I LOVE bread. I’ve been known to inhale half a loaf in one sitting when it’s fresh from the oven. Warm brown bread with Marmite is one of my most abiding childhood memories. But I’ve never been that good at making it.

So when my little brother (a novice bread maker) told me he found this great book featuring the best bread making method, I thought I’d get right on it.

The book’s called Dough, and it’s by Richard Bertinet. Our Richie (as I’m going to insist on calling him) has a glorious local pedigree. He was head chef at Rhinefield House and worked at the Chewton Glen, and now runs a cookery school in Bath, voted one of the best cookery schools IN THE WORLD by Gourmet magazine.

People say things like "Bertinet hasn't merely changed the way I bake - he may have changed my life" when they talk about him.

So when I settled down on Sunday to give his famous bread making method a go, I was feeling relaxed, confident; excited even.

Dough comes with a handy DVD of Richard demonstrating his method. He weighs, not measures, the water. He says things like “don’t worry if you think it’s too wet.” He bans you from adding extra flour because that would be altering the recipe.

And using an unusual but not too complicated-looking technique, he takes a sticky, runny mass of flour and water out onto an unfloured surface, and turns it into incredible bread dough.

So I followed his instructions. Yeast straight in, no proving. Water all in at once, weighed not measured, according to the recipe.

It looked sloppy. Ahah! I thought. That’s what they meant when they said (they being reviewers, fans of the Bertinet method, bloggers) “you’ll think it’s too wet, but don’t worry.”

As I used my old River Island card (it’s part of the technique, I’m not just weird) to scrape the “dough” (to be honest it was more like batter) into a pile, I was already imagining the conversation I’d have with my boyfriend when he got home.

As he tucked into my superb, unrivalled, loaf with a blissful expression on his face I’d say “it’s amazing. There was a point near the beginning when I thought I’d made a terrible mistake but when it started to turn into real dough it was like a miracle…”

But my fantasy was soon replaced with the terrible realisation that I might – just might – have made a mistake.

Try as I might, the dough wouldn’t get any less sloppy. It was so wet I was covered in bread splashback. There was dough on the floor, in my hair, all over the mug tree. It remained resolutely unbread-like. Definitely unBertinet-like.

Twenty minutes in, back muscles burning from the lift-slap-fold-lift-slap of the Bertinet technique, I paused to double check the DVD. Maybe I was doing it wrong? I also searched the web for some indication that it WAS possible to have added too much water.

Richard’s dough looked much firmer than mine. But I kept coming across phrases like “you’ll think it’s too wet but DON’T add flour” and “slowly but surely, a miracle happens.”

So I persevered. For another twenty minutes. But it wasn’t happening. I added some flour, silently praying that by doing so I wasn’t inviting a bolt of French lightning to descend and kill me instantly.

Twenty more minutes. No lightning. No bread either. More flour. A lot of swearing. In the time I’ve been kneading it’s got dark, and the pumpkin I’d roasted to make soup with has got so cold it’s hard as concrete. Empires rise and fall. My arms fall off from the effort.

The third addition of flour seems to do the job. It’s at about this point that I find a set of instructions that say “after five or ten minutes the dough will start to transform”. If I had the energy I’d break something. But I haven’t, so I leave the dough to prove and crack open the Spanish brandy.

An hour later I’m tucking into some fougasse, warm from the oven – and I can’t believe how gorgeous my bread is. It’s fluffy and springy and airy, with a great crust. Almost worth the effort.

So will I persevere? I think so. Only next time I might add less water…

Got your own method of baking bread? A perfect recipe? Let us know what it is in the comments!

PS: I've since tried the method again. It works perfectly. Best bread I've ever made. Maybe I just got my measurements wrong....