Get healthy – use your loaf

bowl with a teaspoon of water, mix, cover and leave overnight at room temperature. The next day, chuck half away (so it’s got enough food and won’t become too sour), then add another teaspoon each of flour and water. Repeat, then by day five you should have a bubbling, active starter ready to make bread with. “If you just leave flour and water together, it’s astonishing,” says Lindsay.

Keep your starter in the fridge. Then bring it out the day before you need it, so it can warm up and begin bubbling again. Starters can live forever if you keep feeding them.

You can use most flours for getting your starter going, but bread and rye flours work best. Lindsay says: “Just never use buckwheat flour – I don’t know what happens to it, but it is foul smelling.” Modern Baker use their own version, made from four types of heritage grain flour.

Cut back on your kitchen cleaning regime if you want a bubbling, biodiverse starter. “The more hygienic your kitchen, the less active your starter,” explains Lindsay, “so don’t use bleach. You can use your hands to mix it in fact, as there is yeast on your hands - you want all that good bacteria in your starter.”

Sourdough is a natural preservative, a loaf of the stuff will last much longer than your average fresh-baked bread (roughly five to six days). Sourdough freezes really well too.

Be tough on your dough when it comes to kneading it. “People often are really tentative with dough, but you don’t have to be,” Lindsay promises. Proving baskets are not necessary, but they are cute and “leave lovely imprints in the bread”. Modern Baker use bamboo ones. Just remember to flour them liberally, or your dough will get stuck and you’ll “spend hours trying to unstick it” says Lindsay. “Sourdough tends to be stickier than yeasted dough.” And expect to end up covered in flour. “It’s a bit like being a weightlifter with all the chalk.”

Modern Baker: A New Way To Bake, Ebury Press, priced £26.

Modern Baker’s range of baked goods are available in Selfridges, Planet Organic and their Oxfordbased cafe-bakery.