I will start with a confession, because food blogs are full of people who won’t make it. I have kept sourdough starters. I have named them, fed them, apologised to them, thrown half of them away every morning like a man paying rent on a tenant he never sees. And I have concluded that it is not worth it. The bread was no better than this one, and this one did not need feeding while I was in Protaras.

What I use instead is dry sourdough starter from a packet (AlphaMega or Metro have it): half a sachet, nine grams, with two grams of dry yeast, 150 ml of water and a teaspoon of honey to wake it up. That’s the point where I put the scale away, so let me write it down before I forget: 9 g starter, 2 g yeast, 150 ml water, 5 g honey, for 650 g of flour. Leave it until it bubbles.

Now the flour, because the flour explains the bread. In our kitchen there’s a bag of mixed grain flour meant for chapattis: wheat, rye, jowar, and a few other things the mill doesn’t bother to list. It is the flour of my childhood and has no business being in a European-style loaf. So naturally I put it in one. While the yeast is waking up I wet all the flour, somewhere between 600 and 700 grams, with just enough water to make it damp, and leave it alone for an hour or more. The bakers call this autolyse. I call it letting the flour think about it.

Then everything goes into the KitchenAid: the starter, the flour, a good glug of olive oil, a spoon of black treacle (which is why the crumb is that colour; people assume it’s a dark rye, but it’s a sweet, slightly bitter chapatti loaf in disguise), 25 to 30 grams of salt, and water until it feels right. I know that’s no help to anyone. I don’t measure anything except the yeast, and I’m not going to start now.

Oregano and thyme from the garden, because this is Cyprus and everything gets oregano and thyme eventually. This time a handful of chopped black and green olives went in too; other times it’s walnuts, or sun-dried tomatoes, or whatever you fancy. Pumpkin seeds and melon seeds pressed onto the crust, which is where they belong: on top they toast and go nutty, inside they just go soft.

It is not a pretty loaf. It is dark and heavy and the crust looks like it’s been through something. Cut it and the inside is close and moist, a little sweet from the treacle, a little salty from the olives, and it holds together on the knife, which chapatti flour has no right to do.

How to eat it? Butter and salt. Halloumi, inevitably. Olive oil and a tomato. Jam, if you must. Caviar, if you like that sort of thing; I don’t, and the bread doesn’t need it.

There’s no recipe here, only a method and a feeling. Which is roughly how I DJ: the yeast is the one thing I count, the rest I do by hand, and the loaf I don’t plan is usually the one people ask about.

Svetlana’s verdict, delivered from the kitchen doorway: “I want the ends!” A pause. “And the middle.”

Ajit