Recipe collections

Bread rolls with porridge base made of toasted oats and ale or stout. Definitely one of the all-time top 10 breads. The ale and the porridge base make them moist and they stay fresh for a good few days.

Apple and onion bread, it should really be called a bird feed loaf because the amount of seeds in it is staggering. At first I was going to reduce it – a full baking tray of toasted seeds going into one little loaf! But then I thought – trust Dan. His recipes do not fail.

The dough for these sweet apricot buns is very versatile. Try spreading it out, focaccia-style, in a baking tray and topping with fruit and crumble. Try putting lots of dried fruit on top, folding in half or rolling and baking into a strudel.

Bagels with poppy and sesame seeds - as good as in New York or Montreal. Anyone who knows a thing or two about bread, dough and things yeasty will work out that if you stick a bit of yeast dough into boiling water...

Baguettes made with white French type 55 flour, cold fermented overnight. The best thing for me about holidays in France is going to a boulangerie to get fresh baguettes, coming back proudly brandishing the crusty sticks, pretending I’m a proper French person.

Basic sourdough bread made with ‘old dough’ or pâte fermentée. This method uses a reserved chunk of dough instead of a starter and it makes for a tasty, long lasting, flavoursome new sourdough loaf.

Basic white bread, a simple sandwich loaf made at home is miles better than any shop bought bread. Try it once, you’ll be converted.

Bazlama, Turkish flatbread enriched with yoghurt is not only tasty: it’s absolutely spectacular when it cooks on a hot griddle, inflating like a balloon!

Beetroot bread with grated raw beetroot, flavoured with caraway and studded with sunflower seeds and an occasional raisin. A proper loaf, good for slicing, toasting and sandwiches, with spectacular colour of the crumb and excellent, moist and chewy texture.

Black bread flavoured with treacle and coloured with coffee. The apparently odd list of ingredients - rye, fennel seed, grated raw carrots - produces a very interesting loaf.

Borodinsky bread is Russian rye sourdough, with its history going back to Napoleonic wars. Great for gut health, this rye sourdough loaf is named after the battle of Borodino.

Buttery and barely sweet brioche, home baked breakfast fit for a king. Paper-thin glossy crust and the softest, meltiest crumb hiding inside, waiting only for a lick of good jam.

Buckwheat sourdough bloomer, a handsome loaf with the addition of buckwheat flour in the mix which makes it wonderfully chewy and very flavoursome.

Caraway and parmesan pain de mie - soft crusted sandwich loaf with fantastic flavour. Pain de mie means a soft crust loaf, ideal for sandwiches, and it’s traditionally baked in a loaf tin closed with a lid.

Challah - rich with eggs, glazed with egg wash plaited festive bread. It is traditionally baked for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, commemorating the manna from heaven to the children of Israel during the Exodus from Egypt.

Cheats sourdough or how to get close to sourdough taste in 24 hours. Crusty on the outside, chewy crumb, you might be easily fooled into thinking it’s the real thing.

Braided chocolate brioche, not too sweet and perfect for breakfast. The braided bread is quite a challenge for me, the messy baker. I’m absolutely no good at tidy shaping. My challahs invariably have one end thicker than the other. Spacing of cookies suffers in giant quadruples melded together. And I am a lousy cake decorator

Ciabatta bread - a terror to make but delicious. The end product tasted great though, definitely authentic, even though it looked like nothing at all. Excellent toasted. Delishhh hot-pressed into a panino. It is a ‘panino’, mind – you only ever order a single one, don’t you? Well, it’s a ‘panino’ in singular, ‘panini’ what the place has on offer, plural.

Wholemeal cider bread with chunks of apples. They allegedly came up with this bread in Normandy but I think anyone could do it: just have a drop of cider (or calvados) and decide you’ll chuck all those apples into the bread do, for a prank.

Cinnamon twist star bread, inspired by kanelbullar, Swedish cinnamon buns. A giant kanelbulle twisted into a star bread shape, with cinnamon, apple and chocolate fillings. It tastes as good as pretty it looks!

Crusty and airy ciabatta loaves. Why ‘coccodrillo’? Oh please - don’t these loaves look just like gnarly little crocodiles?

Super easy coconut loaf made with shredded coconut. This must be the quickest cake in the world. I wish I could say it is also the finest but the two things rarely go hand in hand.

Savoury courgette wheat and rye bread with Parmesan, it is perfectly good for slicing, buttering, and turning into ham sandwiches.

Courgette sandwich loaf - tasty, sliceable and excellent when toasted. This is a twist on my onions-and-mash deli bread, a lovely loaf in itself albeit really quite oniony.

Savoury sourdough couronne bread, crusty French round bread made from San Francisco-style sourdough. Sourdough starter sponge in the evening, crown shaped bread early next afternoon!

The best crusty Italian white bread made with a slow fermenting biga, Italian starter dough, following a recipe by Ottolenghi.

Dabo - traditional Ethiopian honey and milk bread. To make the Ethiopian yemarina yewotet dabo, which means honey and milk bread, beat the honey with the egg, salt and spices.

Deli bread - slices beautifully, moist and flavoursome thanks to the addition of onions and mashed potatoes. This is a perfect loaf for salt beef or pastrami sandwiches. Chop up some gherkin on top and mazel tov!

Easy deli style homemade rye bread leavened with yeast: it is perfectly possible to make deli style bread without a sourdough starter. Great for sandwiches and excellent for toasting.

Fermented buckwheat bread: the most natural and the healthiest loaf possible, with a great flavour, and wholly gluten free.

Quick bread, ready within two hours from mixing to baking. There is quite a lot of yeast to speed up the rise and the tricks to make it taste like a longer-proving loaf are adding raw potatoes, vinegar and a bit of fat.

Flutes, similar to baguettes but not as crusty and a bit richer, are made of soft and chewy dough generously flavoured with sage and Parmesan.

Fougasse with grated Emmental cheese, chewy and crispy French flatbread, the cousin of Italian focaccia. Make it with sourdough starter or bakers’ yeast – equally delicious and not at all difficult.

Fougasse au Roquefort - flat bread with blue cheese, quite like focaccia. Fougasse can be salé or sucré, with lardons, olives, both, Roquefort – or covered with a thick layer of crisp, almost caramelised sugar. All strictly Provençal.

Pain the campagne, sourdough bread made with wheat starter. Sourdough starter I find fickle – I know it can live for ever, only refreshed every now and then, but my best results have been with fresh, four days old leaven so that’s the approach I suggest here. Veteran sourdough makers though – please use whatever wheat starter you have on the go.

Homemade garlic bread with dough made from scratch. You don’t have to. You can buy your French stick. But just think how many calories you’ll burn doing all the kneading?

Seelen means souls in German, and in Schwabia it means fantastically tasty spelt sourdough bread rolls, rustic and completely artisan.

Focaccia with olive oil, fresh grapes and crumbled blue cheese. I am not quite sure why grapes are not popular as cake ingredients. All summer berries, cherries, stone fruit and apples get to play, jumping into soft sponge, orderly marching onto tarts, drowning in runny clafoutis and sweating gently underneath crumbles

Hokkaido milk bread made using the tangzhong method. Hokkaido milk bread is also the basis for the best breadcrumbs in the world, panko.

Honey and apricot brack, inspired by traditional Irish bread with raisins and currants aka barmbrack, this one is full of dried apricots, sultanas and walnut chunks.

Joululimppu, Finnish Christmas bread with rye flour, buttermilk, aniseed flavours and treacle – quite an unusual and wonderful Christmas bake. It means just that: ‘Christmas bread’.

Julekake (pronounced yoo-le-kar-ka) is a traditional Norwegian Christmas bread, with Sukat (candied citrus peel) and raisins. Julekake is flavoured with cardamom and it’s best toasted, served with gjetost (brown cheese).

Kubaneh, Yemeni Jewish bread traditionally baked slowly overnight, is the original croissant except with none of the hassle and lots of fun in the making.

Lavash, Middle Eastern flatbread often served with dips or kebabs, is easy to make and cooked on the hob in a frying pan with a little ghee.

Lazy bread: no kneading, no shaping but still a good flavour. It’s a good option when you’re feeling particularly lazy, that’s why I called it lazy bread.

Malt vinegar rye bread with coriander and caraway seeds, nearly as exquisitely tasty as rye sourdough which it pretends to be, with a fraction of the toil.

Light granary bread made with half and half malthouse (malted grain) flour and white bread flour. Basically - the bread 'with bits', it's as tasty as it's healthy.

Easy malthouse or granary loaf. This is a wonderful loaf using whole grain flour, baked in a Pullman tin but just as good in an ordinary loaf tin. Makes the best toast in the world.