Episode: 1827
Title: HPR1827: How I make bread
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1827/hpr1827.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:47:55

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This is HPR episode 1827 entitled How I Make Bread.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 19 minutes long.
The summary is, I've been making my own bread for nearly 40 years and I thought I'd share my methods.
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Hello everyone, this is Dave Morris and I'm going to talk about how I make bread.
Ken Fallon was asking for advice on bread making on a recent community news recording.
Well, I don't know if he's had much feedback but I've been making my own bread for quite some time and I thought I'd pipe up and do a show on the subject.
Frank Bell also did an excellent show on the subject in 2013, I've put a link to it in the show notes.
I remember my mum making bread or having a go at it when I was a kid.
My sister and I were both excited about the exercise.
It smelled really nice as it was preparing and cooking and everything but when it came out of the oven it and risen very much.
It looked a bit like a brick.
It was a subject of much family humour.
We cut it up and ate it and it was really nice but it wasn't really quite the way she expected it to be.
I don't think she had a go after that, I think she just gave up after that first attempt.
She's a bit sad.
Anyway, I always felt that it would be fun to have a go at doing that myself.
By the time I'd left home and got my first job, one of the first things I bought myself was a food mix or a
Kenwood chef which is a popular brand in the UK.
It came with some bread recipes and it also came with accessories including a dough hook which let me
knead the dough.
I had an experiment with various recipes and had some successes, some failures and kept on experimenting with it
and got better.
I ended up making all sorts of different types of loaves and rolls and had a go at bagels ones which
are not a lot of fun to do, not bother too much since then.
I did quite a lot of Peter bread which is a bread with a pocket in it for a quick way making sandwiches
made pizza bases and that sort of stuff.
Anyway since then I've been making my own bread and I don't think there's been any bricks really.
I haven't bought much bread from shops unless I come across them really really good
high quality bread in a sort of shop that sells that type of thing but it's usually too expensive
so it's a lot cheaper to make my own.
I used the Kenwood chef for many many years.
In fact the first one fell apart.
I think the the early models perhaps weren't that brilliant making bread because the gearbox
seemed to break. That business of kneading bread doesn't do a good thing to the the sort of planetary
gearbox on them and it doesn't anyway didn't behave all that well and I bought a second one.
I don't know how many years that lasted but it did actually break down eventually and I've
got a third one there and been using that quite happily.
I tend when my kids are small I used to make bread with the food mixer but as they grew up
and life just seemed to get a lot more busy I invested in a bread maker.
So I now have a Panasonic bread maker. I went through a few of these as well and I used that
primarily because it's just so simple to measure out ingredients, chuck it in the thing and leave it
to do the rest. You can put the fill the bread maker up at night and then get up to fresh bread
but I don't usually do that. Anyway for this episode I decided to go back to one of my older
recipes. It's the one that makes two one pound loaves. It says one pound on the recipe because it's
an old recipe and it's a sort of adaptation from one of the ones that came with the Kenwood chef.
He uses wholemeal flour and quite keen on wholemeal bread. I've included a PDF copy of this
recipe along with the notes. They're a long show notes for this episode by the way. Hopefully you
found them. So in my notes I've put some pictures. What I've done is to is to make thumbnails of the
pictures and they're clickable so you can see the full picture by clicking on them and to start with
talk a bit about the flour I used for this one. This is one I do use from time to time. It's
I used a mixture of wholemeal flour and white flour and I've probably used about 80% wholemeal
and 20% white. Now you'll see on the picture that they're referred to a strong, strong plain or
extra strong. I think it's a terminology that's used mainly in the UK. Basically it means a
high gluten flour and I think high gluten flour tend to come from winter wheat so I think there's a
Canadian type of wheat which is a winter wheat or so I think it's known as hard spring wheat. Hard
seems to be a term you hear in relation to the wheat as well. I mean it's high gluten. Not quite
sure about the the farming aspect of this. Be quite interesting to go winter but I don't have
any high gluten weats make a more elastic dough and the more gluten there is means that the bread
rises better. You can make bread with a low gluten dough. This sort of so-called soft flour that you
would use to make cakes but it doesn't rise so well and doesn't it makes it so more crumbly soft
textured bread whereas the high gluten ones are more elastic and if you cut a slice the slice doesn't
fall apart in your hands. So I mentioned the food mixer there's a picture of it the actual one
and it's about 20 years old now I reckon. I don't remember exactly when I bought that one. I did
buy a fair number of attachments for it. The thing about the chef and probably quite a lot of
that type of mixer is that you can add lots of other attachments to it. Obviously I've got the
the beta things that are shown in the picture but I've also got a coffee grinder which does
pretty good job actually of it's a burger grinder which is said to be the best for
for grinding coffee. I've even got a wheat mill but coming by good quality wheat to mill yourself
not that easy actually I don't haven't found it much you can mill other things like rice and
other grains but not done a huge lot of that have to say a bit of a gimmick I suppose really
so as you'll see from the recipe the first thing to do is to mix together way out to mix together
the flour and add salt and I put a picture of the the flour to mix together with some salt and
you then need to take the dry yeast I'm using dry yeast that you buy in the supermarket and
it's active yeast it only it doesn't last a huge long time a year or something like that it's got
used by date for it needs to be mixed into warm water with some sugar the sugar is necessary to
fit a feed on and the water needs to be warm and it needs to be not too warm 110 degrees is what
I've said in the recipe so that's 110 Fahrenheit the if you do this and you mix mix them together
that the yeast starts to froth and you can see it in the picture you can use fresh yeast if you
can get it I have managed to do so in the past I don't know exactly where I would get it these days
it's not sold in the sort of places it used to be I guess people don't make their own bread with
fresh yeast very much these days might be wrong at that but I've not come across anywhere anywhere
selling it in my locality but if you can get it it's really nice it does make a nicer I think a
nicer nicer bread and it becomes active very quickly you do you still need to mix it up and activate
it in a similar way so mixing together the ingredients with the water so there's flour the salt
the yeast water and some oil the amount of oil that you add in this particular case is relatively
small but some recipes require a little bit more my bread maker for example takes three
tables one falls of oil but it does take a bit more flour than this recipe does so in my food mixer
and I tend to use it for this taking the dry ingredients and mixing them with the water into a dough
takes about three minutes and the dough hook works it and needs it to a certain degree it does a
pretty good job but I reckon you can do a better job if you take it out at that point and hand
knead it for a while so I've given some pictures of what it looked like as it came out of the mixer
and then kneading it which you put it onto a lightly floured surface and stretch it and then
roll it then fold it over itself and then stretch it again and that extends the gluten which is
a protein so it's long-chain protein so it stretches it out and tends to get it all going in a
similar direction so in my picture number eight you can see the finished dough which is very sort
of soft and pliable that's really how you want it to look not too wet not too dry and really
nice and flexible then I put it in a bowl and let it rise the um I started I actually put it in
the bowl and put some some cling film over the top I'm not sure what you call that in America
is a saran wrap or something anyway um but that over the top and that's pretty good because it keeps
it nice and moist inside but I've forgotten that in the past I've done this and the dough rises right
up to the top of the bowl and then it sticks to the underside of the the film which is intensely
annoying because you can't really get it off so you lose some of the dough and I don't so I took
the film off and threw it away and put a damp cloth over the top instead tea towel was what I
used because that's got quite a dense weave to it so you leave it for maybe I don't know the
the amount of time varies I don't really time it I just wait to see if it's risen to the the
top of the bowl and it can be an hour or more depends on the temperature it was a nice warm day
when I did this so it rose very quickly so it was it was it was completely risen in an hour I think
it must have been picture 11 shows where it looks like when it's fully risen then you need to do
the stage called knocking back where you work the the dough a bit longer so what you've got there is
a flour dough with bubbles in it produced by the yeast and you work this around so that you
effectively spread the bubbles around a bit more which gives you a better texture so I put the
dough in the in the mixer at this stage and give it three minutes of kneading in there no kneading
it by hand would be would be just fine so the next stage is to let the bread rise again before you
do that you need to prepare it for the whatever it is you're making in my case it was
loaves two loaf tins these one pound tins as I mentioned so I had the flour I forgot what the
quantity of flour was it says in the recipe I haven't got that in front of me right now but I
divided it in two and then shaped it you really want to shape it so that the top is nice and smooth
and the any seam as you sort of roll it into a sausage and then then get it ready for the for the
tin that the seam is underneath some people say to sort of flatten it out roll it into a sausage
shape and tuck the ends in I don't normally bother too much of that once you've shaped it you need to
put it in your tins and they have to be greased before you you do this I normally just use a
bit of margarine and just smear it on just to stop it sticking otherwise you can have a problem
getting the the bread out once it's cooked for some reason I decided this time to prod the dough and
flatten it flatten it into the tins actually that was pretty stupid I think it didn't affect it too
much but the work that had gone into making the top look nice was all messed up by poking it with
my fingers so probably best not to do that actually so anyway I covered the two tins with that
damp cloth again and left it for another hour you can see in picture 18 the the result that the
dough is risen to the the top of the tin that's about right that's that's as far as you want to
let it go you don't want it to I've had bread in the past where it's risen so much it's come out
over the top of the tin and you you're in danger of it expanding and sort of flopping
flopping down over the side of the tin making a strange shape loaf if you do that this being a
whole meal loaf it won't rise as much as maybe a whole a 100% white flour type of loaf because
the the extra fiber in it tends to make it rise less there's this sort of bread I like anyway
so picture 19 you can see I've baked it in the oven 230 I think it was for about
30 35 minutes you can just keep an eye on it to make sure it's not getting too dark I have a
fan oven so where it goes in the oven doesn't really matter very much I do still go about half
way through the the cooking and turn that turn the the tins around just in case my oven has a few
hot spots even though it's a fan oven it's not very good one you take it out of the tins pretty
quickly and leave it to cool on a rack otherwise it the the moisture in it tends to stay in it and
you end up with the rather wet unpleasant sort of loaf so putting on the cooling rack also helps
to to dry it out a bit which is desirable and then the last picture 21 you can see I've after
it's cooler and you best let it cool first otherwise it will it's it's not got much structure to it
I've started to slice it what I normally do is to slice up my bread and freeze it once it's cool
enough that is and then I find it keeps really well when I first started making I would I would
just keep a loaf available in that in the kitchen and cut slices off it when I needed them or whatever
but it goes off quite quickly I mean it gets stale quickly quicker than maybe some commercial
bread because they've got additives in to prevent this many cases and it it will go stale quicker
and also go molding perhaps if you've if you've exposed it to to the air a bit too long freezing
it is better I find and plus also I used to or used to make fairly large batches of bread when I
was doing it for the family my kids are away now so they're not bothered but slicing it up
putting it in the freezer means you can go and take individual slices out and either let them
store out to to use them to make a sandwich or something or you can toast them straight from
frozen that's what I do I normally have toast the breakfast with something something healthy on
the top so that was my demonstration of a of a homemade loaf with the recipe to be going going by
I'm quite like making bread from various mixtures of flour and when I make it the moment mixes a
third each of whole meal rye and spelt flour spelt being an old grain from an an earlier an
older form of wheat I think it was the Romans actually used to use it and they brought it to the UK
if I remember correctly and I put sunflower seeds in this quite like seeded bread personally
tend to put poppy seeds and sesame seeds in a lot of breads that I use but sunflower seeds are also
very nice the one I make just now is that is quite a heavy bread it was very very nice toasted by
quite like heavy heavy breads but this one I cheat as I sit in when I was I cheat with this one
I make it in the bread maker if you use flowers like rye if you like rye and spelt for that matter
they are a lowering gluten rye is quite low in gluten and spelt spelt has a fair bit and I've
also been experimenting with buckwheat flour which I don't think has much gluten at all this is
a lovely nutty taste so I tend to mix that with other flowers that have gluten otherwise you end
up with that that brick of a loaf like my mum made all these years ago my son who's used to when
he was little he liked to come and help out with the bread making which usually involved a fair
bit of flour going on him and on the floor and stuff but he's somehow rather taken that away with
him as he's got older and he makes a really good sourdough and the sourdough you use a piece of
the starter to make your loaf rather than yeast and he's often left me his sourdough starter when
he's away on holiday so to look after you have to feed it every every week so personally I've not
had a huge amount of success with the sourdough I've made them but it ends up with a really wet dough
which I find quite hard to work probably he has it down down down to a real art he makes a lovely
loaf but I need to get some lessons from him but we'll possibly get him to do an HPR one day
I've said this to him but he seems to duck the issue every time so anyway that was my personal
story of bread making I hope it's useful to to somebody okay bye
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