It seems many of you out there have been keen to learn the artisan skills of ciabatta bread and the other fantastic regional breads that Italy has to offer. By popular request we therefore ran our first “Discover Italian Baking" day this month. Clive is currently in France on a very exciting baking project so the course was taught by Salah Bournemman our guest baker from our Celtic Bakery in London. Students had a fabulous day producing dozens of loaves and each left with armfuls of bread to feed friends and family for at least a fortnight!

The class learned about biga the classic Italian starter which produces the delicious flavour and used it to produce some classic ciabatta breads. They then tried their hand at focaccia, panini, grissini and pizzes. Everyone went away with a pot of Salah's 14 year old Italian biga with promises to look after it and feed it with tender loving care, sadly one distressed student contacted us the following week to say that it had been mistakenly identified in the fridge as old Yorkshire pudding batter and thrown away! Not to worry, the great thing about a biga is you can always grow more, but there’s a lesson there for all of us, always label it in case your hapless other half is having a clear out!

For recipes from the course and to read more about Italian artisan baking see our Focus on Italian Breads and Baking.

The course proved really popular and was fully booked within 24 hours of us publicising it in last month’s newsletter. For those of you who missed out this time around we shall be running more Italian baking days next year. If you’re interested in attending one of next year’s courses, please email us at enquiries@shipton-mill.com and we’ll send you the dates once they’re confirmed.