Making a Bloomer

After the catastrophe that was making not-for-beginners Danish pastry (or, trying to, anyway), I decided it would be a good idea to go back to the very start of Paul Hollywood’s book Bread, and make the very first recipe. This was a bloomer loaf – a very standard soft, white bread with a thick, crunchy crust.

A blob of dough

I’d avoided this one previously as I’d thought it would taste a bit dry and boring, but this was not the case; it was light and airy. It was a relatively easy, straight-forward recipe which is great for introducing new breadbakers to the techniques required, and therefore one I definitely should’ve started with.

The only thing I had trouble with was shaping it (you can see above that a. I ended up with a canyon in my dough that I tried to fix but couldn’t, and b. I didn’t cut deep enough so the slashes didn’t open up as the bread baked, like they should have done). But that just meant it didn’t look as nice as the picture in the recipe book, which is quite unsurprising, considering this was my first attempt at a bloomer, and Paul Hollywood, by comparison, is some sort of god of bread.

Overall, though, it went great, and tasted lovely too!