Manuel Monade moved to the UK in 1987 from Paris where he was studying archaeology and art history at La Sorbonne. In London, he opted for a more hands-on vocational path, first becoming a qualified chef then moving on to baking in various West End restaurants in the exciting London food scene of the 1980s and 1990s. His defining moment came when he joined the original team at St John Restaurant in Smithfield. Fergus Henderson, the head chef and proprietor, insisted on having real artisan bread freshly baked in-house for each service. Dan Lepard was the main baker and he introduced Manuel to breadmaking. When Dan left, Manuel took over the small bakery and never returned to working as a chef again. He baked not only for the restaurant but also for the local community in Farringdon and Clerkenwell. Manuel returned to France to train at the Institut National de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie in Rouen before returning to work in London. For many years he worked with Matt Jones at Flour Power City Bakery, before becoming a teacher at Bread Ahead Baking School. Manuel is the current chair of the Southwark Refugee and Migrant Project, an organisation that he has been working with for the past 20 years. Having helped people facing stressful situations in the course of his charitable work, and also having experienced the sense of achievement of his students, he is interested in the therapeutic potential of baking to enhance wellbeing.

Caroline Harrison is a BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and supervisor, EMDR (eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing) therapist and mental health nurse with over 20 years’ experience in the NHS, working in a range of adult, child and adolescent therapeutic services. She currently works at the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma at the Maudsley Hospital. Caroline authored a workbook on Coping with Trauma in collaboration with the Good Thinking website https://www.good-thinking.uk with techniques for helping people cope with symptoms of PTSD.

ROBINSON

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Robinson

Copyright © Manuel Monade, 2021

Bread Making for Mental Wellbeing
Copyright © Caroline Harrison, 2021

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47214-683-0

Robinson
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

The recommendations given in this book are solely intended as education and should not be taken as medical advice.

This book is dedicated to anyone who is struggling to cope with daily life, who is feeling isolated or perhaps even lacking self-worth. We humbly hope that using your hands to make bread and to bake – this simple way of being proactive – may play a small role in your recovery.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Breaditation: The Art of Bread Making

Bread Making for Mental Wellbeing

Bread Basics

The Four Stages of Breadmaking

Kneading

Proving

Shaping

Baking

All You Need to Know – in a Nutshell

Ingredients

Essential Equipment

Recipes

Italian Breads

Morning Treats

Flatbreads

Daily Bread

Enriched Doughs

Pastry Crusts

Biscuits

Sourdough Breads

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

Before there was a book, there was a project.

I have been working with refugees and asylum seekers in the London Borough of Southwark for over 20 years as the chair of the Southwark Refugee and Migrant Project. I had been interested for a while in linking my professional baking experience directly to my voluntary work through some meaningful initiative. I thought first about a bakery as a social enterprise to tackle the high rates of unemployment in refugee communities, but I wasn’t sure that I could commit to such an initiative in the long term, or if I would be able to devote the energy needed to make it successful. I carried on with my day job, but this idea was always at the back of my mind, popping up from time to time, although more as a bitter-sweet thought: ‘It could have been a great idea.’

Then, entirely by chance, I met Caroline Harrison through a common acquaintance in the voluntary sector. We started to talk about our respective lines of work. She told me that she was a cognitive behavioural psychotherapist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust specialising in trauma and anxiety disorders, and part of her job (aside from individual therapy) was to run groups for people who had been through distressing or traumatic experiences in the past. To me, this presented an unexpected opportunity to unearth my old idea. I would just have to change it from a straightforward employment venture to more of a general wellbeing project. Naturally, I asked Caroline if she would be interested in adding baking as another activity to her weekly therapy group. She thought that this sounded like a great idea, but she would have to discuss it with the rest of her team. In the opinion of an impatient baker that took quite some time! But eventually things started to happen quickly and we were soon ready to launch our long-awaited project. Twenty-twenty seemed a promising year, but then, as we all know, the whole world ground to a halt, and it was impossible in the short term for workshops to go ahead. Once again, ‘It could have been a great idea’!

But in another twist of fate, through another chance encounter, this time with publisher Duncan Proudfoot who happened to be attending one of my breadmaking classes, the idea bounced back and became the potential subject for a book, this time aimed at a much wider audience, but with the same ultimate goal: to look at baking as a way to unwind and ground ourselves, to help us cope with stress. In many ways, the craze for baking during the first lockdown had already made that case.

Through its various reincarnations, this idea remained essentially the same: to use baking as a medium for positive personal change. And I’m still hopeful that those workshops that had to be postponed will come to fruition in the not too distant future, turning that slow-proving idea into practice.

Manuel Monade