Do Wild Baking: Food, Fire and Good Times (Do Books): 16

Freshly baked breads and honest food cooked outdoors

Cooking outdoors can be a challenge – building your own fire for starters – but the rewards are great: a hearty stew eaten under a starlit sky; grilled mackerel on the beach; ash-baked flatbreads plucked from the glowing embers, torn and shared.

Tom Herbert, a fifth-generation baker and true advocate for this way of life, makes it easy. Armed with your hero ingredients, essential kit, and some kindling, you’ll be inspired to leave the kitchen for an outdoor adventure – even if it’s mere miles from home.

In Do Wild Baking over 50 delicious recipes – from Beer Bread to Hot Smoked Salmon – are grouped by location: Beach, Mountain, River and Forest. And if rain prevails, most can be recreated at home.

This is a call for a more relaxed, inclusive style of cooking and baking. It’s not just about delicious meals shared, but the conversations ignited, the senses reawakened, and above all, the memories created.

Tom Herbert is a fifth-generation baker and founder of The Long Table, a community food hall supporting food hubs and local supply chains around Gloucestershire. As a social enterprise, it has grown rapdily since 2018 from serving 50 hot meals a week on site to neighbors, to over 48,000 freshly-cooked frozen meals (with the help of partner kitchens) during lockdowns. Tom is one half of TV’s Fabulous Baker Brothers. He started baking at the Hobbs House Bakery but more recently has baked with RCK (Refugee Community Kitchen) in Calais and Ujima Bakehouse in Kenya. In addition to baking, he also teaches, writes, presents, and mentors. As an ambassador for the development charity Tearfund (tearfund.org), for whom he has baked around the world, he helps to give people a hand up by sharing skills and knowledge. His dream is to one day bake in space. Tom has been married to Anna since they were very young; they now share their life together with their four children.