Some years ago, I was given a large, circular pizza stone. I haven’t made that many pizzas on it but I’ve turned out countless loaves of bread. You put it in the oven as it heats up and it sears the bottom of the dough as you put it on. I’ve had very few loaves stick to the stone while I used to get a lot adhering when I was using a metal tray so it has been a real boon to my baking. However, it is also quite wide and wouldn’t fit in the oven in the rental house.

During the last few months, I have produced a few loaves, mainly using my silicon bread ‘tins’. I’ve discovered that they do work with a larger volume of dough than I had been using but they don’t have the strength to hold it to a proper ‘loaf tin’ shape and one ended up breaking on me (it was, itself, a decade or two old so I got decent value from it). However, the new place has a wide oven and, today, I finally got my stone-bread-fu back on and produced the above result – photogenic and wonderfully tasty (and already looking much shorter than when that image was taken!).