On baking bread

Imagine your June 2020 self travels back in time a few months to meet your March 2020 self. June passes March a jar of sour-dough starter.

'Here, you'll find this useful,' says June.

March stares at it in bewilderment. 'Why?'

'Trust me,' says June. 'Oh, and here's a recipe for banana bread. You're gonna need that, too.'

During this pandemic, it feels like everyone's been baking bread.

We began the lockdown with a tried and trusted recipe for soda bread - my husband's Irish and developed a good recipe years ago. It's delicious when fresh, especially with cream cheese and smoked salmon (if we happen to have those in the house). We love it toasted too. His recipe uses buttermilk, a mixture of flours - plain white, wholemeal and malted - and he adds pumpkin seeds and linseeds to it.

We also have a breadmaker we've used on and off in bursts of enthusiasm over the years. With both grown-up sons staying with us for the duration, we realised we'd need a lot of bread, so why not dust it off and use it? Favourite recipe is based on a French bread recipe from the instruction booklet, but uses a mix of flour including malted flour.

If I were more organised and was writing this post in advance, this would be a photo of bread we've made at home. But the post is being put together at the last minute, so the photo is from BBC Good Food and is a loaf made by Paul Hollywood.

Back in late March and early April, there was a Great Flour Shortage across the UK. With everyone baking, the flour mills, while they were producing enough, weren't able to quickly switch from packing it in large sacks for commercial use to the 1.5kg bags sold in supermarkets. We especially struggled to find our favourite malted flour and in desperation my husband eventually ordered a large quantity of it online.

Yeast too was a problem. Its street value rose to more than that of cocaine at one time. I posted a lament on Facebook about our lack of it and ended up with two friends posting me some and another local friend telling me that a nearby deli stocked it. (This deli was also selling flour bought by the sack and repackaged into small paper carrier bags to sell to the public. Life-saver!)

And then there was the sour-dough. I need to make a confession here - it is not me who makes any of these breads. In fact I've never made a loaf in my life. My husband and I don't follow a traditional split of pink jobs versus blue jobs - he does the food shopping and most of the cooking; while I mow the lawn and put the bins out. So I am writing here from a point of view of near-ignorance in all things baking-related.

In the absence of a time-travelling June self visiting us in March, we did not have a sour-dough starter, so my husband watched Youtube videos to discover how to make his own. Apparently you only need flour and water, though he did invest in some special jars.

For weeks now, my husband's alternated between using the breadmaker, making soda bread and making sour-dough. The breadmaker just requires you to chuck in the ingredients and press a button: three hours later it's done. Soda bread is quick too - turn oven on to preheat, mix ingredients, whack the dough on a baking tray, slash the top 'to let the fairies out' and bake. But the sour-dough takes all day. Mix, knead, prove, stretch, fold - God knows; I keep well away from it all! Tastes good, though.

This is a writing blog and I've been talking in a rather uninformed way about bread-making. So I'll round off with a (slightly tortured) analogy to bring it back to writing. Making sour-dough bread is like writing a novel. You need a starter - an idea. You can't use that immediately - it needs to ferment for a while, and you must gather other ingredients. You need to mix it all up, creating the dough - writing the first draft. It must prove for a while - put the novel aside before you attempt to edit it. You'll need to stretch, fold and reshape it. Eventually you must commit: put the dough in the oven; send the novel to your publisher. The baking process is the publisher giving the book a cover and blurb, turning it into something enticing that people will want to read/want to eat. And then you just hope that all your hard work pays off and people will enjoy your finished product!