Making Faces

This summer's Green Man, in bay leaves, wild grass & honeysuckle.

There's a fine line between edible beauty and culinary kitsch. And we all draw our lines in different places. Personally, I feel that bread should look like bread. I love a well-made loaf that shows the individual baker really cared, or was even a bit inspired, but the freakish confections of crust, those bread showpieces baked to look like other things - bird cages, motor cars, swans, bears etc. - leave me curiously unhungry.

Still, I love playing in the bakery. So to keep myself amused in this week's swelter, I made a couple of simple sourdough loaves and decorated them as the Green Man and his Queen, using foliage and flowers from the garden. Easy to copy, and a showstopper centrepiece for your table, indoors or out.

Ingredients

• 400g ripe white leaven
• 800g Shipton Mill's organic white no.4
• 400g Shipton Mill's organic Emmer wheat
• 24g sea salt
• 730g filtered water

Method

• Combine water and leaven in large bowl.
• Add flours and salt.
• Mix into a sticky dough and knead (20 rock & rolls, if you follow our method) until smooth.
• Cover and ferment at room temperature for 3 hours, folding twice.
• At this point, you can shape and prove the loaves, or refrigerate the bowl of dough, as I did, until you're ready next day.
• Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a boule. Set in well-floured bannetons to rise.

My chilled dough took 3 hours to rise on the counter, on a very hot day.

• While the loaves are proving, sketch your ideas for two faces on a scrap of paper. Be bold and simplify the lines as much as possible.
• Pre-heat your oven to 240 C. You will get even better results if you use the Dutch oven method, but it was just a tad too hot yesterday for me to feel like wrestling with a cast iron pot!

• Turn the first loaf out onto a paper lined tray and brush as much excess flour off as you can, to minimise stripes. Using a very sharp blade, carve a face. Slide the loaf into the oven.
• Repeat with the second loaf.

• Bake for 25 minutes, turning temperature down to 210 C after first 10 minutes and allowing 5 minutes extra for second loaf.
• Allow to cool on rack before decorating.

Queen Emmer, in flowering marjoram & helichrysum.