For all those who do not want to eat mass produced sliced bread filled with chemicals and preservatives, help is at hand. Chef, teacher and baker extraordinaire Richard Bertinet gets back to basics and shows that, far from being hard or time-consuming, baking bread is quick and easy. Dough breaks down the bread making process into easy-to-follow and achievable steps using just four simple ingredients - yeast, flour, water and salt. An instructional DVD accompanies the book to help illustrate and ease the process of working with dough.

In his book Bertinet explores five different doughs – White, Olive, Brown, Rye and Sweet - and shows how from these 'parent' doughs you can bake a vast variety of breads really easily. Though the doughs vary, the technique for making each one is identical. The beauty of it is that it takes no time at all to fill a bread basket with, say, striking looking Fougasse, Breadsticks or Spicy Moroccan rolls (from the White Dough chapter) or Poppy Seed Stars, Sesame plaits and chunks of Pecan and Cranberry, or Cardamom and Prune bread (from the Brown chapter) and no one will guess that they are all part of the same 'family'. Most of the breads take less than 1 hour to bake and many of the recipes can be part-baked and frozen, ready to finish off in the oven at any time.