Kitty Tait was 14 when depression struck. Three years later the Orange Bakery she runs with her dad is feted by star bakers on Instagram – and they have their own book of recipes, Breadsong

D on’t, whatever you do, call it a village. Watlington, population 2,643, on the edge of the Chiltern Hills in Oxfordshire, is reputed to be the smallest town in England. “We are so proud of that fact,” says 17-year-old Kitty Tait. “The townspeople, the smallest townspeople, are very proud of that.”

“And we are some of the smallest people in the smallest town,” interjects Al Tait, Kitty’s 52-year-old dad, who describes himself as looking like a Guess Who? character: bald, glasses, ginger-flecked beard.

“We are,” agrees Kitty, who has inherited her father’s vivid red hair and blue eyes. “We’re called the Tiny Taits.”

Watlington may be diminutive but it is perfectly formed. On a Friday morning in March, shoppers with canvas bags nip between – on one street – an excellent butcher, Angela’s veg stall, a fancy chocolate shop and the Orange Bakery, which the Taits opened in early 2019. “We’re working on the candlestick makers,” says Kitty, smiling. “It reminds me of the town in Hot Fuzz. I tell myself, ‘There’s a dark underbelly here…’”

The Orange Bakery, especially, has developed a cult following. An artist called Biddy who makes work about “anything that’s dead”, describes it to me as the heartbeat of Watlington. When I’m hanging around the shop, a man with his toddler son tells me, unsolicited, that the Taits make the best bread in the world. When I tell Kitty that later, she replies: “Well, I did pay him. Money well spent. The boy, actually, was the expensive one.”

They come, and usually queue, for the sourdough, baguettes and focaccia, but Kitty and Al throw out all sorts of unusual and wonderful bakes. Kitty’s favourite loaf is The Comfort, which is laced with Marmite and has a salty, umami crust with a Twiglet-like flavour. One of their proudest creations is Happy Bread, made from doughnut dough, caramel and sea-salt flakes, with an optional sprinkling of chocolate-infused CBD oil, the (legal) chemical extracted from marijuana. If you can’t make it to Watlington, there is a new Orange Bakery cookbook called Breadsong, named after the hiss and crackle that loaves make when they come out of the oven, a sound that some bakers think sounds like faraway applause.

The Taits are exceptional bakers but the story behind the Orange Bakery might be even more remarkable. “I wouldn’t wish what’s happened to us to happen to anybody,” says Al when he picks me up in the work van, a Nissan S-Cargo called Dodo. “But I’m so glad it has.”

It began in spring 2018, when Al and his wife, Katie, started to notice that something was up with Kitty, then 14 and the youngest of their three children. Kitty was doing well at school and was known for her infectious giggle, but, almost imperceptibly, she became less sociable, more anxious. She ate less and less, was hardly sleeping and began to have panic attacks. Soon, she couldn’t get out of bed, and stopped going to school. Kitty had depression and started to see a therapist in Oxford twice a week.

The sessions, though, never made much headway. At home, Al and Katie tried everything they could think of with Kitty: gardening, sewing, painting. Nothing stuck. Al, who worked with dyslexic undergraduates at Oxford University and the charity Now Teach, which encourages older people to go into teaching, pretty much wound down his career. One afternoon, out of ideas, he made a loaf using New York baker Jim Lahey’s no-knead method. It wasn’t particularly special, but Kitty took an interest. “It was like alchemy,” she recalls.

Both agree that the routine was as appealing as the bread. Kitty and Al made more and more loaves; Kitty took to sleeping in the kitchen, because she felt more comfortable being around her dough. “Everyone should have a bed in their kitchen,” she writes in Breadsong. Pretty quickly, the Taits had more bread than they could ever get through as a household, so they started offering it to neighbours. Strangers would collar Kitty in the Co-op supermarket and ask how they could get hold of one of the loaves: “It was like being the drug lord of Watlington.”

Kitty is so funny, so energetic, it is hard when you meet her now to imagine anything different. Writing Breadsong with Al, which is a memoir as much as a recipe collection, forced her to confront how ill she had been. “None of this is planned,” says Kitty, over a lunch of sausage rolls and knäckebröd in their home. “When we started baking, we didn’t think: ‘Right, we want to set up a bakery, let’s learn how to bake.’ At first, it was just pure survival mode. And literally every day just thinking ahead to the next day was too exhausting. We were so living in the moment.

“And writing about it, I didn’t realise how emotionally exhausting it was going to be,” she goes on. “There’s all this trauma that I’d just pushed down and moved on from that I had to work my way through again. And that was really painful, but also really good because, at the end of it, I understood, not why I got ill or why I struggled, but I became immensely proud of myself. Beforehand, I’d felt really ashamed of my mental health: the times that I couldn’t get out of bed or the times when I just had to scream. And writing about it made me realise my mental health wasn’t my fault and it never really was. And there might be other people who might feel ashamed of their mental health.”

When we meet, Al and Kitty are in the process of recording the audiobook for Breadsong. “It is an emotional process reading it back,” says Al. “There’s the catharsis of it, but there are still moments where, just because I’m a soppy old fool, I’ll find it quite hard to read some bits. Because it takes me back.”

Kitty is the first to admit she has an obsessive streak. Not long ago, she “had a fling” with carrots: she was eating a bag a day, pretty much. Eventually her skin started turning orange, a harmless condition called carotenemia. “I thought you’d been using fake tan, which is very unlike you!” says her mum, Katie. “It really reminded me of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with the child who turned into a blueberry.”

Baking has allowed Kitty to channel her energies more productively. In the early days, when she was not well enough to travel, much of this was done by “stalking” bakers and chefs she admired on Instagram: a global knowledge base that includes Chad Robertson from Tartine in San Francisco, Christina Tosi from Momofuku Milk Bar in New York and the best sourdough bakeries around the UK. Many of Kitty’s heroes have been generous with advice – Robertson and his partner Elizabeth Prueitt backed the Kickstarter for the Orange Bakery to move into new premises – and some have become friends IRL. Since Kitty has recovered, she has gone out on short placements at the Dusty Knuckle and Little Bread Pedlar in London and Hamblin Bread in Oxford.

“For lots of girls, particularly my age, but I think older people too, Instagram can be a place where you compare yourself in a way that’s really negative and slightly addictive,” says Kitty. “But I wouldn’t be here without Instagram. At the beginning, it enabled me to see that there was this outside world that wasn’t just Watlington. And it drove me to bake better.”

As the bakery moved on from a subscription model to a pop-up to a permanent space on Watlington’s High Street, Al Tait started to realise that he wasn’t going back to his old life. There have been financial concerns along the way but, as the bakery has grown in productivity and popularity, these have lessened, too. One day, when friends asked him to witness their wills, he wrote his occupation as “baker” and he realised that his heart soared as he did so. “I feel I’m the lucky one out of the two of us, because I’ve been able to have this second chapter,” he says. “Kitty’s creativity, and her independence, is extraordinary. I don’t think I’ve brought that out, I’ve just happened to be there at the same time.”

Kitty and Al make a good team, and four years of 5am starts have done nothing to dent that. They have carved out their spaces in the operation – “I’m anything cheese-related,” says Al. “The cheese king is here!” – and have a closeness that not many fathers share with their teenage daughters. “When I got depressed and when I was dealing so badly with anxiety, you were the one who really, really understood,” Kitty tells Al. “And that’s because you’d also gone through depression, but you really listened. And I think because my brain was so fragmented, when it rebuilt, you were just kind of part of it. Most teenagers don’t have that as much, because they move away, but you’re not just my parent any more, you’re part of me. You’re my best friend, and you’re also my business partner. And you’re also just, like, my partner.”

Kitty laughs to break the emotion. “Partner in crime!” she says in a sarcastic voice, before turning serious again. “And I love that.”

Both Al and Kitty are effusive about Aggie and Albert, Kitty’s patient siblings, who had to put up with their kitchen being turned into a professional bakery for a couple of years. Kitty has even named one of the Orange Bakery’s sourdough loaves after her brother. “We think he likes the fact that it’s called The Albert,” says Katie, their mum. Then she giggles: “He doesn’t really, actually.”

This would be an obvious time for the Orange Bakery to expand, employ more staff, open new sites. The Taits started making plans but one day not long ago, as they were mixing dough for the following morning, Kitty turned to her dad and said she wasn’t ready to take a more hands-off role, mainly because she loved what they were doing now. He’d been thinking the same thing. They both want to work more with schools, with a local prison; Kitty often says she wants to “democratise” good bread. They both want to write more. Perhaps, they think, the best way to achieve this would be to open the shop less rather than take on extra commitments.

Kitty, perhaps remembering her age, is also aware that there might be other things in her life that have nothing to do with dough. “But I also think that bread, just like Dad, will always just be a part of me,” she says. “Fundamentally, when all my fragments broke, when I was just all over the place, Dad was there and bread was there. And that’s just who I am.”

This was the first bread recipe I learned, and how the simple ingredients transform into a loaf still feels like magic. All you need to make a loaf twice as tasty as anything on the supermarket shelf, with a crunchy crust and pillowy crumb, is a casserole dish with a lid and an oven that can get up to 210C fan/gas mark 8. At the beginning our oven could only reach 160C fan, so even if yours is lacking oomph, your breadmaking is not doomed. If you make only a single recipe from this book, this one will probably give you the biggest thrill. It’s truly a miracle.

strong white bread flour 500g, plus extra for dusting fine sea salt 10g instant dried yeast 3g (1 tsp or slightly less than half a 7g sachet) lukewarm water 330ml

Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl and add the salt and yeast. Stir together using either a sturdy spoon or, my personal favourite, your hands. Bit by bit gently mix in the lukewarm water until a shaggy dough forms. We call this the Scooby dough in homage to Scooby-Doo.

Place a damp tea towel or shower cap over the rim of the bowl and leave in a cosy draught-free place to prove for hours – overnight is best. Like the fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a carriage, time transforms your scrappy, dull dough into a bubbly, live creature of its own, although I think I’d prefer the pumpkin over the carriage.

Once your dough has risen and is bubbling away, tip it on to a lightly floured work surface. Remember it’s alive so the greater respect you show the dough with gentle handling, the more it will reward you and the better your loaf will come out. Gently shape the dough into a ball – a well-floured plastic dough scraper really helps here – making sure there is a light coating of flour all over.

Place the shaped dough on a sheet of parchment paper, cover with a damp tea towel and set aside in a warm, cosy place to rest for 1 hour.

Halfway through the resting time, preheat the oven to 210C fan/gas mark 9 or as high as it will go. Put a large cast-iron casserole dish with a lid and a heatproof handle into the hot oven for 30 minutes to heat up.

Once the casserole dish is good and hot, carefully take it out of the oven and lift off the lid. Uncover the dough and, using the parchment paper, lift and then lower the dough into the heated casserole dish. Using a sharp knife, razor blade or scissors, score the top of the dough with slashes in any pattern you like – one long slash, a cross, a square or even a smiley face. You might want to invest in a baker’s lame for this, basically a razor blade in a stick and cheap as chips but, alongside your dough scraper, a good friend.

Pour a couple of tablespoons of water inside the casserole around the dough, replace the lid and put the dish back in the hot oven. Bake for 30 minutes with the lid on. Remove the lid to reveal your magnificent loaf, then continue to bake uncovered for a further 10 minutes to get a nice, golden crust or 15 minutes if you like your loaf a bit darker. I do.

Place the loaf on a wire rack and leave to cool for at least 30 minutes. This is the hardest part, but it’s also the most important as the bread keeps cooking after you take it out of the oven. If you listen carefully, you might even hear the loaf sing – this is the “breadsong”. Just don’t scorch your ear … You’ve just made bread. No mess, though I always find a way. No kneading. Just magic.

Swap 250g of the strong white bread flour for wholemeal flour. This results in an earthy loaf that makes you feel like you’ve been working in a field all day. Serving suggestion With a slab of salted butter and some chunky country paté.

Swap 100g of the strong white bread flour for rye flour and add 100g toasted seeds of your choice. My favourite combo is pumpkin, sunflower and linseed. This makes a dense loaf with a nice, roasted nuttiness. But be warned, working with rye is like handling wet concrete. When your hands get all sticky from the dough, use a bit more flour to wipe them clean. Sounds weird, but it’s so much better than scraping off dough under a running tap. Serving suggestion Cut thinly, toasted and spread with a scraping of horseradish sauce, some smoked salmon and a couple of thinly sliced cornichons.

Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of Marmite or other yeast extract, dissolving it in the 330ml warm water before mixing it into the dry ingredients. This is my favourite loaf. I started making this bread at a time when every day seemed like a war zone, full of panic attacks, extreme lows and constant blasts of exhausting mental shrapnel. Every night I looked forward to mixing the dough that I’d bake in the morning. Everything about this loaf makes me feel safe. Its sweet, slightly charred smell, its crust (like Twiglets), its squishy, soft, more-ish centre. Whenever I knew the day ahead would be hard, I’d make this loaf. Serving suggestion If I had my way, I’d be very happy eating the Comfort loaf with cheese all day, every day.

I used to hate chelsea buns; I just couldn’t see the point of anything where raisins or sultanas were involved. Every now and again I would chomp into a cookie, bun or pastry speckled with chocolate chips, only to find out that they weren’t chocolate chips at all and were in fact chewy, dry little pellets – raisins or sultanas, my nemesis. However, after a lot of requests, mainly from customers of a certain vintage, I decided to have a go. Like in Roald Dahl’s Danny Champion of the World, I soaked the dried fruit. This made them plump and juicy. This, together with adding thinly sliced apple, results in an amazingly soft bun that is now one of the bakery favourites (even with our customers under the age of 70).

Makes 12 buns everything dough 1 quantity (see below)

For the filling raisins, sultanas or mixed dried fruit 150g garam masala 1 tsp dried cranberries 50g (optional, but great if you can get hold of them) tea bag 1 (English breakfast or earl grey) boiling water about 100ml unsalted butter 50g, melted soft light brown sugar 50g ground cinnamon 1 tbsp apple 1, thinly sliced (optional, but strongly recommended) lemon zest of 1 (optional)

For the glaze water 50ml orange marmalade or apricot jam 1 tbsp

For the icing icing sugar 100g water 1 tbsp

In a mixing bowl, stir together the raisins, sultanas or mixed dried fruit and garam masala (and the cranberries if you want). Add the tea bag (English breakfast is fine, but earl grey adds a really nice fragrance) and pour in enough boiling water to cover. Set aside to steep for at least 15 minutes or overnight.

On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough into a 30cm ×20cm rectangle roughly 1cm thick. This is much easier when the dough has proved overnight in the fridge and is still cold.

Lay the dough rectangle on the work surface with a longer side facing you. Brush the surface of the dough with the melted butter, sprinkle with the sugar and cinnamon, then lay the apple slices on top.

Drain the fruit in a colander and remove the tea bag. Scatter the plump fruit over the dough along with the lemon zest, if using.

Starting at one long edge, roll the dough into a tight log. Using a sharp knife or length of thread, slice the dough crossways into 12 equal slices, each roughly 2cm wide.

Line a deep baking tray with parchment paper. Place the dough slices cut-side down on the tray, spacing them 1cm apart. Place a damp tea towel over the top and leave in a warm place to prove for 40-45 minutes, or until doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 180C fan/gas mark 6.

Bake in the hot oven for 18-20 minutes or until golden brown. Check the buns halfway through the cooking time.

If they are cooking unevenly, then turn the tray around. If they are browning too quickly, drape a sheet of foil over the buns – any exposed raisins may burn and you don’t want the bitterness that brings.

Leave the buns to cool in the tray for 5 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack.

To make the glaze, warm the water and marmalade or jam in a medium saucepan over a medium heat. Generously brush the glaze over the buns. You can hold on to any spare for later use as it will keep for several days.

To make the icing, whisk together the icing sugar and water in a small bowl or measuring jug until it forms a silky paste. Once the buns are completely cool, drizzle over the icing.

Makes 1 quantity lukewarm whole milk 200ml instant dried yeast 7g (2 tsp or a whole sachet) strong white bread flour or plain flour 500g caster sugar 80g for a sweet dough or 10g for a savoury dough fine sea salt 10g eggs 2 soft unsalted butter 125g, cubed

Gently warm the milk in a small saucepan. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the yeast. Set aside and leave to bubble for 5 minutes.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar and salt. Make a small well in the flour, pour in the milk and yeast mixture, crack in the eggs and stir together until it forms a rough dough.

Tip the dough on to a lightly floured work surface and either knead by hand for 10 minutes or in a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook for 4-5 minutes, gradually working the cubes of butter into the dough as you knead until it is soft, silky and stretchy.

Pop the dough back into the bowl, place a damp tea towel or shower cap over the rim and leave to prove for 1 hour until the dough has almost doubled in size. Alternatively, refrigerate the dough (still covered) overnight, ready to bake the next day. If you can plan for this extra proving time, it really helps as the dough is much easier to work with when cold.

Breadsong by Kitty Tait & Al Tait (Bloomsbury, £20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, Mental Health America is available on 800-273-8255. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978