Do you want to start off by talking us through the three bread recipes you have shared with Great British Chefs…
RB: Well, there’s the Viennese loaf, which comes into the category of an enriched dough, so it’s dough that’s got a higher amount of eggs and butter in it than a standard dough. It is light and airy but because of that extra richness - from the butter and eggs - it colours very quickly when you toast it, so you get a nice caramelisation on the surface but still soft and fluffy.
And the rye bread?
The rye bread is a starter-based dough, so you’re making a starter 24 hours ahead of time. And what it does is extend the fermentation process beyond a direct yeasted bread, which gives you a better flavour. That’s the idea behind that. It’s a blend of flours in that recipe to produce a rye bread that is distinctively rye but not one of those really heavy solid rye breads. It’s what we use on the salt beef and rye sandwich. You get a really good crust on it but it’s a quite a light textured loaf.
And then there’s the gluten-free soda bread?
So this was a soda bread, so not a leavened bread in the traditional sense or a chemically risen bread, but one that we have adapted from our standard recipe to give us a gluten-free option. We just use a Dove Farm white gluten-free bread flour. We do make sure it’s got gluten-free oats in there as well. And there’s some eggs in there - which aren’t in our traditional soda bread recipe - which helps the binding of the dough. Because it is not a leavened bread it is a very quick bread - you could start making it while you are prepping the vegetables and have it ready to go with dinner.
So tell us about the process for making bread at Sienna?
We tend to alternate: we tend to make white one day, of some description, and brown the following day, of some description. We make bread in the morning so it’s ready to come out of the oven for lunch. Things like the rye bread, we’re putting a starter on for that this morning for tomorrow. So you make the starter that sits in the fridge for 24 hours and then you incorporate that into the dough the following day.