

Tips

• Soak a tablespoon of dried lavender in warm buttermilk for 15 minutes and add to the dough with 3 tbsp of extra sugar for a sweetened lavender bread.
• Add the zest of 2 lemons and 2 tablespoons of poppy seeds for a lemon and poppy seed loaf.
• Make into a savoury soda bread tea loaf by adding 100g of raisins.
• Double the recipe to freeze a batch

Recipe and image kindly supplied by Vanessa Kimbell www.Goddessonabudget.co.uk

Whether you’re a beginner, experienced home baker or simply a food lover, why not learn how to set up and run your own successful pop up bakery courtesy of food writer, author and BBC radio broadcaster Vanessa Kimbell.

Vanessa has been running a popular pop up bakery for quite some time now and is full of knowledge and expertise having previously worked in a bakery in the South of France.

Vanessa’s put a new course together to get you and your bakery off to a flying start. The course will include advice and tips and will cover everything you need to be able to go home and set up your own bakery confidently.

The day will commence with a coffee and a bite to eat and then Vanessa will make a delicious lunch with vegetables from her own garden.

Vanessa Kimbell’s Pop Up Bakery Class will take place in Northampton on 13 September 2012 from 10am-4pm and costs £125. For more information visit GoddessOnaBudget or send an email.

With a Northern-Irish ex-pat father, occasionally through my childhood we’d be treated to various Irish specialities. Potato cakes are what I remember best, thin pancake-like triangles of potato, butter, flour and maybe some herbs fried to give a brown, caramelised crunch. Just thinking about them makes my mouth water and yet for some reason they aren’t popular in my part of the world.

When he moved to England in the ’60s, my Dad was shocked at the poor range of flour available in supermarkets, just white or wholemeal in the main and the wholemeal was very much finer than he was used to in Northern Ireland. He says that, unlike what he found in England, there would be a wide variety of wholemeal (or wheaten meal) flours available, from fine to coarse – and even with today’s ever homogenising supermarket offerings, several grades of coarseness are available.

Some time ago, he contacted various millers in Ireland to try to produce some “proper” coarse flour used in scones, farls, wheaten bread amongst others but couldn’t convince any to send some across-the-water and so had given up the search. This is where the marvellous Jon Cook at Foster’s Mill comes in. He has made a mid-coarseness stoneground wheaten meal for us to stock – and it has had the thumbs-up in the ex-pat authenticity test!

Here then, is a very straightforward recipe for Wheaten Scones using Jon’s flour and a family recipe. Traditionally these would be cooked on a griddle but work well in the oven (use the top of your range cooker if you have one). The scones have much more bite than the more common white scones and, with the turn half-way through baking, they have a delicate crust too. Great with butter and jam, in fact, I think, I need another one for inspiration while writing-up the recipe.

This recipe contains buttermilk, another ingredient readily available in Ireland and much less so in England. The buttermilk available in the supermarkets isn’t quite the same but is near enough. The recipe makes 12 excellent scones, good hot, cold or toasted.

Ingredients:

• 300g The Prior’s Organic Wheaten Meal
• 100g The Prior’s Organic White flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1tsp salt
• 30g softened butter
• 50g caster sugar
• 284ml buttermilk (1 pot)

Preheat your oven to 230°C (215°C for fan ovens).

Soda breads should not be kneaded and rely on the baking powder to make them rise. So, mix the wheaten meal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together to make sure that all are well distributed. Rub the butter into the mix with your hands until the butter is lost in the flour and then add the buttermilk, mixing (rather than kneading) until all comes together as a fairly stiff dough.

Flour your worktop and roll the dough to about 1″ thickness and then using a 60mm pastry cutter cut out the 12 scones, placing them on a greased baking sheet.

Put the scones into the pre-heated oven for 7 minutes before turning the scones over and then baking for another 7 minutes until golden brown. Tip onto a cooling rack, cool a bit before eating.

I’ve had a Four Grand-Mère wood-fired oven in my garden for a couple of years and have been learning how to get the best out of it. I’ve baked with it in 8″ of snow and often in the dark, but can confirm that decent weather and daylight are more pleasant. As a weekend baker, I prepare for a large bread bake usually around 24 1kg loaves of various recipes to be baked in 3 batches. It means that when I want to use the oven, it starts from completely cold, rather than having any residual heat from the previous bake and so the oven needs to be taken to bread-baking temperature (about 220°C). This takes a bit of time but isn’t difficult and on the way, we manage to squeeze in a pizza night. I light the oven on a Saturday afternoon for a Sunday bake. You might do it all on the Sunday but you miss out on the pizza part.

Quick Overview of Wood-Fired Oven Baking

There are 2 methods for baking with a wood-fired oven: door open and door closed. When the door is open, a constant flow of air can feed the burning fire within. This is used for baking (or grilling) foods such as pizza. Pizza need a burning flame and a hot hearth in order to be grilled quickly (about 3 minutes) and have the unmistakable flavour of a wood-fired oven pizza. Bread and most other bakes do not have a burning fire within the chamber while baking. Instead, the oven will have been pre-heated and the chamber completely cleared of anything burning. The foods are then placed into the oven and the insulating door (the “stop gap”). The body of the oven releases heat into the chamber and the food bakes.

Wood-Fired Oven Technology

There are two basic wood-fired oven technologies: retained heat thermal store and direct heat. Retained heat ovens (like ours from Four Grand-Mère) have a large mass, that is, they are very heavy (a few 100kg) being made from materials such as thermal bricks and tiles. They are designed to absorb the heat from the fire deeply within the body of the oven and for the heat to even out and then to be released back into the chamber during a bake, and then to recharge the oven between batches until the heat is depleted at which point a top-up fire might be required. On my oven, I can bake 3 batches of 8 1kg loaves between firings. The heat store means that the oven temperature will be even and through the insulation, maintained for a long period. Direct heat ovens tend to be much lighter in construction, typically made from steel and have a separate firebox where a fire is maintained during the bake. This is good for making the oven more portable but can make maintaining a constant temperature during a bake tricky.

How to Light Your Oven

Firstly, it is important to know how to light the oven without smoking yourself too much. The key is to understand the process and what the fire is telling you about the fuel, temperature and air supply.

Lighting a wood-fired oven is more than lighting a bonfire: it is somewhere that food is to be prepared so the things that you burn matter – no treated or painted bits of wood, no old pallets with the odd nail in. It is also important to understand something about how fires work to keep smoke to a minimum. When a wood-fired oven is operating correctly there will be no visible smoke coming from the chimney – just a heat haze. Getting your oven working correctly is easily mastered once a few principles are understood.

A fire making smoke is a fire that is not burning efficiently, it is an indication of incomplete combustion which is a waste of fuel and the smoke is a nuisance. The trick is to get the chamber and the chimney warmed quickly so that the fire can burn at the optimum temperature such that there is a heat-haze rather than smoke.

The first thing to do is to get the chimney warmed since if it has been left for a long period, it will be cold and the cold air within it will form a plug preventing it from drawing well. At the same time, getting the chamber warming will allow the small fire to get hot enough to burn the fuel completely and so eliminate smoke in the shortest time.

To do this, fuel that burns quickly, such as clean paper (no tape or staples) scrunched up to form a bed about 30cm by 30cm and 5cm thick is a good start – be generous with it as the aim is to get the fire lit in one go. The paper is the first part of a chain of fuels: it burns brightly and enough to light the cardboard strips which should be placed on top of the paper, again be quite generous with it. On the cardboard, I add some think pieces of wood, small sticks of kindling. These have a large surface area to volume and so the burning cardboard will burn for long enough to get these to light. In turn, the kindling burns for longer, and for long enough to get the main fuel alight.

I have experimented with various fuels in my wood-fired oven. I have tried using the clean bits of wood from pallets but don’t think that this is a great idea since I don’t know its history and really don’t want to have to explain any missed nails. Logs are good, but it is very important that the wood is well seasoned, something that is both tricky and costly to get hold of. Logs need to have a moisture level of about 12% to burn well otherwise lots of the energy within the burning log is used to evaporate the water rather than to heat your oven. Not many log suppliers can guarantee this so you will need to store the cut logs yourself for a period before use – normally 6 months or more. My favourite fuel of the moment is Verdo compressed wood briquettes. They are made using only dried wood fibres so they are clean, dense and dry. When they are alight, they open up and burn a little faster than logs, burning with a clean flame. I get them by the pallet load (Verdo Wood Briquettes from Woof! Woodfuels) and I think that this compares well with a typical “load” of logs.

So, to the paper, card and kindling pile, I put a wood briquette on either side and one across the top. Then, with the flue damper open (if you have one fitted), and with the oven door wide open, the paper is lit. The paper should catch quickly in turn igniting the card which will burn long enough to get the kindling to light which will ignite the briquettes. If there is enough card and kindling, the oven air temperature will increase rapidly to push out the plug of cold air in the chimney. As the kindling takes hold, the initial smoke will quickly disappear to leave a heat haze.

After a few minutes, the paper and card will die out as the fuel is exhausted and the briquettes should start to burn. I can’t resist a bit of a poke at this point to rearrange the fire, to make sure that any paper and card is burned away. When the fire is clearly burning well, I will then add a couple more briquettes and close the door a little if it is windy to stop the fire burning too quickly and sending all of the heat up the chimney. I tend to check on the fire every 30-60 minutes to make sure that it has sufficient fuel and to top it up. The aim is to get a flaming fire to fill about 1/3 of the hearth area.

A sign that the oven is low on fuel or airflow while the chamber is being heated is when you can see smoke coming from the chimney – check it by slowly opening the door wider and you might find that the smoke ignites and starts burning correctly again. Otherwise, see if more fuel is needed.

Saturday Afternoon – First Burn and Pizza!

I tend to light the oven on a Saturday afternoon, leaving it burning until the early evening and then cook pizza in there with the fire swept to the back of the oven and with a flame going. I make a batch of pizza dough and make 10 pizza each with 150g dough. The oven is up to temperature when the tiles (our model is the Four Grand-Mère with tiles lining the dome) turn white, or when (a little) flour thrown onto the hearth immediately turns black – the oven wants to be hot! I slide in 3 of the pizzas using a 9″ peel and by the time that the next 3 are ready to go in (working fast!), the first are ready to come out.

Once finished, I rake the burning embers to cover the hearth to burn away the odd bits of cheese and olives that have rolled off, and then put the insulating door in place, close the damper and the outer door and leave until next morning.

Sunday – Bake Day!

I usually do the bake on the Sunday. The oven will still be pretty hot in the chamber although not hot enough for baking. For this, a top-up firing will be needed. Repeat the fire-lighting above which will be easier as already warm and leave to burn vigorously for a couple of hours. After the wood has died down to ash and a few embers, it is time to scrape out the fire, into an ash-bin. I then use a brass brush to sweep out the remaining embers and as much ash as I have patience to clear. Some next use a damp (not sopping wet) cloth on the end of the brush to clean the hearth of the remaining ash. Check the oven temperature, hearth and dome. For this I use an infra-red thermometer and usually read something around the 300°C mark. This is too hot and what I want is for the oven to absorb the additional heat into the body for release later, and for the temperature to even out across the oven. So, put the insulating door in place and close the damper if you have one and leave for 30 minutes or so and check to see if the temperature has settled to 220C to 240C on the hearth. Any higher will tend to burn the base of the loaf.

With the oven at 220°C-240°C, it is time to bake. I slide 8 loaves from their bannetons (proving baskets) onto a 12″ long-handled peel, into my oven as quickly as I can and replace the insulating door and the outer door. For the first 20 minutes, I close the damper in order to promote a steamy baking environment for crustier crust. After 20 minutes, I open the damper otherwise, the level of steam can lead to water running out of the front of the oven (mine has the tell-tale stains of this!). After about 40 minutes, the smell drifting across the garden tells me that the first batch is done. These I take out and then close up the oven, including closing the damper. The oven is then left for about 20 minutes while it recharges and evens out again. Then, the process is repeated for the second and third batch.

After the third batch the oven is still pretty hot, around 200C, but not hot enough for more bread, so there is plenty of opportunity for other bakes to make the most of the retained heat which will be available for several hours. Cakes through meringues and fruit or herb drying are all options for the organised.