Excuse me while I silently jump up and down in glee, socks thumping the tiled floor of the kitchen, crumbs flying as I hold my bread trophy triumphantly aloft. Look at moy, look at mooyyy…

I have finally baked my first successful loaf of wheaten bread; a loaf which comes after many incredibly stolid unsuccessful attempts back home in Sydney. This success has been pulled out of the oven, duly admired, then sliced and gratefully buttered, and eaten with a sigh.

Why the obsession with a craggy-looking lump of bread? This staple of the B family breakfast table is elegant in it’s ugliness. I love it’s texture, chewiness and uneven, rustic appearance. When toasted, it ellicits an extra dimension of fragrant nuttiness. More importantly, I can’t seem to find it anywhere in Sydney and what you can’t have, you want more of. Not that I’m alone in these sentiments.

In the kitchen here, it’s become obvious why my loaves in Sydney didn’t quite work out. The buttermilk here seems to be lighter, with a nicer sour tang. The flour looks completely different; it’s flecked with larger brown wheaty flakes. The initial tricky bit was deciding which flour to get. Back in Sydney, there is usually only one type of wholemeal flour available on the shelf. Here in Belfast, there’s at least three, plus a flour specially for making wheaten bread with. I contemplate the cheat’s flour, which is composed of wholewheat flour, soft flour, baking soda and buttermilk powder. It’s a just-add-water version. If I walked down this lazy path now, there would be no chance of successfully replicating my results when I returned to Sydney, so instead I chose a “medium wholemeal” flour.

Combined and patted into a rough round shape, it is thrust into the heat, and I’m already envisioning ways of tweaking the recipe so that I can enjoy more of this bread back home.

[NB: While waiting for the beast to bake, we ran around the back garden, avoiding the apple cores and handfuls of week-old boiled cake that B’s mom had strewn over the lawn for feasting birds. B spotted tiny white mushrooms poking up from a dark and damp corner, which we had to stop and take a picture of. They look like button mushrooms, but we haven’t a clue if they’re edible or not.]