‘FOR ME, LOOKING AT IT IN ITS SIMPLEST FORM, OUR CULTURES ARE COMPLETELY BASED ON BAKING, AND YOU CAN SEE THAT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. FLOUR IS THE UNIFYING FACTOR – THE BASE FOOD IN SO MANY CULTURES.’
I have wanted to write this book for a long time. It sees me discovering baking cultures of the world in ten of its most amazing cities, some of which I’d never been to before or didn’t know a great deal about. So it was a chance for me to take a few weekend breaks and just explore. I wasn’t sure what each place would offer me in terms of exciting discoveries, but the experience will stay with me for ever.
I have been around baking all my life and what these trips and this journey gave back to me was a huge slice of passion for what I do. I’m not saying that I had forgotten things or techniques, but it opened my eyes to just how important baking is to people all over the world, from Cubans in Miami – a relatively new city – to those who love a traditional British afternoon tea; from the third and fourth generations of family-run bakeries in Poland to the migrants who settled in the USA and developed a new style of baking unique to New York (with a nod to their places of origin). And then there’s Copenhagen – I’ve made so many Danish pastries over the years, so to travel to where they celebrate them more than anywhere else in the world was just amazing. They produce some of the best Danish pastries I’ve ever tasted, giving them twists like adding wholemeal flour to the dough. I’d never tried this before, but it tastes so much better.
For me, looking at it in its simplest form, our cultures are completely based on baking, and you can see that throughout the world. Flour is the unifying factor – the base food in so many cultures. Even in those places that I thought would be so different from the UK, like Russia. Have a look at the beautiful design of the Russian pies here. The presentation might be very different, but the beef pie is basically a massive sausage roll and it took me straight back to Britain when I tasted it.