THE BREAD DOCTOR

Our resident bread expert Barney Desmazery troubleshoots your baking questions

What’s the best type of yeast to use?

I’m no scientist, but yeast is yeast whether it’s fresh or dried, and as long as it’s used properly, it will give you the same results. The insistence on using fresh yeast, which is hard to ind and doesn’t keep for long, just makes bread-making more exclusive and mysterious. I use dried, instant or fast-action yeast. If you have a recipe that uses fresh yeast over dried or instant, you can adapt it – use half the amount of dried yeast to fresh.

Should I knead or slap-and-fold my dough?

It doesn’t matter. With both techniques you’re doing the same thing, which is stretching the gluten to make the dough more elastic. It really depends how wet your dough is – a wet, sticky dough can’t be kneaded and a sti er dough can’t be slapped. The ideal wetness for a beginner's bread is around 150ml of water for every 250g of lour, which gives you a dough that can be kneaded or slapped until elastic.

My bread is lacking in lavour – what did I do wrong?

My irst question to anyone who asks this is: did you forget to add salt and if not, how much salt did you add? Bread takes on more salt than you think, and some recipes don't have enough. As a rule, you want to add 1 tsp of salt for every 250g of lour which also translates as 5g of salt for every 250g lour, but this can be pushed to 7g, or even 8g if you like your bread salty.

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Find all the bread recipes you need at bbcgoodfood. com