Making Bread

I love making bread with children, it is such a simple thing to do, and such a tactile process and has such satisfying results!

I won’t include a recipe here, for there are thousands to choose from depending on what type of bread you would like to make. Quite often we make pizza dough using the recipe in Delia Smith’s Frugal Food cookery book.

It is all about getting your hands in! Mix the dry ingredients with warm water with your hands and get them all sticky. As the dough comes together there is great fun to be had in pulling bits of dough off your fingers and sticking them back on to the ball of dough.

Now it’s time to start kneading. We don’t have a great kneading technique; we just enthusiastically pull, stretch and thump the dough around. It has to be said the children have much more stamina for kneading than I have, I’d get bored after a few minutes but they will keep going until I ask them to stop giving a lovely fine texture to the dough.

Then we pop the dough back in the bowl, cover it with a tea towel and come back to it at tea time. This is the magic moment. We peak beneath the tea towel, has it worked? Oh yes it has! The dough has risen! For the next five minutes we attempt to stretch the bread out over baking trays. The dough is very elastic and shrinks back from the edges of the tray but after a bit we have some irregularly shaped pizzas that we cover with tinned chopped tomatoes, cheese and what ever we can find in the fridge!

In one simple and cheap activity we have a wonderfully tactile experience, a magic moment as we reveal the dough has risen and something to eat.