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Dan Lepard (born 1964) is an Australian baker, food writer, photographer, television presenter and celebrity chef. He was previously a fashion photographer working for Italian Vogue before changing careers age 27, and is today known for reconciling historical methods with innovation in baking.

Early life
Dan Lepard was born in Malvern Australia and grew up in Boronia, a north-eastern suburb towards the Dandenong Ranges. His father Ray is British-born, and his mother Nancy from New Zealand, and after marrying in England they emigrated to Australia. At Boronia High School alongside core subjects he took classes in photography, music, cooking, and edited the school newspaper. Baking was a hobby as a child, inspired by his primary school teacher baking hot cross buns. Interviewed in The Age in 2005 he says, “In many ways I had a difficult time at school, and I used to bake as a way of making myself feel good, I think. I used to come home from school and bake a cake”.

As a teenager he won a summer scholarship to Milan, spending time with fashion editor Anna Piaggi and Vern Lambert as they set up “Vanity” magazine at Vogue Italia with Antonio Lopez (illustrator), and they encouraged his photography and interest in fashion. He then went to Monash University, started studying politics, music and art history but dropped out during his second year.

Attracted to music and theatre Dan was offered a minor role in Cameron_Mackintosh’s Australian production of Oliver starring Garry MacDonald as Fagin, at the Adelaide Festival Centre. After the tour finished he travelled to London, and in May 1983 got the role of Asher in Bill Kenwright’s UK touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. During the tour Dan shot a photo essay of one of the acrobats in the show and after a year touring left the production and moved to London to continue photography.

Photography career
In London at a small gallery in the basement of Demop, a hairdressers in Soho in 1985, Dan was offered a space to exhibit his acrobat photographs. At the opening, designer Rifat Özbek’s business partner Robert Forest purchased the entire collection for the showroom of a knitwear company in Milan. While in Milan to install the images in the showroom, a friend suggested he see Vogue Italia features editor Mariuccia Casadio. She commissioned 30 pages of portraits from Dan, of upcoming designers, artists and actors, ranging from Vivienne Westwood, Rifat Ozbek and Manolo Blahnik through to Tilda Swinton, Sean Bean and Derek Jarman as well as his mentor Anna Piaggi. For Interview Magazine he photographed upcoming actors Jean-Marc Barr, Geena Davis (interview by Michael Musto), Natasha Richardson (interview by John Lahr) as well as Federico Fellini. Dan also shot fashion for The Guardian and The Sunday Times. For Australian Vogue Dan interviewed and photographed Leigh Bowery.

Most of his work from 1985 – 1989 was shot on a Linhof Karden Color 4x5 camera, and used an unusual type of cross processing that developed negative C-41 film in E-6 chemistry, producing transparencies where the yellow layer stayed intact to give a faded look. He used this technique in 1986 for the UK and France Mulberry (company) campaign (nominated for a D&AD award in 1988). ‬‬, as well as his Interview Magazine and Tatler portraits.

After a meeting with Isabella Blow and editor Mark Boxer he started working regularly for Tatler Magazine for the remainder for the 1980s, and shot her engagement photograph to Detmar Blow.

Dan photographed Boy George, from 1989 until 1991, and for the The Martyr Mantras album cover and The Crying Game (song) 1992 (shot in 1989).

In 1989 he was among 12 photographers including Norman Parkinson and Patrick Lichfield (Patrick Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield) chosen by the CPRE to photograph the disappearing areas of British landscape. Dan’s photographs of Norfolk were included in “Legacy: The changing face of the landscape” and in an exhibition of the book at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In the book, author John Gibb writes that “at twenty-three, he is the youngest photographer in the Legacy project and has brought a dramatic and refreshing approach to his vision of the Broads.” In describing the images, Dan writes “I was very aware of the emptiness of the countryside and the air of depression in the local communities. Much of the employment is seasonal and concerned with tourism…I tried to express this sort of “dead” feeling in my photographs”

He stopped photography in 1991, and did not start again until 2003.

Early cooking career
In 1991 Dan lived in Dean Street Soho, a block away from Alistair Little’s restaurant in Frith Street. Wanting a change, chef Little suggested he try working in the kitchen on the pastry section where his trainee chefs started. Dan started there, and according to Little in an interview on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, Dan appeared taken with the pastry section and breadmaking. To build experience he also did shifts with Peter Gordon at The Sugar Club.

After a year he became David Hockney’s personal chef, first in London while Hockney was staging Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1992, and then in Los Angeles.

He then went back into kitchen brigade work in New York City late 1993 as a line cook with Patricia Yeo, who had left Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill, to open VIX Café in Broome Street, Soho. From there he worked as junior sous chef at The Dakota Bar & Grill, then returned to the old VIX site to work as junior sous chef at Tasca Porto (owned by Philippe Lajaunie and José de Meirelles from Brasserie Les Halles) but left just prior to its opening in early September 1994 to return to London.

St John
On his return Dan met with Fergus Henderson and his partner Margot from The French House, Soho who were opening a restaurant near the old meat market in Smithfield, to be called St John. As the sous chef position was taken, Fergus and Margot offered Dan the position of head pastry chef. Margot suggested that Dan make bread as well, and that became almost the focus of his work for the next decade. In 1994 Independent newspaper named Dan as one of top upcoming pastry chefs, and were taken by his approach British traditions. About his steamed ginger figgy pudding, “I call it wonderful” wrote reviewer Emily Green, she notes “he had planned to put to put Treacle Roly-Poly on the menu but changed the recipe – and the name – after facing a nostalgic customer who argued the finer points of roly-poliness.”

He then became head pastry chef at Giorgio Locatelli’s Zafferano in Belgravia (and formed a friendship with Locatelli), and worked with Stephen Terry at Oliver Peyton’s Coast in the pastry section before starting his first bakery at John Torode’s Mezzo restaurant for Terence Conran in 1995.

Baker & Spice
In January 1996 Dan met Gail Stephens (Yael Mejia), who had taken over the old Justin de Blank bakery in Walton Street, Knightsbridge and renamed it “Baker & Spice”, in the beginning a French patisserie and boulangerie with a British-style larder. Dan stayed at Baker & Spice until 1999, and left after co-writing “Baking with Passion”. It was there his ideas about minimal handling of bread dough and high-hydration dough took shape, after experiments at Alistair Little in 1992. In Baking with Passion (1999) he argued that with “repeated but minimal kneading through an extended fermentation process you can aerate and develop the dough with little effort and to remarkable effect”. The book also promoted sourdough bread, groundbreaking for a British book at that time, and advocated slow fermentation. He explained, “I use the analogy of gardening to [bread] baking – you know where you want to get to, but the plants do things that are beyond your control. There is a natural balance in bread that you should never lose sight of.” Writing in The Guardian in 1999, Nigella Lawson found some book recipes daunting for the home cook but felt that “it exudes enough enthusiasm for that not to be a real limitation.”

Salone del Gusto
In 1998 while at Baker & Spice, Dan attended the 2nd Slow Food Salone del Gusto, baking eight 2kg loaves of sourdough with English wheat, and flying them to the event in Turin in hand-luggage to be served at Australian chef Stephanie Alexander’s food tasting. From this, Dan felt that bread could be presented on its own at the event, so in 2000 organised the finance for a trip and “picked a young team, arguably the cream of modern British baking” to take over over a small Turin bakery to bake bread for the Salone. The trip followed by BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, ITV’s Country File, and The Independent newspaper. According to respected food writer Michael Bateman “at the exhibition hall, cars were being shooed away, but we only had to say "pane" and that password saw us through. And so it was all week, Italians marveling at the miracle of pane inglese. Stallholders crept up; could they buy a loaf to serve with their cheeses and salamis?”

Other restaurants
In 2000 he helped open Levant restaurant with Tony Kitous, developing the Lebanese-inspired breads and desserts. The Telegraph food writer described the breads this way: “in among the steam under the cloth of the basket that came to our table lay the Moses of Middle Eastern breads. Pitta breads like crisp and airy pillows, and some amazing, layered, wafer-thin breads stuffed with herbs and fresh cheese. Bread being the handicraft corner of great food, this meal remained in my memory as one that went beyond “ethnic, interesting” to astonishing.” In 2002 he worked with Giorgio Locatelli to install a micro bakery inside Locanda Locatelli,. The Evening Standard’s Charles Campion wrote “Made with assistance from baker Dan Lepard, the astonishingly good basket of varied breads and the yard-long home-made grissini set the tone.” Later that year Dan advised Yotam Ottolenghi and his team on the bread for their first Ottolenghi in Notting Hill (and later for their Islington restaurant). In 2003 he returned to work with Fergus Henderson and Justin Gellatly in opening St. John Bread & Wine.

Baking website
He started his website in 2003 as a way to help promote his baking ideas, and baking in Britain. So to do this he kept track of and published a list of bakeries in the UK where good bread could be found. He also started a baking forum, one of the earliest on the internet in 2003. The forum was closed in 2008.

The Handmade Loaf
In 2003 he journeyed through northern Europe, from the highlands of Scotland through to farms in Russia, to discover more about traditional sourdough bread, and his notes and photographs formed the basis of his next book “The Handmade Loaf”. Shot exclusively on a Canon AE1 with a 50mm lens, chosen as it was the first camera he used at high school and limiting himself to only one lens, it was shot entirely on Fuji Superia 200, and all images printed at high street labs to maintain the amateur nature of the book. Though many of the images are shot as if in a studio, he took a single light and a roll of a3 white paper with him in his backpack so the loaves looked like clinical images. Published in 2004, it was the first British book to use sourdough in nearly all of the recipes. In The Times magazine review of the book, Sheila Keating wrote that “his supreme skill is his empathy with people who bake, from Grandmothers using ancient ovens to cutting edge chefs.” It was nominated for a Guild Of Food Writer’s award in 2005, and has been translated into Spanish by the celebrated Basque baker Iban Yarza (titled “Hecho a Mano”). Writing in the Spanish daily El País about Yarza’s translation, journalist Mikel López Iturriaga wrote that Hecho a Mano “is not a book about bread. It is the book about bread. Rarely has a gastronomic publication displayed so much knowledge yet so much love for the subject matter, presented in a natural, affordable and unpretentious way.” By 2014 it had been continuously in print for a decade.

Salone del Gusto
In 1998 Dan attended the 2nd Slow Food Salone del Gusto, baking eight 2kg loaves of sourdough with English wheat, and flying them to the event in Turin in hand-luggage to be served at Australian chef Stephanie Alexander’s food tasting. From this, Dan felt that bread could be presented on its own at the event, so in 2000 organised the finance for a trip and “picked a young team, arguably the cream of modern British baking” to take over over a small Turin bakery to bake bread for the Salone. The trip followed by BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, ITV’s Country File, and The Independent newspaper. According to respected food writer Michael Bateman (his obituary ), “At the exhibition hall, cars were being shooed away, but we only had to say "pane" and that password saw us through. And so it was all week, Italians marvelling at the miracle of pane inglese. Stallholders crept up; could they buy a loaf to serve with their cheeses and salamis?”

Loaf in a Box
In 2012, he created the pop-up sourdough bakery The Loaf in a Box in San Sebastián, Spain together with a local organization La Salsera. Built using repurposed old shipping containers, and with assistance from the Basque Government gave work unemployed people from all over spain looking to learn breadmaking. It ran from July to September and served as an arena for all those who love bread to debate and eat local produce. Writing in Food & Travel magazine, US baker Chad Robertson of Tartine restaurant named it as one of the world’s best bakeries for that brief time.

Writing career
From September 2005 through to September 2013 he wrote a weekly baking column in The Guardian called How to Bake. His column has been very popular drawing a broad fanbase of eager home bakers. Dan's recipes can also be found on the BBC Food website and he is the baking guru for Mumsnet.com.

He also writes for Waitrose Magazine, Sainsburys Magazine, and Delicious Magazine (UK). In Australia Dan writes for Gourmet Traveller Magazine.

In April 2014 Dan started to write a monthly cookery column for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne

Television career
In 2013 Dan featured as a judge alongside Kerry Vincent on The Great Australian Bake Off, a cooking television series aired on Nine Network in Australia. This was the first series and is based on the popular British format The Great British Bake Off, and according to presenter Sue Perkins for the first series the producers really wanted "Dan Lepard to do it". In the UK he appears as a guest chef on Channel Four's Sunday Brunch.

Teaching
Dan teaches sourdough masterclasses for the Cookery School at Little Portland Street, London. He frequently gives baking demonstrations, talks and masterclasses throughout the world at a wide range of events and festivals.

Personal life
He has lived in London since his late teens. In 2012 Dan Lepard entered into a civil partnership with his long-term partner David Whitehouse. At the reception they served Dan’s coconut cake with mascarpone buttercream. The recipe was published in The Guardian on the day of their ceremony, 22nd June 2012 to support the UK marriage equality campaign.

Awards
London Restaurant Awards 2003, winner of the Outstanding Contribution to London Restaurants. Dan is a patron of The World Marmalade Awards, based in Cumbria.

Photographer

 * Made in Italy: Food and Stories (2006) – winner of the Glenfiddich and World Gourmand awards
 * Hawksmoor at Home: Meat - Seafood - Sides - Breakfasts - Puddings - Cocktails (2011)