So last week we promised you the recipe for our focaccia we made during the holidays, and here it is! Slightly delayed, but we have been working on some other areas recently which are progressing really well, so not been able to blog for a few days. We will be letting you know soon what we have been up to though!

So the holidays are here and we like many others have been busy baking. Baking bread is great, but sometimes its also nice to try out new recipes and different types of breads as well, which is the main subject of this weeks blog. 

Nice to meet you!
Bob is a sourdough starter and although Bob might not look like much, inside that jar is a microscopic community of billions of wild yeast and bacteria living in harmony. But how did Bob come to existence? 

What is it and why is it important to be aware of it?
We often have questions about how to achieve a good amount of burst during baking. Although this can be contributed to by a number of different points such as recipe and process, one of the most significant areas that affects burst during baking is dough tension. 

Not convinced? Well we decided to do an experiment to demonstrate the effects of dough tension on the dough. In our experience, achieving the correct amount of dough tension during moulding is critical to achieve good volume and crumb structure in the final loaf.

So has anybody heard about the new innovative slicing technology recently causing a stir in the baking industry? It is a new type of bread knife that actually sticks bread back together. Ours arrived in the post this morning so we thought we would give it a go on some nice crusty bread and it actually worked! We had to take a video of it as proof! 

So bread stencils... whats all the fuss about?

Although the use of a stencil on bread to add patterns to the crust is nothing new, (its been around for a long time) especially within the artisan bread and craft baking sector, it does appear to be gaining some popularity on social media, and businesses and individuals are using different ideas to catch "consumers" and "followers" attention.

So being curious (again) we decided to have a play around and see what types of different designs we could come up with. We found that if you get creative with it, not only does it make the final bread more attractive, but can also be used to raise awareness of your brand or event!

Recycled bread... is that even a "thing?"

It may well be the case more recently that recycled bread appears to have been around for a while, although apparently no-one really speaks about it. It may even be the best kept secret in baking!

The reason why I say that, is because we recently did an experiment to look at new ways to recycle and become more sustainable as a university over the past week. We had heard about an article that British Baker ran on a bakery in London, where old bread is recycled into new bread. Now we had heard of using old bread up in products such as bread pudding, but in terms of adding it to the final dough, this was something new! So with this in mind and being curious, we decided to have a go and see what happened! Here are the results;

So how do you make recycled bread?
Well first off, you need some old bread. It is really important that you know where this bread came from and what's in it as well. Otherwise you might have an allergen issue. The recycled bread starts life by being sliced and then water is added to it to make into into a porridge type consistency.