In Britain, we spend over three-and-a-half billion pounds on bread every year.
I come from a family of bakers,
but I still want to encourage you to bake your own bread at home.
Smell that is coming off that is...
Is fantastic!
I think every home is improved by it,
so I want to show you that making bread in your own kitchen
is much more satisfying than buying a loaf...
Because its a feast for your family and for your senses!
The smell of it...
The feel of it...
Beautiful stuff!
The look of it...
Not like the ones you buy in the shops. It's more special than that.
The sound of it...
This is a beautiful loaf.
And the taste of it.
Wow!
It just tastes so good. You've got to try it.
I want to show you that making bread is simple, really.
You mix...
Knead...
Prove...
Shape...
Prove again, then finally...
Bake.
Some loaves I show you may seem complicated,
but with time and focus you can grasp them all,
as I will guide you every step of the way.
Once you've mastered them, I'm going to reveal
how bread can be much more than just a loaf.
It can be a meal in itself.
One of the only things that will keep my mouth shut!
So, there's no excuses.
Get baking!
In this last programme of the series we are tackling more challenging types of bread,
enriched doughs that use eggs, butter, milk and sugar
and often involve chilling doughs in the fridge.
There are some new techniques to practice, like layering.
So, these may be breads to try when you have a little bit more time on your hands,
but they taste absolutely fabulous so I know they are well worth the effort.
Really good.
I'm going to show you how to make British lardy cake...
Danish pastries with a savoury twist...
A brioche crown stuffed with the best of the med...
And, first of all,
an Italian-style loaf suitable for any special occasion.
So, this dough is an enriched dough. And it's like
a cross between an easter bread and a Christmas bread.
It's an enriched dough, full of fruit and full of flavour.
You start this enriched lemon and orange sweet bread
in the same way as a normal bread
with a mix of strong flour, yeast and salt,
but then add the richness.
Four eggs now in there. This is where the enrichment comes from.
You've got the sugar, you've got egg and your milk.
They're the three ingredients that take a basic dough
of salt, yeast, flour into the enriched world.
You can see by the color of that, it's enriched.
It's lovely and yellow. Now I'm going to tip that onto the bench
and work it in some flour.
An enriched dough often feels more sticky as you first knead it.
Just gently bring it together.
And as it gets softer,
become more vigorous with it.
Lovely dough.
Cultures all over the world have a variety of different breads
to celebrate certain times of the year, whether Christmas or easter.
There's kulich in Russia, which is eaten around
Christmas time, just topped with icing.
When you look at British culture, you've got hot cross buns.
Then of course, you've got your crossover into easter,
and you've got your simnel cakes.
And perhaps the closest relation to this
is an Italian easter bread, colomba or easter dove.
You mix that for ten minutes at least. Then it goes stringy.
And place it in a bowl to rise for a couple of hours.
And it'll at least double in size.
Now, I'll add the ingredients to this.
The fruit that makes it the celebration bread it's gonna be.
I'm using dry Cranberries for a little sourness,
mixed peel and flaked almonds.
The zest of two lemons...
And some fragrant orange zest.
But do try to avoid the bitter white pith.
I'll just add the juice of half a lemon in there as well.
Begin to fold the mixture into the middle.
Just incorporate all those ingredients together into the dough.
It's that heady smell
of zest and the fruit inside it.
I'm going to bake this in a tin like this, it's about a seven-inch tin.
I've put a bit of butter on the side and the bottom
and I've cut out a little cartouche.
A cartouche is just basically a circle of silicone paper or baking parchment.
Push that down at the bottom, get your loaf...
And pop it in there.
Just press it down a little bit.
And then you leave that now to rise. It'll take about an hour, hour-and-a-half,
because there's so much stuff in there.
It'll just struggle to come up a little bit. But leave it to come up until it sits
above the level of the ring and it'll be ready to go into the oven.
This is a great basic enriched dough.
You don't have to stick to this choice of nuts or fruit.
For a more christmassy flavour, try tangerine and Clementine zest,
or spices like cinnamon and ground cloves.
That'll go straight in the oven now, 200 degrees for 20 minutes.
Now, while that's baking, when it gets to the brown stage
what we're going to do is put a topping on it.
We've got two egg whites in here, to which I'll add
ground almonds, caster sugar
and just mix all this together. And it forms a little paste.
It will create a nice shine and on top of that we'll put flaked almonds
and it gives a nice crispy top to your bread.
Coated with its sweet, nut-crammed, crunchy topping,
it goes back in the oven for another 15 minutes.
Let's have a try of this.
You can tell it's a bread because you've got that slight bit of chew to it,
that little bit of tautness that you feel on the crumb.
Perfect.
It's a great bread.
I'll have another piece.
Absolutely delicious.
Recently, people have been getting into baking in a big way,
with more and more groups coming together to share recipes,
tips and their best bakes.
From the band of bakers baking club in South east London,
I'm being joined by Naomi, John and Gemma.
They're all pretty confident about making cakes and biscuits
but the idea of enriched breads is more testing
so I'm going to show them how to make one that anyone can manage.
Today I'm going to show you how to make a very classic British dish.
A classic lardy cake.
Now, this has been around in this country for a long, long time
and it's a celebration dish. It's normally eaten around harvest time.
- I know you're partof a baking club... - Yes.
You make cakes, breads?
It's a mix, really. A lot of cakes,
- Yeah. - a few savouries, pastries, things like that.
So you're going to be all right at bread, then, aren't you? Especially with me!
To start with you need to make a base dough.
Again, it's a standard bread dough of flour, yeast and salt,
but this time it's not suitable for vegetarians.
Lard is fantastic, actually, in a bread, and it does have an inherent flavour.
We're using the butter and lard together.
Just use all the water up and then it should all disappear.
Get your hands in there now, pick up the residue and push it into the dough.
It's all about incorporating your ingredients.
Now to the kneading.
Flatten the dough down onto the table.
And everyone has an opinion on how vigorous to be.
Come on!
Well, I do.
Someone's just stood you up and you're left there in the rain
and you're thinking, "I'll kill him."
That's how you do it, how you get the energy that you need to do this.
That's all you do to someone that's stood you up? Is that it? Is that the worst you can do?
Roll it up...
And then tuck it under.
Beautiful and smooth, isn't it?
- Mine's got a funny dimple inthe middle. - That's ok. That's fine.
What we'll do is get your bowls back again.
Cover it up
and we'll leave this until it's grown a bit.
Once it's been proved for an hour, it's time to layer the lardy cake.
What I want you to do is roll it roughly to the length of the rolling pin.
Maybe a little bit longer.
Take a third of the lard
and then just spread it equally over the dough.
The same with the butter.
Break up your sugar a little bit, spread that over the top.
And then a third of the fruit.
Push them into the dough itself.
Now, you want to fold this over a third.
Then you grab this bit here and fold that over the top as well.
Then what you want to do is roll it out to exactly the same shape again.
- How's that? Sort of a rectangle. - Ok.
So you've got a layer of dough, fruit, dough, fruit, dough.
"Dey do, dough, don't dey, dough?" Ok?
So, what you then need to do is then build another layer.
Historically, when ovens were only fired once a week...
Fold it again.
Any dough not used for making the daily bread
was transformed into richer products, like lardy cake,
earning their alternative slightly-less-appetizing name,
scrap cakes.
Now you're beginning to see the fruit coming through.
After folding three times, roll out to the size and shape of your baking tin.
Use your fingers, just to neaten it off.
Once its risen for a further half-an-hour, it goes into the oven
at 220 degrees for about 35 minutes.
I just hope our lardy cakes will be the toast of the baking club's members
who've assembled with their celebration breads.
Hi, we just wanted to say thanks for coming. It's nice to see you all again.
And thanks for bringing so many of your breads. They look delicious.
Dig in and enjoy and have a good time.
Leave some space for the lardy cakes as well which these guys have been making.
It seems rude not to offer some... judgments.
- It's a little tanned. - A little tanned?!
It's a lovely shape.
They taste great.
It's like doughnuts in South Africa.
They really do taste good.
They do look like my garden after we haven't cleaned it after the dog...
Just put a bit of coconut on it!
Having done my bit to encourage some enthusiastic bakers,
it's time for us all to taste the lardy cakes.
That's really good.
- That's very nice, isn't it? - It's very rich.
It's so light. That's really tasty. They're all very good. They'd pass the test with me.
I don't know if it was doing it all together, but it was a lot easier than I would
- have expected. Yeah. - It's simpler than you expected?
Now you've all got to try it.
You've got to eat it all.
Lardy cake, as the name suggests,
skirts the boarder between bread and cake.
My next recipe is the Danish pastry.
Though, tellingly, in Denmark it is known as wienerbrod, or viennese bread.
Chilling in the fridge for one hour, my basic bread dough has been enriched with one egg,
milk and sugar.
Rolling pin in the middle.
Roll up and roll down.
The enrichment, however, doesn't end there.
Over here are the magic ingredients.
Good quality unsalted butter...
Which is very cold.
Bang out your butter.
I'm going to fold this butter into the dough, just like the lardy cake,
and itll give my Danish pastry its characteristic flakiness.
Perfect. Move the butter to the dough.
Grab the ends, fold it over half the butter...
Like so. So, you have the basics of a pastry.
Dough, butter, dough, butter, dough.
Knock it out from the middle up.
Middle down.
If you go from the top all the way up,
you're just pushing all the butter up, all the way up to the top.
You roll up.
Roll down.
Fold it over.
Fold it over again.
Now you need to chill this down
and the only reason being is that butter
is now soft and I want to harden it up again.
Then we roll it again, fold it again. You need to fold it three times.
Then it's ready to use.
When you've done that the dough is ready to be rolled out.
quite thin, so about 5mm in thickness.
Tack one side down to the bench. You'll see why later.
It's now ready for the filling of caramelized onions,
mushrooms and a good grating on emmenthal cheese.
Neatly fold over the front edge and begin to roll up towards you.
Now you understand why we've got the tension.
By tacking it down to the work surface,
you're able to roll it up tightly.
Take off the ends, which will have next-to-no filling.
Divide the roll up evenly.
There we have it.
Beautiful mushroom and onion and emmenthal pastries ready to rise.
So they're going to be left to prove now in a bag.
After proving for a couple of hours, brush with egg wash
and top with more emmenthal.
These are going to be baked at 200 degrees for 20 minutes.
Buttery.
Ah, it's gorgeous.
For this and other recipes in the series go to the BBC food website.
It's not surprising something so delicious is eaten all over the world.
But there's another Scandinavian country now putting
their enriched breads on the British baking map.
- Hello, Daniel. Nice to meet you. - Hello, Paul.
I'm in north London to meet Daniel Carlson,
a baker from Gothenburg in Sweden.
He's going to show me a classic Swedish celebration bread - semla.
I've heard all about semla. I know a little bit, its name, and that's it.
Its supposed to be eaten on shrove Tuesday.
So you're supposed to eat yourself fat before lent so you could fast.
Yeah, I've done that a few times, to be honest.
So where does the name semla come from?
The name comes from the Latin semilia, I think,
which means fine flour.
Ok. Now, I see a load of ingredients in here. Is this cardamom?
That's cardamom. Whole cardamom and ground.
Cardamom is really popular in sweet stuff in Sweden.
The basic bread mix is strong white flour, yeast, salt,
a little sugar and a little bit of butter.
Is that the whole lot goes in there? That's a lot.
Yes.
If I break this up first... have you ever done this by hand before?
- In school. A long time ago Yeah. - In school?!
Further enrichment comes from a couple of eggs and some full-fat milk.
Is it normally quite a dry mix or a wet mix?
I want the dough to be a little bit wetter for these ones.
I like doing things by hand.
If you get a problem with your electric in any way at all,
you know you've always got your hands to fall back on.
Being hands-on has its limits... When you're getting on a bit.
How long would you normally mix this in a mixer?
- Ten minutes. Ten minutes in a mixer?! Right. Ok.
There's your dough. Stick that in a mixer.
Once proved, baked and cooled,
the buns are ready for the next stage...
You mustn't get the lid too thin
because then they will dry out.
In Sweden, shrove Tuesday is know as fettisdagen or fat Tuesday
and, preparing for it, Daniel will personally fill a couple of thousand of these.
What's in there exactly?
Most bakeries have their own secret recipe for the cream
because that's our competition in Sweden,
the best semla in the city.
You can't tell me the exact recipe, but rough ingredients?
Marzipan or almond paste, and some put custard inside as well.
The cream.
Not many calories in this, then, Daniel, is there?
No, none at all.
Eat yourself slim, that's what I say.
- We need to do one more thing. - Ok. Icing sugar.
- And that's it? - And then that's your semla.
Wow. I wouldn't have expected that from Sweden
because it's got a little bit of britishness to it as well.
Even with my big mouth, this might be a challenge.
Where to start?!
Now, most people take the lid off first.
Well, thanks for telling me that now!
That cardamom with that sweetness coming through from the marzipan and the cream...
- It's delicious, isn't it? - Delicious.
The more traditional way to serve it at home is with warm milk
infused with a stick of cinnamon.
It almost turns into a pudding, doesn't it?
Yes.
When was the last time you had it like this?
Last pancake day.
- Good, isn't it? - I really enjoy that.
I think the marzipan and then you get the coolness of the cream
and then the hot coming from the milk...
I think the hot milk is a fantastic idea.
When you were a boy, was this one of your favorites?
I think it's everyone's favourite in Sweden.
You won't just have one semla. You'll try and eat as many as possible.
You want to eat as many as possible!
I feel my family will be getting these lovely, comforting buns,
as well as pancakes, next shrove Tuesday.
I've saved something till last that will test even the keenest baker.
It's a table-topping celebration bread,
inspired by six years I spent working in the mediterranean.
I'm going to make a savoury brioche crown
which is going to be filled with mozzarella, parma ham
and a little bit of parmesan cheese.
I'm enriching the basic dough of strong white flour, salt and yeast
with eggs and milk.
I'm using a mixer for speed, as this wet dough takes a long time to work by hand.
What I'm using is the hook.
And let that mix together.
What you're doing is fully developing a dough by mixing it properly,
making it glutinous, even with the eggs in.
To create the glorious yellow brioche dough, start adding butter.
And that will soften down the mix. You won't be able to work with it
so you have to chill it down before you use it.
It's a classic way of making a brioche.
A beautiful, soft, sticky dough.
The butter's gone into the already glutinous bread
and made it shiny. It's in there. It's a beautiful glossy mixture
and that's exactly how it should be.
You need to bring out your food wrap.
When you've chilled it down, the butter solidifies in the dough
and then you can work with it.
So, grab your brioche, it comes out in one lump.
Pop this straight in the fridge.
After a couple of hours in the fridge,
make sure your ingredients are lined up and get ready to rumble.
You have to work fast with this dough before the butter melts.
What I'm going to do is roll this out to a big rectangle.
I'm going to tack one bit down to the table here.
Just like the savoury Danish pastry, tack this down at the end nearest to you.
Start with your parma ham.
Lay them all over the top of the dough.
I love parma ham. I'm only putting things in that I like.
I think the parma ham really adds to this recipe.
On top of that, I'm going to put some buffalo mozzarella.
Just rip pieces and put it all over the top.
It'll take at least three. You want plenty of cheese in here.
Add some basil to this.
Just roughly tear it up.
I mean, basil and mozzarella, what's there not to like?
And then finally, get some good parmesan.
This is the bit where you roll it up.
Fold over the top bit
and then you begin to roll up.
As you roll it, just pull it back to give you that tension that you need.
Taking off some of that excess flour...
And then you need to seal it. There.
Put a little bit of flour on the bench...
And then roll it out.
Start in the middle and then gently...
Don't force it out, you don't want to rip it,
just nice and gently roll it. Trim off the ends.
Well, that was the easy part.
And now what you want to do is cut it down the middle.
Do this carefully as you need to make both halves
as close to the same size as you can.
Now you've got to bring these two twists together.
Hand in a bit of flour.
One goes clockwise and the other hand goes anti-clockwise.
Twist. Twist. Twist.
Twist.
It's important to do it quickly to keep the filling inside.
Pinch the ends slightly, just to taper them off
and then turn it into a circle
and then join it together by pushing it together.
And there you have your basic couronne.
Crown is what it means.
Now I'm going to pop that onto a baking tray.
Lift it off quickly, pop it on.
Add a little bit of flour to that.
And that's it.
To get to that stage, you should feel very proud of yourselves.
After rising for half-an-hour, coat with egg wash...
And a bit of parmesan.
That goes in the oven at 200 degrees.
To go with the couronne, I decided to do a spicy salad
with the main addition of...
Pumpkin.
To a base of spinach leaves, add pitted black olives and goat's cheese.
Add pumpkin which has been roasted in olive oil, chilli flakes and cumin...
And some gently wilted pak choi.
The simple dressing is made with chopped spring onions,
red wine vinegar and olive oil.
That goat's cheese is melting now with the warm pumpkin.
After about 25 minutes in the oven, the crown is ready.
Hopefully, my lunch guests Gemma, Naomi and Charlie from the band of bakers baking club
will enjoy my crowning glory.
Here you are. Let me grab you a slice. Look at that.
Wow.
What did they say about your lardy cakes for real?
- Did they like them? - I think they did, yeah.
I took some to my neighbours and they really liked them.
Tuck in, guys. Haven't had a piece myself yet.
- Is that basil running through the bottom? - Yes. Yeah, it is.
- It's very good. - Raise your glass to baking bread...
And, of course, your baking club.
- Cheers. - Cheers.
In this series, I hope I've inspired you to try your hand at baking bread at home.
I've taken you on a journey through bread, from classic British loaves
to international flat breads...
Oh, no. That's a disaster.
Sophisticated sourdoughs to simple soda breads...
Don't you like it?
You will have learnt how to mix,
knead and prove,
how to bake the perfect crust,
achieve chewy, airy textures
and the richest flavours.
That's the fella.
I've also shown you how to transform those breads into meals
suitable for any time of day or night.
I used to have this for lunch. And dinner, actually.
And if I could have it, I'd have it for breakfast as well.
I reckon baking a loaf is one of the most satisfying things you'll ever do
and I believe that making bread for your friends and family
is fundamentally just a way of saying,
"this is home."
Happy baking.
Subtitles by red bee media ltd
Synch & corrections by Vegemite