All Day Baking in Our English Cottage | Bread, Pizzas & Sourdough Bagels for My Family of 5

We are constantly told that convenience is the ultimate goal of modern life, that buying things ready-made saves us time so we can be busy doing something else. We rush from task to task, optimising our lives until there is no room left for the process itself. But lately I've been asking myself, what exactly are we saving that time for? Today I wanted to ignore the supermarket aisles and reclaim a simple, traditional skill right here in my cottage kitchen. I'm making bagels, bread rolls and pizza from scratch. It's a day of batch baking but it's also a quiet rebellion. It turns out the secret to a peaceful home isn't found in It's found in slowing down and working with nature. Join me as we reclaim the kitchen one sourdough loaf at a time. There is something incredibly grounding about handling sourdough. Unlike commercial yeast which is designed for speed and consistency, which is helpful sometimes, a sourdough starter is a living thing. It changes with the weather, the temperature of the kitchen and even the flour you feed it. Actually looking at this bubbling jar it's fascinating to think that for 6,000 years this was the only way bread existed. If you were a baker in ancient Egypt or a villager here in England before the Victorian era, you didn't have packets of dried yeast, you had a culture, you had a relationship with your food. In the 1960s we saw the rise of the Chorleywood process, methods designed to make bread as fast and white as possible. We traded nutrition and digestibility for speed but here time is the one ingredient I can afford to spend on this. I'm starting with getting a sourdough pizza dough ready for tonight's supper and then I'm working with some simple bread rolls for this week's lunches. People often ask me why I bother with the extra effort of sourdough pizza when a delivery is so easy for example or a frozen pizza is so easy but the secret is in the fermentation. See while the dough sits here on the counter bubbling away, the wild yeast and bacteria are actually breaking down the gluten and the phytic acid for me. It's almost like the dough is being pre-digested and that's why a slice of homemade sourdough pizza doesn't leave you feeling heavy and bloated the way a greasy takeaway does. It's gentle, it's nourishment, not just fuel. Working with sourdough requires a different kind of attention, you cannot rush the fermentation, you have to wait and in that waiting the kitchen quiets down. This dough demands my patience but it rewards me with rhythm, it's a physical kind of meditation, the stretch, the fold, the rest that clears the mind in a way that scrolling on a phone absolutely never could. So last night I whipped up a sourdough dough for some bread rolls and I've let that rise in the fridge and ferment overnight and now it's time to shape the rolls. These are one of my favourite things to make for lunches and bacon rolls and those sorts of things because the rolls are just so faithful and the recipe is faithful and it's delicious and I'll leave that in the description link or over on my Patreon for my supporters over there. I put them into printable and downloadable recipe cards for you. So I'm going to pull the sourdough roll dough out of the fridge and let that just rest on the counter and come up to room temperature and in the meantime I'm going to get started on some pickled onions for our lunch and I just let the the onions chopped finely and let it rest in vinegar and a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt and they are absolutely delicious. My favourite is to use red onions but you can also use shallots and pickling onions and things and make the kind of traditional pickling onion and this was delicious. I served it with some homemade wraps and a roasted chicken. So as I mixed the flour and the water earlier for my sourdough pizza dough now it's time to add in the rest of the ingredients. I find that when working with sourdough or fresh flour or anything like that you need to let the flour and the water autolyse and let it sit for at least 30 minutes to an hour so that's what I did with the sourdough pizza and now it's time to add it all in and give it a knead together and let it rest in an oiled bowl for a few hours. So these are my super yummy soft wraps and it has one cup of flour, half a cup of warm water, one and a half tablespoons of olive oil and half a teaspoon of salt but I added an extra quarter teaspoon of garlic powder and a tiny pinch of sugar to balance the flavours and they just the most perfect soft wraps with our roasted parsley and olive oil chicken for lunch. So now the dough has come up to room temperature it's time to shape them. This is my favourite stage because the dough finally tells you how well you've looked after it and a little homemaking tip here I always lightly flour my hands but keep the work surface almost bare because too much flour on the counter and the dough will just slide around instead of gripping and building that nice tension on top and you want it to cling just enough so that you can gently pull it into a smooth tight ball and as I took the edges underneath I'm thinking about how this is such a small ordinary task but it quietly shapes the whole week ahead and these little rolls are post homeschool session lunches, quick soups and bread suppers and maybe the odd evening snack for my husband when he's feeling a bit peckish and there's a rhythm to it that I really love you take a piece of dough stretch it over itself and turn stretch and turn and it doesn't need to be rushed or perfect at all but the dough responds so much better when you're gentle with it almost and homemaking can feel overwhelming when we only look at the big picture the meal plans cleaning lists appointments but moments like this remind me that a cozy home is really built in these tiny repeated actions one roll at a time one load of washing one wiped down and you know your rolls are shaped well when the tops look smooth and slightly taut like a little drum almost and that tension helps them rise upwards in the oven instead of spreading out flat and I'm going to line these up on a tray now and let them have a second rise while we move on to something a bit more adventurous the sourdough bagels but for now I love seeing this tray full of neat little rolls all sleepy and puffy just waiting to become something golden and delicious so now that the sourdough pizza dough is ready to shape before we get onto our bagels I wanted to shape them ready for our supper tonight so I'm just dividing the dough into two large pieces and the children are helping me press them out and I like to let them take the lead here as much as I possibly can and their little fingers are perfect for gently pressing the dough from the middle outwards and I just sort of step in now and then and shape my own and then let them help and take over and then help them with theirs and then guide it into something roughly circular it doesn't need to be perfect a slightly wobbly edge just means you just know it's homemade and a little tip if you're doing this with the children encourage them to leave a thicker ring of dough all around the outside because that's going to become our crust and today we're doing something a bit special with it which I'm very excited about and once we've got our rough pizza shapes I'm tucking in little pieces of mozzarella all along the outer edge then I just fold the dough over and gently pinch it closed to seal in the cheese and it looks very rustic at this stage but in the oven it will puff up into the most beautiful cheesy crust and it's such a simple way to make a homemade pizza feel like a real treat and the children love helping with this bit too, patting the mozzarella, patting the pepperoni, making sure there are no gaps in the crust and it's a lovely quiet kind of teamwork and now we're spooning on the tomato sauce and I'm showing them how to keep it away from their stuffed crust that doesn't spill over and I like to use the back of the spoon in gentle circles almost like painting, it slows them down and it makes it all feel just a little bit more intentional. I also like to finish with a sprinkle of dried herbs over everything, oregano or basil is fine or whatever you have to hand honestly and it smells like a pizzeria as soon as it hits the warm dough and sauce it's delicious and if your children are unsure about herbs and things then letting them do the sprinkling and getting involved in adding the herbs to food makes them much more willing to try. So now after a full day of baking we're on to our last project of the day, the sourdough bagels. The kitchen is a little quieter now and the light is softer and this feels like my slow gentle way of closing the busy day. I've already got the dough rested and ready and now I'm dividing it into even pieces as much as possible and I like to weigh them if I have the patience which today clearly I do but most of the time I kind of eyeball it and accept that some will be a little bigger than others but homemade doesn't need to be exact to be beautiful and there are two main ways to shape the bagels, you can roll each piece into a rope and wrap it around your fingers or you can do what I'm about to do here which was an experiment for the first two and that is to poke a baking piping bag top, I can't remember the name of it and poke it through. I saw someone do this online and then take the dough out. Now I sort of liked that process but I didn't like wasting the dough so after this I just decided to do the other way which is to roll it into a tight ball then poke a hole straight through the middle and then gently stretch the hole out turning the dough around my fingers so it doesn't tear and it will spring back a little as it rests so really don't be afraid to make the centre wider than you want to, that is my tip with bagels after making them. For a while now just bake the holes bigger and they will puff up when they rest and they'll puff up in the boil and the bake and a little homemaking tip too is when I'm tired I set everything up a bit like an assembly line like one tray for the dough balls, a clear space in the middle to poke and shape and another tray lightly oiled and lined ready for the finished bagels and having that simple order makes the whole process feel kind of soothing rather than chaotic and you know I'm able to listen to a nice podcast and actually enjoy the evening making bagels rather than it feeling like a chore and there's something very comforting about this rhythm which I really enjoy especially when the house is still and this becomes my quiet moment of creativity almost and I think every homemaker needs at least one task like this where your hands know what to do and your mind can gently drift. I'm returning back to the rolls now because they have rested for a long time so I'm adding in an egg wash and I'm sprinkling over some everything but the bagel seasoning which is just a perfect topping to these rolls then I bake in the oven for about 18 minutes. So now that the bagels are shaped I've got a pan of water gently simmering on the hob and I drop them in a few at a time just until they rise and puff on the surface and a quick turn with a slotted spoon and you can already see that kind of shiny chewy skin starting to form. As they come out of the water I lay them back on the tray, some I leave completely plain and a few I sprinkle just the lightest seasoning while they're still damp so it clings to the surface and they go into a hot oven and this is the last bake of the day. The kitchen fills with that deep comforting smell of bread, the crusts turn golden and the bagels sit cooling beside the loaves and the pizza and that is where I'll end today. A quiet cottage kitchen, tomorrow's breakfast already waiting and the simple joy of knowing that flour, water, salt and time became all of this. So thank you so much for spending this day with me. If you like my videos and you'd like to support my channel then please do check out my Patreon page and I'll see you over in the next one.