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Use your loaf

By Jane Clarke The Daily Mail, 2008

Baking your own bread is easier than you think - but don't stick to boring buns and bloomers. Our resident foodie shows just how much dough can do.

A warm bread roll straight from the oven, with a smidgen of good unsalted but­ter, is one of life's simple pleasures. And now bread machines have revolutionised the way we make bread - you put the ingredients into the machine, wait a few hours, and then the alarm tells you a hot, golden loaf is ready. With butter and some pure fruit spread or honey, freshly made bread makes an irre­sistible breakfast.

I must confess that I miss the whole manual bread-making part of the story. In the summer holidays, Maya, my four-year-old daughter, and I like to make bread from scratch; we love getting our hands messy with water and flour, kneading it into a dough and watching it rise. Bread is really easy to make, and not a lot can go wrong as long as you use strong bread-making flour (which has the maximum amount of gluten, the protein that enables the loaf to have a light, risen texture). Yeast, which is necessary to make bread, is available fresh from supermarkets if they have their own in-store bakeries, but dried yeast works very well and has the advantage that your bread can be made from cupboard ingredients.

Use bread dough to make your own pizzas, which are useful for picnics or late suppers because the base can be made ahead of time, and you can be imaginative with the toppings, from the tomato and mozzarella pizza I cooked only last weekend, to olives, ham, chicken, all sorts of cheese - in fact, virtually anything savoury.

In the recipe shown here I've made mini pizzas, and given the amount of topping for each one, but you could just as easily make it into two larger pizzas, in which case you will need 16 tablespoons of tomato sauce, 4 buffalo mozzarellas (buffalo has a delicious taste) and 8 tablespoons of basil pesto (ready-made is fine). Use half this topping on each pizza. This sounds like an awful lot, but I really like my pizza to be oozing and dripping with sauce and melted cheese.

Some people have problems digest­ing bread made out of wheat flour. In this case, I'd suggest cutting down on the quantity of yeast-based wheat bread you eat, substituting pumpernickel, Irish soda or spelt bread. Others find wholemeal suits them better than white, or may find all-wholemeal bread is too rough to digest. Rather than giving up all bread, consider the other varieties suggested above. The time of day you eat bread can influence how you feel, too. I some­times find bread at lunchtime makes me sleepy. The most filling and satisfying bread is wholemeal, which contains the outer fibrous husk of the cereal. Wholemeal bread contains five times as much fibre as white, plus valuable amounts of vitamin E, potassium, iron and В vitamins. Granary and brown breads don't legally have to contain any more nutrients than white does - even if they look brown, this may be down to food colouring. As a nation we should be eating more wholemeal, wholegrain foods, since the fibre helps us maintain our weight (we feel fuller, and are there­fore less likely to need more food after eating wholemeal) and keeps our guts moving. It is also linked to a reduc­tion in bowel cancer and other hor­mone-related cancers such as breast cancer, and can be a useful way to lower our levels of bad cholesterol, which can lead to heart disease. If wholemeal bread contains such seeds as hemp or linseed, we can also glean some extra omega-3 fatty acids.

As I mentioned, in our house we don't just eat wholemeal bread -Maya needs to get plenty of energy from her food, and I recommend that children eat a mixture of wholemeal and white. Too much wholemeal can fill them up too quickly and can also reduce the absorption of essential minerals such as calcium and iron.

For this reason, white bread is good for children - in this country, white flour is still fortified with calcium, thiamine and niacin, and it is very soon going to be fortified with folic acid, an antioxidant linked to a reduc­tion in neural tube defects such as spina bifida.

White bread can be easier to eat for people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), except when it's very fresh as that can aggravate your stomach. Day-old bread may suit them better, and if you're looking for a savoury way to use it up, the tomato and bread salad, below right, is delicious.