Farming for self sufficiency

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Stand it in a warm place, out of draughts, and go to bed. The above operation takes about five minutes. If you have a stove that keeps in a'nights stand it near that.

In the morning stagger out of bed, go downstairs, dump some dry flour on a table (I am not going to use such culinary terms as a 'clean table' in this book—I shall leave that much to the common sense of my readers), dump the dough—which by now will have risen until it is overflowing the bowl—on to the flour, sprinkle dry flour on top of it and then comes the process of kneading, which takes a little practice. The aim is to make a moderately stiff dough, dry on the outside. At first when you begin to knead the dough will stick messily to your hands. Don't, whatever you do, wash it off with water. 'Wash' it off with more dry flour. Fling dry flour on top of the mass. Wherever it is wet—fling on dry flour. Push the mass away from you with the palms of your hands, and then pull it together again. Whenever it sticks to your hands 'wash' your hands again with dry flour and wash the table too. Soon it will stop sticking, and turn into a most satisfying lump of floury substance, delightful to roll about. Roll it about to your heart's content and then put a dollop in each baking tin. Only fill the tins three quarters full. There will be some left over; make little rolls of that and put them on an iron oven-plate. Make pretty scores on the tops of your loaves in the tins. Balance the tins on the cool side of the stove and cover with a cloth and leave to rise ('prove') yet again. Bread rises twice. Leave the rolls to rise too. When the rolls have risen pop them in the very hot oven. In ten minutes they will probably be done, and you will have splendid hot whole meal rolls for breakfast. After breakfast take the bread tins gently—and here is the whole skill of the thing—to jog them is to make them collapse and you'll get heavy bread. Do not jog them! Place them gently in the oven. After half an hour look at them, and if you wish to, gently change them round—the top ones to the bottom. In three quarters of an hour, if the oven is hot, they should be done. If the oven isn't hot you shouldn't be making bread. You can test them by tapping their undersides (if done they will sound hollow). Balance them on top of their tins to air well as they cool. You probably don't spend more than half an hour of the morning actually working with the bread: while you are waiting for things to happen you can be doing other things. If your flour is good, and fresh, the above method makes, quite simply, the best bread in the world: as superior to wrapped factory pap as good butter is to cheap margarine.

Below is a comparison of the food values of white flour and whole meal flour:

The wrapped-pap factory lobby always trots out the hoary old folk tale that the phytin which whole meal has and white flour hasn't inhibits the absorption of calcium in the human. What they forget to add is that four hours of fermentation in the dough lowers the phytin (phytic acid) content by 75 per cent which renders it practically harmless in this respect, also that habitual whole meal eaters develop an enzyme named phytase in their bodies which destroys any phytin that they do ingest. You have only to look at the teeth of any whole meal-bread-fed family to realize that they get enough calcium..

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