The Easiest Bread in the World

Bread is cheap, filling and delicious when homemade, expensive when bought from an artisan bakery and rubbish when bought from an English supermarket. We don’t tend to regularly make bread at home, much because it seems like such an arduous task – all that kneading, rising and proving etc.

Wrong. 

This recipe is not hard to follow, difficult to accomplish or boring to do. When done, you feel like a baker, which, for some reason, feels very very cool. And nothing like working at Greggs.

No yeast, no kneading and no proving. What’s not to love? In fact, the less you do, the better the result.

The cost? £1.50 for the best loaf you'll ever taste.

INGREDIENTS:

300g of any type of flour (but not self-raising)

1.5 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

1.5 teaspoons of salt

300ml buttermilk or plain yoghurt

Preheat oven to 200c. Place the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Add the wet ingredient and mix very quickly with a fork. Tip contents onto non-stick baking sheet and shape into a single rough mound. Bake on middle shelf for 30mins. Cool on a wire rack.

NB. The dry and wet ingredients should be mixed for no more than 30 seconds, so that the bicarbonate of soda is all fresh when it goes into the oven. The mound on the baking sheet should look like a pile of doughy lumps. Do not smooth it. The oven will make it beautiful.

Variations:

It does not matter which liquid you use, as long as it’s interesting. Try Guinness for a grown up Irish variation or fruit yoghurts for a sweet version – great with butter and jam for tea. As long as you use the same number of grams of flour to millilitres of the wet ingredient (basically a ratio of 1:1), and adjust the bicarbonate of soda and salt accordingly, you will have quick delicious bread you can make every day.