To begin

If you're a purist you're probably going to be happiest elsewhere.

My recipe of the moment is:

375 mls water
500 gms flour
1 1/5 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

which is a recipe for baguettes taken from Bread: Baking by hand or bread-machine. My baguettes have nearly all looked and tasted more like ciabatta so in the end, I stopped trying to shape them (although you can get baguette trays, I don't know where I'd store it) and just bunged them in a standard bread tin.

Today I've gone for 400 gms white bread flour and 100 gms wholemeal flour and it's all in the breadmaker as I write. I use a breadmaker as I literally don't like to get my hands dirty, particularly not with the goo that occurs on first mixing the flour and water. My aim in life is to balance the ingredients so that I can pull a nice smooth dough out of the breadmaker in one lump, bash it about a bit with none sticking to me or anything else and pop it in the tin.

When I first started to make the baguette-style bread, I did do all the rising given in the recipe, but to be honest it all took far too long. I soon discovered that you could actually just rise it once before putting it in the oven and on occasions when I've been really pushed for time it's gone straight to the oven from the breadmaker.

However, the main aim for making our bread is for sandwiches which are eaten on a nearly daily basis by the rest of the family. I remember when a nice organic wholemeal & seeds sliced loaf from Waitrose (when I could still afford to shop there on a regular basis) was 85p. Now you're lucky to get it for that price when it's reduced. I don't want to buy or eat rubbish bread, so I dusted off my breadmaker and occasionally produce something actually edible.

Initially I just did the whole loaf in the breadmaker, but after a while, the hole from the paddle gets annoying and if you weren't there to lift the lid immediately it would sink and it took hours to produce a loaf which seemed to last 5 minutes. There was also the small matter of some dough overflowing whilst unattended one day which possibly makes it dangerous to allow the maker to bake any more.

So now, I make the dough in the breadmaker and bake it in the oven and mostly it works really well. I've recently started to allow the dough to rise in the bread tin before baking which makes for a more satisfactory sandwich bread (apparently), although I have to allow it to cook for longer at a lower temperature to make sure it's not soggy in the middle.