Roll call as bakers of tomorrow get to prove themselves

Now Bettys Cookery School is celebrating its 10th year of offering free bread-making lessons to schoolchildren in Yorkshire.

Yesterday’s event at which 16 pupils from Woodfield Community Primary in Harrogate turned up for their turn at the oven door took the total number of pupils taught how to make bread “the Bettys way” over the last decade to 3,652.

It may mean getting up early in the morning, well before the dawn chorus has started, and almost certainly finding your social life rapidly becoming a long-distant memory but to those who cherish the smell and sight of a perfectly baked bread roll the effort is always worth it.

And there was no shortage of eager young hands flying up in the air when cookery school manager Richard Jones asked how many of the boys and girls, wanted to follow in his footsteps though the early start proved a sticking point for several of them.

The children, aged between nine and ten, were taught the elementary rules of baking, but given their youth were allowed to start at the slightly more civilised hour of 9am instead of 12.20am.

It is part of the cookery school’s commitment to community education work, promoting healthy eating and the importance of learning how to cook as a life skill.

The school was founded by Lesley Wild, chairman of Bettys & Taylors who spotted the potential for her dream of a purpose-built school on the site of a couple of leaky old cow sheds in a corner of the family business’s site at Plumpton Park, North Yorkshire.

The free bread-making classes for schools are funded by the so-called Five Per Cent fund – a fund set up out of Bettys & Taylors’ profits.

In 10 years the school has also run 145 Young Chef classes for youngsters between the ages of eight and 16 all designed to give young people a feel for the basics.

Mr Jones said: “Working on the bread team is a tough call. It means for some of our staff starting work at 12.30am in order to supply our six Bettys in Yorkshire while the others get a slightly later start at 4am.

“And for all those pupils who said they were interested in a career in baking the number of hands certainly went down when I mentioned the early morning start times.

“We started these community schools projects 10 years ago as a way of working with local schools to get children enthused about cooking.

“Bread has always been part of our school’s curriculum and is a great way of interesting them in cooking.

“We have a social responsibility to ‘get ourselves out there’ but also to look for the potential bakers of the future.”

As part of being shown how to bake bread the children are shown the ancient skills of kneading and how to shape bread into either “plaits” or “scrolls” and the arts of decorating them with sunflower or poppy seeds.

When the rolls are placed in the oven to be “proved” the children are given a tour of the school which inevitably ends in the “chocolate room”.

This is then followed by a tasting session where “shop bread” invariably gets the thumbs down in favour of Mr Jones’s expertly cooked roll.

Mr Jones added: “I have been here seven years and we have been involved in this project 10 years as a way of working with local schools to get children enthusiastic about cooking.

“It is after all quite endlessly intriguing how half-a-dozen ingredients can create something so tasty when it comes out of the oven.”

James Clarke, a teacher at Woodfield, who accompanied the pupils yesterday, said: “They all enjoyed it and it was very interesting for me too and we were all impressed with the whole complex. It is certainly a very professional operation indeed.

“You never think about what goes in to making a simple bread roll. The kids were very impressed with some of them saying they wanted to be bakers – the rolls certainly were delicious and the children were enthusiastic about making bread rolls.

“Some of what they learned was quite technical, the shaping element for example.”

When he is not teaching children the art of making delicious rolls Mr Jones helps advise cookery enthusiasts of all ages and shows them the finer points of how to create delicious food.

In the past these have included various celebrities from Emmerdale as well as those just anxious to impress their friends at dinner parties.

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