The other week, in the interests of healthy food for the bump and because Jackie had added some yeast to last month's shopping it became time to make some bread. To give us a bit of a nice simple head-start we turned to Nigel Slater's Appetite which has a recipe involving yeast, flour, water and a little salt (which I forgot to put in). Acting on a tip from Alan (Waters) I used some of our OO pasta flour in the mix - not exactly sure if this makes a difference as it's a first attempt but it will be interesting to see what happens when we vary the flour over coming months.

I stuck to Slater's quantities and once the thing had risen we realised that it was going to make a huge quantity of bread and duly split it into two respectable loaves. One for the freezer and one to eat straight away, still hot and smothered in butter! Not bad for a first effort we thought. For future loaves we would like to make the crust a little softer (lower temp?) and get a more airy texture (more kneading?). Remembering to put the salt in might also help.