My name is Neil Annett, and I’ve been making bread for many years. I have no commercial experience of baking or catering, nor any training in the field, so you may well wonder how I’m qualified to write a book about it (even if it’s only a virtual book). I would respond by suggesting that that is exactly what does qualify me to write it. It reflects pretty faithfully my own learning experience and the questions I have found myself asking over the years. In other words, it is the product of being a self-taught amateur – like the intended audience of this book – rather than a schooled professional, whose learning experience is likely to have been very different.
I have other qualities, too. I took a degree in fine art, and then a masters in media and communications, at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the mid-1990s. It was certainly intellectually rewarding. I got fired from a well-known West End art gallery for dropping everything I picked up, and I spent many years moving furniture. I was much better at that, and very rarely dropped anything. Now I live with my young family in East Anglia, where I write, paint, and earn a living doing something dull that involves very little lifting.