The Times sourdough recipe

I’ve always felt you can judge someone’s foodie credentials by how often they make their own bread. Not as in how often they switch on the breadmaking machine, but in how regularly they get up to their elbows in flour and yeast. I’m afraid that by this measure, I’m woefully under-qualified. Over the years I’ve been on three breadmaking courses and made a total of two loaves. As they say, you do the math.

I haven’t given up all hope though, especially when Dan Lepard invited me to preview his new baking classes, running in Central London. Could this be the one to unleash my inner breadmaker? “I’ve dispensed with most of the fuss around keeping a ‘starter’,” he writes, “and I don’t really knead the dough very much at all, so the day will be relaxed, rather easygoing, yet produce a beautiful, tangy sourdough loaf at the end.” That’s my kind of baking.

Lepard is something of a legend in bread circles. He has worked with everyone from Fergus Henderson to Giorgio Locatelli, and for a long time was baking mentor at Baker & Spice. His aim, and that of his class, is to debunk many of the myths around baking. “So many people tell me, ‘I’ve been told I can’t make good pastry because I have warm hands.’ What? Who is telling people this nonsense? No, it is because you don’t measure properly. That’s all.” With breadmaking, he’s tackled every possible reason not to bake – lack of time (tick), lack of organisation (tick) – and eliminated them. “I can take away almost everything except laziness,” he says. So, if this doesn’t work, at least I’ll know whom to blame.

The loaf we are going to make is a simple sourdough. Normally it takes a week to get your starter going, but Lepard has sorted that. He shows me a bag of what looks like nuggets of porridge in the freezer. Yes, the frozen starter did originally take a week to get going, but having done it once, he’ll never need to again. When he is running low he simply mixes a dollop with more flour and water, leaves it overnight, and next day he has a dozen more instant starters to freeze.

The joy is that, at a stroke, he’s got rid of all the advance planning that normally goes into making a complex, tasty loaf. The night before he wants to make his bread, he takes out a dollop, dissolves it in tepid water, and mixes in white, wholemeal and rye flour and leaves it for 12 hours. “It’s that simple. You can do it drunk.”

Then, on breadmaking day, he takes this leaven, mixes in more water and flour, and 15 minutes later kneads the dough for about ten seconds. Yes, seconds. And I say knead, but it’s more a laying on of hands really. “Kneading and knocking back was about creating a homogenous loaf with a smooth crumb, but that’s not the sort of bread we want to make any more,” he says.

You repeat this every hour (tip: oil your hands and work surface first and none of the dough sticks to them) until you see a network of air bubbles in the dough, then you shape it, leave it to rise for another hour or so, and cook it in a covered pot for about 45 minutes. As Lepard says, “The only thing I can’t take out is the waiting, but I have removed as much of the effort as I can. You do have to be on hand for the four or five hours the loaf takes, but the actual work you do adds up to little more than ten minutes.”

The result, as he promised, is a loaf quite the equal of any you’d get from an artisan baker. This time, I really think I might have cracked it. No, honestly…

Dan Lepard’s baking classes start with sourdough on January 17 at Cookery School, London W1 (020-7631 4590; www.cookeryschool.co.uk)

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