A Proper White Tin Loaf

There's a smell that fills a kitchen when bread is baking and it isn't quite like anything else. Yeasty, toasted, slightly sweet, faintly malty. It gets into the curtains. It greets you when you come back from the garden. People who've never made bread don't understand what they're missing, and people who have, never quite stop making it.

This is the loaf I come back to. A plain white tin loaf, the kind your grandmother might have made, the kind that turns into toast in the morning and sandwiches at lunch and the heel torn off and eaten standing up at the counter, butter melting into it, while you pretend you're just checking that it's cooled enough to slice. It uses four ingredients. Five, if you count the pinch of honey, which I do because it helps the crust go a proper colour. There is nothing clever here and nothing to be afraid of.

Making bread is one of those things people convince themselves is harder than it is. It isn't. It's slow, but slow isn't the same as difficult. The yeast does most of the work. Your hands do a bit of kneading. The oven does the rest. What it asks for is your attention, in small doses, across an afternoon: a few minutes here, a glance there, a gentle press of a finger to see how the dough is getting on. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and bread is the most conversational thing I know how to make.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I got it right. "Tin loaf. Saturday. Better than the bakery." That was years ago and the recipe hasn't changed since, because there's nothing left to change. Flour, water, yeast, salt, your hands. That's the whole thing. Make it once and you'll wonder why you ever bought a loaf in plastic.