Bread and Jam

I seem to have got into the habit of baking a different style of loaf every week and this weekend was no exception a Onion and Bay bread from Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf. Not the best looking bread I have ever made but the taste was excellent though it would not have gone well with the nectarine jam I made on Thursday, there seems to be such a glut of fruit on offer at the moment it seemed the perfect thing to keep me out of mischief on a working day evening. Sadly no pictures of the bread but will post the one of the jam in a few days. The unfortunate lucky few that were given a jar to try all gave positive feedback. I must make some more, strawberry I think next time, perhaps I should make a bread that goes with the jam or should that be jam that goes with the bread? hmmm whatever.

Where was I?

Okay, I know I'm not very good at keeping my blog up to date these days, it comes of having too much work to do, three sets of road works to deal with and not enough sleep due to inconsiderate neighbours waking me up at 4 in the morning. So what's been happening? Well I went on the baking course at the School of Artisan Food in Nottingham and have to say I was impressed with the facilities if not the course. We were taught to knead the dough in a very different way than all the books and the previous baking course I had been on. We weighed out the ingredients as per normal, mixed them together in the bowl and then left it alone for ten minutes, we then folded over the dough back on itself once then rotated it and repeated this process ten times turned it over and left it. In total we did this four times leaving it ten minutes each time until it had formed a smooth dough. We shaped it and put it into the 1lb loaf tins we had been given to use we then left them for an hour to rise. Okay it worked but I'm not very keen on spending forty to fifty minutes kneading the dough, the master baker taking the course said himself that the results would have been the same if we had spent ten minutes kneading the dough. So why waste the time? Anyway I had a good lunch and an understanding that there's more than one way to make a loaf of bread. Then it was back home for a few days rest before heading off too the sunny climes of Florence for a week of sightseeing, pizza and icecreams (not necessarily in that order). Here come the obligatory photo's

Can I have one of these please?