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Its time to touch up on your bread making skills. Whip out Granny’s dusty bread recipes and get baking. Starting 7 May, it’s National Bread Week. In the UK there are roughly 200 different kinds of bread available at any time according to recipes4us.co.uk. Baking bread is much more rewarding than buying the store bought variety, and all you really need is a good recipe and a little time.

Choices, choices

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From flat breads like Venezuelan arepas or Jamaican bammy, Indian chapati and Mexican tortilla, to the high riser breads like good old English cottage loaf and French baguettes and Jewish challah, there’s so much to choose from.

Baking bread

The guardian.co.uk has a great article on how to bake bread like bakers bake bread. And baking bread is cheaper than buying bread from the supermarket, according to realcakes.co.uk: ‘Bread costs a lot more now than it used to before the prices of wheat rose so dramatically. All the more reason then to bake your own bread.’

Perhaps one of the coolest things since sliced bread is the bread making machine. To make bread with one of these is a fuss free process. You just add your ingredients (in the right order), and let this gadget do the rest for you.

Heavenly recipes

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Jamie Oliver has a nice basic bread recipe, good for those just getting started. And then there’s this recipe, hailed by some as the best ever. Either way, bread is bread, and it’s good with just about everything from cheese and jam to soup and sauce. Even toasted in a toaster with melted butter spread on it, with a steaming cup of coffee, some eggs and some bacon, the traditional way, its perfect.

Why not get inspired by Bread Week and bake up a storm? You’ll save money while eating bread fresh from the oven (or bread machine). What could be better?

Tags: bread maker, breadmakers