Thy daily bread

I won't waste your time with lengthy explanations about why I haven't blogged since 1984. I'll simply say I've been researching new material and now I'm back.

Ahem, so in the name of research I got to eat at Jamie Oliver's London restaurant, Fifteen. We ate at the upstairs bit, which is evidently not as fancy-pants as the basement downstairs, but still a definite treat considering I'd been on a steady budget-induced diet of Pret A Manger sandwiches for the two weeks prior.

I love Jamie and I loved his restaurant. The vibe, the service and the food were all swell. I was lucky enough to dine with a friend who worked at Fifteen – and I struggled not to gush when she told us she and her colleagues spent that day in a field collecting wild mushrooms for the restaurant. (Then, when they'd finished foraging, Gennaro, Jamie's friend and mentor, whipped them up a mushroom risotto on a makeshift bush stove. Love.)

I ate lots of yummy things that night, everything yummy in fact, but the taste that stays with me to this day is… the bread. It was a rosemary and sea salt focaccia, and save for my sophisticated dining companions and the fact that I was 28 (and not eight), I may have forgone 'real' food in order to have a three-course meal of that bread.

As is well documented on this blog, I'm an unashamed carb lover – with bread chief among my passions. My new friend Jamie is a fan, too. "I'm still really mad about bread – I love it. It's so exciting. It's such a rewarding, therapeutic, tactile thing and you'll be so proud of yourself once you've cracked it," he explained to me… via our mutual friend the internet.

And the good news is bread isn't the diet devil it is made out to be. The better news is one of the yummiest breads (in my humble 'Bread Expert of the World' opinion) is the ideal choice if you're watching your waistline. A study in the (genuinely) prestigious British Journal of Nutrition found sourdough is the best bread to manage blood sugar. Yep, better than even wholemeal or wholegrain. To put it plainly – sourdough bread keeps us fuller for longer.

Lucky for me I have the World's Best Sourdough baked around the corner from me. I won't tell you where it is because the queues are already long enough on a Saturday, but the secret to its genius is the dough is developed for 30 hours – as an authentic sourdough should be (limiting the need for commercial yeast).

If you want to know if your favourite sourdough is the 'real' thing, then ask the baker. Get them to tell you how it's made. Sourdough should be properly 'aged', not tricked up with vinegar, improvers or emulsifiers. It's probably something you'll instinctively know anyway because real sourdough is AWESOME, and fake sourdough is just regular bread with a fancy fake name.

I've pretty much settled on World's Best Sourdough – with either Persian feta or Irish butter – as my death-row meal. I'm also determined to have a crack at making Jamie's rosemary and sea salt focaccia. I have the recipe and as Jamie says, making your own bread is a satisfying – and ultimately a very tasty – experience.