Hello and welcome to the Healthy Bit podcast. This podcast is designed to talk about all the
things that we can do to stack healthy habits to hopefully make a better, healthier life for
ourselves so that in the future you'll thank us for it. So I'm Hayley Jarville, I'm a specialist
physiotherapist and I want to welcome my co-host Henry Herbert. Hello, thank you Hayley. Yeah,
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It really helps our small fledgling project to spread its wings and fly.
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I hope you enjoy this episode of The Healthy Bit.
And we have some very exciting things to talk about today.
So Henry is amazing as a baker and a chef
And he is going to tell us all about how we can make easy, easy, foolproof bread at home
And he's going to tell us lots of top tips on how we can make our bread as delicious as he makes it in his lovely bakery
So first of all, Henry, just tell us a little bit about your background and about your bakery
Yeah, so thank you Hayley
So I'm a fifth generation baker, baking in the jeans, if you will.
There's quite often literally flour in my trousers.
Yeah, so I'm part of a family business, Hobbs House Bakery in the Cotswold in the southwest of England.
We've been going for over 100 years, so a whole of baking heritage.
And I work there with my brother and my uncle, my sister-in-law, my father, and lots of other members.
artisan bread that we sell through our own shops, but also to lots of wholesale customers,
whether that's farm shops or pubs, et cetera.
So we send to a whole wide range of customers.
And I guess for me, I run a bakery, but I also make bread at home, which might seem like
a slightly odd thing to do.
But actually, I get just a real pleasure from baking at home.
And I guess it helps me feel connected.
My day job is sales.
So actually, I'm mostly in an office answering emails or making phone calls, et cetera, looking
it spreadsheet so actually it's nice to you know not just do it in theory but do it in practice
so baking at home actually i find a really enjoyable thing and um if you're not privileged
to work for a bakery that makes really good quality products and you're you know buying from
the supermarket or you you know you don't have a huge amount of options actually home baking is a
can be a great solution to get proper bread uh into your weekly diet definitely definitely and i
think people think that they need to leave bread out of their diet because they think that that's
going to be a healthier choice and actually that's sort of incorrect really and um and i think you'll
probably have lots to say on this as well henry but people tend to build up um a lot of intolerances
or even allergens to or allergic reactions sometimes to the body's reactions of like sort
of presenting as if they're allergic to it um because of the some of the ingredients or things
that they've used inside supermarket breads that can sometimes kind of feel less healthy as an
option making making things from home like you say with the ingredients that you know you've got in
front of you and actually you can make bread really quite healthy can't you definitely so i think the
first point you made about uh people um the bread you know can be part of a healthy and a varied diet
i know i've got kids and actually often you know they come back from football or rugby or whatever
or back from school and they're just hungry and they need something to eat.
And often bread is that kind of easy go-to because, you know,
it's a piece of toast or a quick sandwich or, you know,
something to dip into some soup.
You know, bread is a great filler for us.
Unfortunately, bread has been probably one of the worst products
in terms of we've kind of screwed around with it
and we've tried to make it do lots of things that bread shouldn't do
and we've tried to make it as cheap as possible.
So I guess it is that kind of, you know,
it makes up a big part of people's diets.
and really the bread that you, well, not all of it,
but a lot of the bread you buy in the supermarket is,
I think we'll look back in history and be like,
this wasn't a good idea.
You know, we've changed the nature of it.
We've tried to make it as cheap as possible
and, you know, last as long as possible.
In doing so, we've had to degrade the quality of the ingredients.
We've rushed the process so that you're no longer getting
that full fermentation.
And also we're putting in a load of UPFs and, you know,
stabilizers and emulsifiers and e-numbers and all sorts of other ingredients actually just
down to eating your diet you know i don't think so actually making bread at home uh can put you
back into back in control and yes you can make it as complicated as you want but actually yeah
it's not as difficult it does require a little bit of planning but actually if you're looking to
um you know really kind of strip out um what you're eating and go back to um you know ingredients
that you're in control of,
making a home can be done
and it's possible.
I think for me,
it's about thinking about
what are your requirements
and what do you need?
For me, when I'm baking,
I'm often, you know,
I'm baking on the weekend.
You know, maybe we're going
to Radson's house
and we've got some people coming over
and I want a really, you know,
lovely kind of artisan,
crusty, bubbly sourdough,
something that's great
in the centre of the table
and it's, you know,
make the house full of wonderful smells.
But it does require quite a lot of effort.
And it's probably not the best place to start.
You know, I've grown up working for a bakery to make quite a lot of bread in my life.
But if you've never really done it before, it's probably the worst places.
It's probably the equivalent of having never run and then deciding to do a marathon on day one.
Actually, you need to build up to that marathon.
So actually, there's a far simpler way to get into bread making.
And then you can work out.
Yeah, because don't you need a starter or something for us nowadays?
So you need to have something that's on the go all the time.
So for people listening who want to kind of break away from eating supermarket bread and they know, OK, yeah, it's all about organic and trying to eat as good as possible.
Where would you start with even just the ingredients?
Is using organic flour really necessary, Henry?
And where do we start with it or what's the easiest recipe?
The thing we say at Hobsack's Bakery to home bakers,
because we get a lot of people come through our either through our cookery school or they email us or they come to bakery tours they often ask us and the main one is you know what flour shop and we always say um you want to
find a good quality flower and you want to stick with it so don't um don't shop around and you know
buy some from mozzers and then a little bit from waitrose and tescos and buy different brands
because you could call that being a bit of a flower floozy but the issue with that is that all white
flour quite often looks the same and it's only when you're using it do you then start to feel
that it reacts quite differently. Now flour makes up the main ingredient in bread so if you're
constantly changing the flour source you're going to have really varying results. Now if you're
kind of an amateur and you're new to it you could get put off quite quickly. You might make a
beautiful loaf and then two weeks later you go again with a different flour and you think it's
going to act the same and it's completely different and you get you know these four loaves and then
you feel disappointed and it might put you off so i would say find a good flan stick with it now
you know if you're going to the supermarket for me personally i would always would look for organic
just because i prefer to you know buy stuff that you know hasn't got pesticides etc on it and
actually the difference in price from organic to conventional is not so much but really if you if
you're going to get seriously into bread making you're going to save your bacon bread once a week
actually probably the best thing you can do is buy yourself a 16 kilo sack so there's plenty of good
mills out there so we use uh shipton mill but there's lots of others um there's mac use a great
one wild farms you know plenty to that you can order online and they'll send it directly to your
door so you get good economies of scale there so you're gonna get you know the price per kilo is
gonna be significantly cheaper and then you've got one consistent flour that you can work with
and experiment now when it comes to bread making you need a flour with a high protein content
doesn't need to be super high you know so anything above kind of 11 12 percent would make perfectly
good bread and the way you can check that is on the nutritionals on the label it'll say you know
the calories per 100 grams it'll have the sugars and the carbohydrates and there'll be one of the
same protein and you just see what the number is and as long as that is above say 11 you'll be able
to make bread now if it's a plain flour it'll be more like eight percent and that's going to be
great for making biscuits or a victoria sponge but as soon as you try and make bread with it it's
It's not going to have the protein, which is required because when you add water, it becomes gluten.
You get this beautiful gluten network, which is what brings bread to life.
So just a little bit of chemistry here.
Whether you've got a sourdough or dried yeast or fresh yeast, what happens is when the yeast starts to multiply and feed on the sugars in the flour, it starts doubling.
So every 20 minutes, they double and double again.
And it kicks off two things.
alcohol, so that's why yeast is used
for making beer or wine,
and carbon dioxide. And now
the carbon dioxide is what we
need to trap within our bread, because
as those little bubbles kind of like
bubble up, they get caught in this gluten network
and it's a bit like a balloon, like a
kind of mesh, and then it kind of
inflates and lifts up, and you end up with
a beautiful risen loaf with
lots of little holes all over it. And really,
those little holes have a flavour,
so when you bite into it, you get that lovely kind of
flavour. And
And whereas if you try making that with a low-gluten flour,
sorry, a low-protein flour, you won't get that.
The CO2 will just disappear out of the loaf
and you'll get a very dense brink, which no one wants.
That's amazing.
And for somebody who regularly checks labels on foods,
I don't think I've ever checked a flour bag for its ingredients
or its nutritional value.
Because like you say, you just need to think,
right, I've got the organic flour, that's fine,
and that's what I'm using.
does also the age of the flour matter so if you've kept it a while and where's the best place to keep
your flour well if you're good so if you if you've got really into bread making you might have bought
yourself a little home mill so i've actually got mill at home um it's a bit like a kind of coffee
grinder because grinding up grain and when you grind your own grain sorry this is this is quite
niche you have to use the flour within a kind of two to three hour window otherwise it um a lot of
like um enzymatic reactions kick off when you crush the flour and then the flour becomes very
unstable by volatile so you then have to age it for about two to three weeks so when we buy flour
from the mill it's not milled fresh they they mill it and then they store it for a couple of
weeks and then they deliver it to the bakery and then that kind of settles down and you get a much
more stable product but once it's milled the the shelf like i think a year i mean probably you find
after a year maybe the weevils start moving in that's normally a good time to um get a new stack
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
So in terms of the simplest bread you can make,
because I've seen sort of,
you obviously see various recipes, don't you?
Some using just the water and the salt and the sugar
and the flour and everything and the yeast.
And some where they're using olive oils and things.
So what would you say is a good kind of reliable recipe
that turns out pretty well every time
as a simple way to get into bread meat?
Simple way.
For me, I always make a kilo.
We'll start with a kilo of flour
because it'll make you two decent sized loaves now,
which for me, that would be enough for my family for the week.
And yes, it'd be fresh for the, you know, fresh hamper,
if it's the first couple of ladies and then toast the rest of it.
Or you can freeze it if you want to keep it a little bit longer.
So if you've got a kilo of flour, then for that, you want to add liquid.
So water is super important.
And it's all about hydration levels.
For a kind of simple loaf, it'd go kind of 55 to 60 pounds.
5% of water to the flour.
So that's about 600 grams of water.
So you'd weigh that, in it goes.
Then you need about 20%, sorry, 2% salt.
So if you've got a kilo of flour,
then you're looking at about 20 grams of salt,
which does seem like quite a lot.
Unseasoned bread is really disgusting.
Then you need some raising agent.
At home, I would always just use dry bees.
You can just buy the little sachets.
You can get a quick action one
or just the normal dry yeast.
I always actually go for the normal dry yeast
because it doesn't have the quick action one
has some extra kind of funky ingredients
that make it work a bit faster
and I'm not in that much of a hurry.
But just the sachets...
They already come in the, is it 7.5 grams?
One of those sachets will do a kilo loaf.
You could put two in if you want.
It not going to make a huge amount of difference but essentially a sachet is fine and you can get fresh yeast but it only lasts about a week and you can freeze it so unless you really keen and you want to you know we actually we do
sell it at our bakery so people turn up and just buy it by the 50 grams if you're using fresh yeast
you do double the amount of dry yeast because it's less constant so if the recipe says 10 grams of
dry yeast use 20 grams of fresh yeast so just right um and then so once you've got your flour
your water your salt and your yeast well then you're good to go so what you've got to do is
you've got to mix it until all of the the wet air mixed into the into the dry and um and then you
need to knead it so if you've got a kitchen aid you can put it on the dough hook and get it going
for about eight minutes or so um but actually you know i'm a big fan of using my hands and
getting a good stretch on and really what you're trying to do is um you're putting your energy
into that dough it's going to warm it up oh yeah also sorry i should have mentioned that you need
to make sure when you put your water in that it's tepid so like a disappointing bath so the
optimal temperature is about 26 degrees so when you kind of dip it in it's like you definitely
you know it's cold um and so it's not really that warm it's sort of like more like what you'd bath
a baby in or is that yeah exactly yeah like a baby yeah and that that's um uh just really good
or activating the yeast and getting everything going.
And actually with bread make, you just want to get some energy into it
and get it moving.
If you start with cold water, it's fine, but everything just takes a lot longer.
And then the temptation is that you don't prove it enough
or ferment it and develop enough flavor.
So now you've mixed it all together and then you need to knead it
and you need to knead it for about 10 minutes.
There's no really kind of shortcut in this.
So what I would do is try and find a song that lasts about 10 minutes or so
and press it and then just you know you've got to get working and you can get arms and stuff
and make sure you clear a nice bit of work surface you've got a bit space and um and then what what
is really helpful is if you have a dough scraper now um these are basically like a little plastic
scraper that you can use to just scrape things up again um and the dough will feel sticky and the
temptation is to add more flour but actually if you add more flour you'll end up um uh you'll end
up with a drier loaf so um so it starts off sticky it's sticking to your hand actually as you start
developing that gluten and getting that stretch you'll find that the the dough becomes kind of
silky and soft and it becomes less sticky and it kind of holds it shape a bit better and then and
that happens after about 10 minutes of kneading so and and that's that's probably one of the biggest
common mistakes we see is that people freak out it's really wet so they add more flour and then
by the time they started kneading it then very dry and then the loaf is very dense and doesn't
power yeah it needs that a bit of moisture for it to be able to express itself so now you've
kneaded your dough it's all nice and soft and stretchy and it's feeling good you now need to
give this what we call a bulk ferment and this is basically the first proof so the yeast is just
starting to kick into gear every 20 minutes it doubles so at the moment there's very little
activity so we put it into a bowl cover it with a tea towel or you know something to stop it drying
out and then you want to put it somewhere warm now at this time of year if you've got your central
heating on your ambient temperature be fine if your house is very very cold you can find a kind
of warm place to put it that's by your boiler some people find they put it in their oven which is
with the light on so that can kind of heat up to about 30 degrees but it needs to be somewhere warm
and it'll take between 45 minutes to an hour and it'll essentially balloon up and double in size
so that's the first box men and um and then you take it out and you knock it back and um and that
expels lots of the air and um the good thing with um dry yeast or fresh yeast is that you get two
rides out of it and um the first ride it's all a bit kind of volatile a bit crazy the second ride
is a bit more consistent but also in the second one you'll get more flavor so you're you're giving
it a longer ferment and at this point you can decide what you're going to do with it so you
could make little rolls and you put my tray and let them prove up and you'd have um you probably
from a kilo dough you'd get a dozen rolls or so which because of sandwiches or whatnot you could
use it for pizza so it would make quite a basic pizza but it's not going to be like a beautiful
sourdough one but it's you know your kids would like it you know or you can if you've got a tin
just a little bit of olive oil inside the tin stock sticking and then you want to just mold it
and it's kind of hard to describe it but essentially you're looking to kind of fold it in on itself so
you've got like a kind of sausage and then you want a seam along the bottom and then you turn
that over and the seam goes on on the bottom of the tin and then again you cover it with um
with a tea towel and you let that prove up again for another 45 minutes to an hour until it's you
know coming off the top of the tin and um and then whilst that proving you preheat your oven
so you need to crank your oven up to like 220 degrees or so and then you chuck the um well
you place very carefully the tin into the oven and then i always just put a tray at the bottom
and chuck a cup of um water into the oven and then you shut the door and then you leave it for about
15 minutes without opening the door and what that steam does is it does a couple of things one is it
it creates a really steamy environment so as the dough starts to heat up in that kind of intense
heat it stops it from setting so it allows it to kind of open up and grow a bit more but also it
gives you a really lovely crust now this is when you're baking when you're getting bread from a
bakery they'll have professional bread ovens and often ovens at home aren't really designed for
bread making they don't have the steam it allows to escape quite quite rapidly because they don't
have um they're not fully sealed so you just have to experiment a little bit but i find that mine
if i put a tray in bottom and chuck the kind of you know half a pint of water in and that keeps
enough of the moisture in the oven for about 15 minutes then you open the door let all the steam
out and then if they're still watering the tray remove the tray and then allow another 10 minutes
or so for the loaf just to kind of brown up in a dry season.
And then obviously the main thing you've got to make sure is that it's cooked all the way
through.
So the easiest way to check is to take it out of the tin and give it a little tap.
And if it sounds kind of hollow, like if it looks kind of golden brown, smells delicious,
it smells like bread.
If it's kind of pale, flaccid and looks raw, it's probably not.
So you just have to use your common sense here.
But generally speaking, 25 minutes at 200 degrees,
it's going to be pretty much cooked.
And then once the loaf is baked if you want to get really technical you can stick a digital thermometer in And as long as it above like 90 degrees then the inside is cooked If it registering 40 degrees you
still going to have raw dough in there. So you need to cook it a little bit longer. And particularly
if you're baking really big lobes and you're a bit nervous about whether it's cooked inside or
baked inside, that's a good way of doing it. And then you need to let it cool down. You should
never try and cut up red pressure out the oven. What happens is all of the starches and the flour
are all kind of scrambled up
and so the inside will be very fragile.
And then as it cools down,
the starches start to form together
and form these strong bonds.
And that takes about 25 to 30 minutes or so.
Then you can cut up and you can devour.
And I'd say the one downside of making bread at home
is that on the day of baking,
you'll consume probably more bread than you require.
But hey, come to the water.
No, that's so good, Henry.
And you mentioned a couple of times using a tea towel.
And do you use a damp one or just a dry one?
Yeah, just a dry, clean one.
I mean, you could use a bit of cling film.
It's just essentially to stop it skinning over.
And then with that dough, so that's a very simple dough.
If you wanted to give it a bit more shelf life and make it a bit softer, you add some fat.
So the easiest fat to add are either olive oil or butter.
Butter will give you a slightly more kind of a softer kind of briochey feel.
whereas olive oil you'll get a slightly more kind of crispy feel.
But again, any kind of fat will improve shelf life.
You can add sugar, though I don't tend to add sugar because I don't think it's required.
Or the other thing you can do...
Yeah, that's interesting.
Sugar, because it's supposed to activate the yeast or something, isn't it?
So you don't use the sugar.
It's a lot of botox.
So the sugar does feed the yeast, but there's sugar in the flour.
You know, because flour is a carbohydrate.
right is sugar isn't it and um so yeah you don't you don't need to add sugar i think that's i think
that's one of those like someone must have written the recipe in like the 80s before they
you know when it was fashionable and then no one's ever checked it and then every time they just
google bread recipe they just keep you cycling the same one so anyway don't add sugar it's not
needed um you can put jam and honey on your bread i'm not gonna you know you don't need it in bread
um you do need to salt though salt is super important it not only gives it flavor but also
So if you don't put salt in, the salt helps regulate the yeast.
So without the salt, you can get very volatile breadfruit in.
So it's a bit like a kind of parental guidance on some teenagers out in Magaluf for the first time.
The salt helps just, you know, it keeps them in check just a little bit.
The other thing the salt does is that it helps give it really nice health.
Without the salt, you'll get a very kind of dull, quite an unattractive loaf.
We always know at the bakery when the salt's been forgotten because the bread comes out and it looks dreadful.
and it's normal salt.
Oh, that's interesting, is it?
So salt is important.
The other thing you can do,
which I know that you're always talking about
trying to get more fiber in your diet,
is that you could put in some wholemeal flour.
It's great.
That's got the whole grain,
and so you're getting all of the nutritionals with it,
all the fiber and all the brown, et cetera.
But when you add some wholemeal flour,
I wouldn't go 100% wholemeal straight away
because it does make the dough tricky to handle.
White flour is certainly easier.
but maybe start off with 25 percent so if you've got a kilo of white flour make it 750 and then do
250 grams of whole milk flour and then you just need to up your moisture contents your water by
maybe 10 percent so if you've got 550 grams of water make it 600 or 650 just add a bit extra
because the bran will absorb more water than the white and um and so you'll end up with a very dry
low so if you're making whole millet just needs to be slightly wetter um that makes sense yeah
that makes sense yeah does it matter what salt you use like um i assume a table salt's a no-no
and do you prefer like the cornish sea salts and that kind of thing i mean i'm in the west country
so i like cornish sea salt um but you could use any any kind of flaky salt or any any sea
just do um but yeah sea salt's fine okay that sounds great there's loads of top tips in that
henry i'm sure yeah i was doing the i didn't put the water in when you um when you bake the bread
so that's a that's a thing and i was probably one of those people who um adds the flour because
it's sticking um and when when you mention you're needing it so you're literally taking the bread
out and not putting it onto any floured surface to start with you're just going for it straight
away you need it yeah and the thing with bread making is that you know this is a 20 minute
introduction it's a lifetime of learning you know for something so simple and once you kind of dive
into that rabbit hole you realize it you know it goes deep and it gets complicated really quickly
and a lot of it is misguided or it confuses people or it puts people off and I think for me
when it comes to bread making so we have a cookery school and we get a lot of people coming in
and and often I asked them right at the beginning like you know how many of you expect them to leave
here like a basing ninja like someone who can like you know make this a wonderful sourdough that's
gonna look beautiful and everyone puts their hands up and you're like that's not gonna happen
today i can like start you on your journey but that requires probably 10 000 hours of practicing
until you're gonna be a master i'm sorry so i think for me bread making it's like if you've
never done it before just start simple don't don't overcomplicate and you can work up to it
it's same probably with exercise don't start on a lift you know the heaviest weights start low and
build up and actually get your confidence and then you'll get better and there's some great
communities out there there's lots of good cookery spools there's loads of good information online
and i'll share this recipe and i'll share my sourdough recipe and i think we've even got some
um video links but yeah it's it's a wonderful thing to be able to do and if you're looking to
yeah take back control of um um all the ingredients that go into your body particularly when it comes
to bread then making it from scratch you know that is a great step exactly and like you said
in just 20 minutes, you've now shown us how to make a white loaf and a wholemeal loaf. And it's
lovely because you've given us such clear guidance, Henry. It's really easy to follow.
And I'm sure everyone's going to feel super proud of the bread that they make having listened to
this. And we'll just feel more confident knowing that they're doing the right thing. So that's
super. So thanks so much for sharing that, Henry. I know I can't wait to give it a go. And I can let
you know how we get on. Thanks, Hayley. Well, till next time. Yes, see you on the next episode.