Source: Guardian  >> Read full article and comment

Baking together – and especially making our own bread – brings us all closer, says the French baker Richard Bertinet

By Sophie Dening

Saturday 12 June 2010

Richard Bertinet’s three children know all about real bread. Jack, nine, Tom, six, and Lola Maude, three, can tell a decent sandwich from the filled layers of pappy, additive-laced squares sold in most shops. If you ask them, they will tell you that they prefer sourdough to sliced white, which many parents would say makes them fairly unusual.

But their father, who is French, believes that all children would say the same if they were given the choice between real bread and what he calls the “bread-type product” with which we fill our supermarket trolleys. For millennia, bread has been the most fundamental basic of the human diet and if we get our bread right, Bertinet believes, the rest will follow. He even believes that it can bring parents closer to troublesome teenagers.

Born in Brittany, the son of a gendarme, Bertinet was introduced to the joys of baking by his grandmother. “She used to make wonderful doughnuts. She had a massive bowl of dough rising on the table and I used to hide beneath and steal little bits. The smell, the first bite of the doughnut … it’s my first memory as a child.”..Continue reading