David's Bread

I need a photo of David mixing his dough - but I forgot to tell David I was doing this and so he had already passed that stage - might add one later on.

It seemed only fair after my effort on the marmalade, to turn to David’s own personal star turn - bread. Even the grandchildren love it. (Small children are somewhat notorious for only liking white sliced bread - but not ours). If he makes it for a family gathering there is none left.

CANNOT BE RESISTED

David used to cook - when we first met and for quite some time he couldn’t quite believe that I could cook. On holiday in Yugoslavia he even stood over me whilst I was peeling potatoes and asked me if I knew what I was doing. I was so enraged I threw all the water over him. But gradually he realised that I could cook and, indeed, he eventually withdrew from the kitchen.

Late in life he had been raving on about sourdough bread that we used to get from the Templestowe Baker’s Delight. Maybe he had first encountered sourdough bread in California - I can’t quite remember now.

“The famed San Francisco-style sourdough, with its deep flavour and heroically crisp crust. This is the bread lover's answer to opening a bottle of vintage Champagne to mark jumping off the wagon.” Nigel Slater

Anyway Baker’s Delight stopped making it and all was calamity until my sister sent him an article by Nigel Slater on how to make sourdough starter. It’s still there on the web - just click here. And I just noted one of those little coincidences you find in life - the article was written on my birthday in 2005. The article also included a recipe for making the bread and I think, initially, he probably followed this to the letter. Needless to say this was all done by hand.

Then I think Dom got into breadmaking for a while with a breadmaking machine but, as Dom often does, lost interest and passed the machine on to us. So then he experimented with that. Not entirely successfully - it comes out of the machine a bit ordinary looking. The ultimate enlightenment came when he decided to use the machine to do all the tedious part, but finish it off by hand - shaping it as he wanted and doing the last proving in the sink, before cooking it in the oven. The process has gradually become more and more complicated and refined (to my eyes anyway) and when David was cooking bread I just had to vacate the kitchen - he seemed to take the entire place over. Now though, I have my beautiful new kitchen, and he has a large corner of the new laundry dedicated to baking bread. And this is where he does all his mixing and kneading. He uses various kinds of flours and bread mixes in his mixtures - it has to be Laucke breadmix - although actually I think he tried another brand recently. Which one he uses and in what proportion changes as to his mood.

And then there’s the starter that has to be reboosted and is left to ferment on the radiator - now in a large container placed in a mixing bowl - after it bubbled over and made a mess once. After that it is stored in the fridge. This starter has now been going for many, many years. A couple of years ago we had a disaster when we came back from holiday and found that our house sitter had thrown it out when she was cleaning up our fridge. She was just being too good. Thankfully though, a short time before, Annabelle had been given some starter made from his own and so he was able to get some of it back again. For a while though he thought he would have to start all over again.

It is superb bread. When he is going to make it he tells me and I often, like today, change my menu for the day to soup, so that we can indulge in some bread with it. The smell as it cooks is just divine. And he is now famous for it.

Postscript - he didn’t like the soup though - he said it had too much chilli - another article coming up there!