Baking with Fortitude: Winner of the Andre Simon Food Award 2021

The 90 recipes in this book are all about beautiful, natural flavours from quality ingredients like fruits and spices.

Dee Rettali is an artisan baker who, over a lifetime of baking, has honed her recipes to bring out intense flavour using forgotten craftsmanship. Dee’s cakes, created for her bakery - Fortitude Bakehouse in London - are a world away from generic cakes loaded with sugar or artificial flavours.

Her most groundbreaking technique is to use a sourdough-like starter in her baking, another flavour-building process she has developed is to ferment the batter itself before baking. Both these exciting and simple approaches bring a unique depth of flavour to Dee’s recipes, as do other slow-paced artisanal methods like steeping fruit and making herb infusions.

This is a cutting-edge way of baking and at the same time it has antecedents in Dee’s past. She grew up in rural Ireland where seasonal and no-waste baking was simply a way of life. This book brings this back to life in a thoroughly modern way.

‘I love Dee Rettali’s baking - she is obsessed with flavour. A bold and beautiful book’ Diana Henry