Requip magic gif

Hello Pat. If you imagine that you have rolled/folded the fruit-covered dough piece up into a Swiss roll, and that this is lying roughly East-West in front of you (or Left-Right) on the table. The 90 degree instruction is simply to turn this whole lump of dough by 90 degrees so that it is now a strip running North-South. Then gently flatten it a little with your knuckle or the palm of your hand and roll it up again carefully. This is a simple way of distributing the fruit fairly evenly within the dough so that it isn’t all concentrated in one place, which would make the fruitiness of some buns greater than others. Don’t worry too much if the fruit breaks through the surface of the dough and leaves you with a sticky mess. Just rub flour on your hands and a little on the table so that you can divide the dough into individual buns and mould them up reasonably smoothly. The advantage of ending up with a smooth ball of fruity dough is that any fruit poking out or sitting on the surface is liable to get a bit charred during baking and this can detract from the eating quality a bit (although I usually pick off any burnt raisins etc just to check how burnt they are ;)).

Nice to hear from you Sue. I moved from Melmerby in 2009 to the Scottish Borders where I ran courses until 2017. I have now moved again to Fife, where I am close to Scotland The Bread HQ (www.scotlandthebread.org) where we research nutrient dense grains and mill them into wholemeal flour to supply community bakers. I’m afraid I don’t run courses now, except for a bit of ‘training the trainers’ work. Luckily there’s a younger generation of skilful and committed bakers coming through to whom I’m happy to pass the baguette. Best wishes, Andrew.