It related to our evolution to farming from hunter-gathering. Once we started to grow things - rice, wheat, barley – we were tied to the place we were growing it in. It enabled us to sustain bigger populations but that was an arms-race: more land for cultivation leads to more people leads to more land for cultivation…

It also bizarrely increased food insecurity – when you only really eat one thing or swap or sell it to eat other things to eat, a single bad harvest can kill you.

Let’s call it “civilisation”.

The upshot, a few years later, is war, climate change and Boris Trump.

So let’s talk about bread.

The first thing is that it’s magical: yeast, gluten, chemistry in motion; the second thing is that, done well, it can be great; the third is we’ll be eating it anyway so why not make it? There’s a real feeling you’ve done something.

First thing is the basic recipe and technique: 1lb flour, some yeast, a teaspoon of salt and half a pint of water. And a bit of time. And an oven.

There are some basic stages:

• Mixing and kneading
• Rising
• Knocking back
• Proving
• Baking

Mixing and kneading is pretty simple - you can do this with a bread machine or a Magimix with a dough hook and it’s fine but it does actually work better if you do it with your hands. Put the flour in a bowl and add the salt and yeast. People say you put the salt ine side and the yeast the other so the salt doesn’t kill the yeast but it’ll all be mixed together in a minute so I’m skeptical. But it doesn’t hurt. Add all of the water – if it’s a bit wet it doesn’t matter and if it’s a bit dry you can add more water – you’ll just get this with experience but it’ll be fine.

It’s messy at the start but as you mix it more thoroughly and the water soaks into the flour it gets cleaner and easier.

When it’s a coherent lump, flour a surface and knead it for 10 minutes. Kneading isn’t about bashing it down, it’s about stretching it to develop the proteins into gluten.

Rising. Lightly oil the bowl and put the dough back in. Cover the bowl with clingfilm – this is important; if the dough dries out on top and forms a skin then that skin will stop the dough from rising

There isn’t a set time for this, you just want it to double in size. The received wisdom is to put it somewhere warm but I’ve heard that in France they let it rise in the fridge overnight to get that perfect texture.

Just leave it to let the yeast fart it’s little bubbles in as it eats the dough.

Knock it back. Literally knock the air out of it so it’s pretty much back to its original size. This redistributes the yeast and evens out the texture. Knead it for a bit then shape it or put it in the tin if you’re using one.

Proving is the second rise, you can sort of do it in the oven for certain shapes like pizza but generally this is where you develop the final texture. By the time it’s doubled again it is essentially the final size and shape.

Baking is the final bit of the jigsaw. It’ll rise a bit because the yeast won’t die until it reaches 60 centigrade. When it’s nice and brown, take it out and tap the bottom. If it sounds hollow it’s done

Toppings. If you want a nice smooth shiny top wet your hand with tap water and stroke it over the bread before you bake it. Again the French do it differently by putting a pan of boiling water in the bottom of the over so there’s steam in there.

Cool it on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t go soggy and don’t try to eat it too soon – it needs to properly cool down to be right.

Yeast

Yeast is just a little fungus that produces carbon dioxide (the bubbles) and alcohol so you need to feed it for it to reproduce and grow and produce enough gas to leaven the bread. In this recipe I used the packet yeast – it’s fine and doesn’t need to be fed in advance as it activates as soon as it gets wet and starts eating the flour and sugar that’s around it. You can also buy yeast that you need to activate by adding sugar and water and then you put the foaming gloop in instead of the powder.

Sourdough is just growing the natural yeast in flour over the course of a week or so and then using it to bake. Put flour in a jar with the same amount of water (100g of flour to 100ml water) and just keep an eye on it for a week or so. You can try to keep a yeast culture growing but I find it difficult to if you wanted to bake on, say, a Saturday I’d make a new batch on Tuesday. Stop it drying out and “feed it every day or so with a bit more flour and a bit more water. Substitute it for any other type of yeast

Crusts

Water or steam gives eh best crust and I’m not sure about oils really; they work on things like focaccia but you don’t really want that crispy. If you want a proper crust just use water or even a bit of mildly salted water