THE BREAD DOCTOR Can I swap brown or wholemeal flour for white flour in a recipe? How do I increase my favourite bread recipe? Why is there sugar in some bread recipes?

Our resident bread expert, Barney Desmazery, answers your most-asked questions

While brown and wholemeal flour have lots more flavour than white flour, they produce a heavier product and they absorb more water. A straight swap of brown for white will mean you’ll need to up the water content in the recipe and you’ll end up with a denser loaf, so I find a happy medium is 50/50 white and brown or wholemeal. Also, just like white, brown flour is available in plain and strong – you’ll need strong brown flour for the best bread results.

One of the happy laws of bread-baking is that, unlike most other recipes, bread dough is really easy to divide if you want to make less or more, and whether you’re baking one or six loaves you simply multiply all the ingredients and the methods and timings stay the same as long as each loaf is the same size. If you’re halving a single loaf recipe to make a smaller loaf or turning a loaf recipe into smaller rolls, they will be baked at the same temperature, just for less time.

Some traditional bread recipes include sugar to ‘feed’ the yeast, speeding up the process and helping the crust to brown. Sugar really isn’t needed in a basic savoury bread dough and the longer the dough takes to prove, the more flavour it develops – there is nothing to be gained, in terms of flavour or texture, by speeding it up. As for the crust, a spritz of water in the oven or simply turning your oven up a bit higher should give you all the colour you need.