Like any craft, I suppose, my bread-making is torn between tramping the paths of old familiar loaves, where I know my destination will be pleasant, and exploring new ideas which, gasp, might take me to a bad place. Susan's recipe and photographs for her Open Sesame Pain de Beaucaire, however, gave...

I read this piece in the New York Times, about the desirability of using weights, not volumes to measure ingredients when it first came out a month ago. And naturally ignored it; I mean, who needs to be told that? But today, when I went to print it out for some people who might need to be told jus...

It all came together in the end. There was dill in the market, although just before we went away on hols so into the freezer it went. There were cucumbers aplenty when we got back, and some dry green chillies. A stroll around the neighbourhood produced the grape leaves (in lieu of the preferred cher...

I had a bunch of good, ripe 100% starter left over from a batch of oatmeal sesame bread that I made last weekend. I wanted a seedy bread, but I finished the last of the sunflower seeds a couple of breads ago, and haven't got enough items on the mail-order shopping list to get some more yet. So I t...

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to dill pickles. Witness this second post in less than a week with details of salt quantities for brine pickled cucumbers. But the real joy of the post is in what happened when David Snyder's wife questioned the safety of...