Inspiration

Now that the oven is all finished we're busy developing new breads for the Bakery.  Matthew is working on perfecting our wholemeal wheat loaf - while we were baking for ourselves in our kitchen during the oven build we tried different ways of doing the wholemeal.  Some things were so successful that Matthew is trying to incorporate them into our regular loaf.

I'm working on developing new specials.  The Sweet Lemony Fennelly was the first product of this process.  The inspiration for the loaf was Laurel Robertson's Bread Book.

The two books which inspired our move to all sourdough, Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters and Dan Lepard's Handmade Loaf, concentrate mainly on white or mainly white breads.  Whilst they are both inspiring books, we are so convinced of the taste and health benefits of wholemeal bread that we needed to look further afield for inspiration, and came to the American wholefoods guru Laurel Robertson.

Although Laurel Robertson's bread is not all sourdough, it is a fairly easy matter to convert the recipes to sourdough.  This is how I began with the Sweet Lemony Fennelly.  I love the combination of lemon and fennel, so I was delighted to come across the mix in one of Laurel's recipes.  Hers is a savoury bread.  My first step was to convert her recipe to sourdough.  The bread came out really well, however, it needed some changes.  We wanted another sweet bread for the bakery so we added light muscovado sugar.  We also felt that the use of lemon zest would be too fiddly a process to replicate efficiently in the bakery, so we continued the sweet theme and brought in the lemon flavour with candied lemon.  We ended up with a delicious loaf, excellent spread with butter the first few days, and toasted with almond butter for up to a week afterwards.

I wish I had a better picture, but I confess I was more interested in eating it than photographing!

New Shoes

A baker spends the vast majority of his working day on his feet, so comfortable footware is of prime importance.  Matthew had been wearing his everyday shoes for baking, but they were getting pretty wrecked with flour and oil splatters, so whilst the bakery refit was going on we decided that when the time came it would be new bakery, new shoes.

For us, a sustainable bakery means, not simply organic flour or wood-fired, but trying to look with concern at all aspects of supply.  We decided that for the bakery, as we do for ourselves, we should buy our shoes from Green Shoes in Devon.  Their shoes are not cheap, but they are made in Britain with concern for the environmental impact of their raw materials.  I have two pairs of their shoes - one for winter, one for summer - which I wear almost every day (sadly in Fife the winter ones get considerably more wear than the summer ones!).  They are extremely comfortable and I think they look great.  The other wonderful thing about Green Shoes shoes is that when they get a bit worn, you send them back down to Devon - they get a full service and come back looking and feeling like new.

Here are the new bakery shoes in all their glory when they arrived a few weeks ago -

They are considerably more floury now than in this picture, but with a little care and attention should last for years.

Human Planners

When we started out, we were baking in our own kitchen. One of the more straightforward regulatory hoops we jumped through was to check whether there were any planning issues we needed to worry about. It turned out there weren't, so long as we didn't take on employees or do retail from the house.

Later, when we started thinking about the wood-fired oven, I asked a Development Services officer whether planning permission was required for such a structure. "Not a planning matter", I was told.

So the letter we got shortly after the oven chimney went up was a pretty nasty shock. We had carried out unauthorized development, it said. We had 28 days to apply for retrospective permission, or remove the offending chimney. Also, we would need to seek permission if we wished to bake bread for sale. The following weeks were stressful. In rare moments of optimism, I thought that we might manage to find alternative premises during lengthy rounds of applications and appeals.

The first thing I did, though, was to write back and ask for clarification. I explained that I had checked whether we needed permission. I used a lot of phrases like "sustainable development". And a few weeks later, I got a reply. No permission was required. The case was now closed. They wished us success with our business.

There are many stories about the kafka-esque beaurocracy of planning authorities, and there do not seem to be very many people reporting happy experiences, particularly amongst people wanting to do anything unusual. Sometimes aquiring such a story feels like earning one's spurs but I think I'm much happier reporting that the planners I dealt with were as straightforward and thoughtful as one might hope for.

Towards a local loaf?

Over the pond in Amherst, Massachusetts the lovely people at the Wheatberry Bakery and Cafe are able to bake a local loaf using flour from traditional flour varieties grown in the valley around their bakery.  They have also set up a CSA for grain and beans, allowing people to get their staples from the local area.  Helped by their dedication to bring grain growing back to an area now considered inappropriate for wheat growing, local farms (including their own) are trialling and growing traditional wheat varieties.  A couple of years ago they were able to make a true local loaf. 

Wheatberry Cafe Local Bread.  Thanks to Adrie and Ben for permission to use this photo.

Aren't they beautiful?


You can read Ben's account of their creation here.

We're lucky to get our wheat from Northumberland, pretty local compared to the distances traveled by the majority of bread flour.  But it's one of the great ironies of the modern food system that I can see wheat being grown from our flat, but it is almost impossible to buy wheat from Fife.

We've decided to attempt to grow our own loaf in a very local way - from our back garden!  The Real Bread Campaign is having a Bake Your Lawn initiative, and we've dedicated a tiny patch of our pocket-handkerchief garden to growing a handful of seeds kindly given to the girls by Gilchesters Organic.  We've put them in.  Only one question remains - will they sprout before the pigeons find them?

Fife Spring Pie

We had three amazing bags of green in our veg box from the Pillars of Hercules last week - spinach, ruby chard and salad.  My thoughts immediately turned to Sarah Raven's version of Spanakopita, Ithaca Pie, from her Garden Cookbook.


Sarah's version was my basis, but I didn't have some of the greens she mentioned (no spring onions here yet), so I decided to go Greek and get foraging in our garden for the wild greens and herbs which make this pie zing.  I used to live in Greece as a small girl and well remember the 'horta' gatherers - usually old yayas (grandmothers) dressed in black - gathering greens from the verges.  Fortunately I'm pretty slack about dealing with dandelions and nettles, so there was plenty of horta to be gathered even in our tiny garden.





I also used my own on-going experimental wholemeal pastry recipe.  We try to avoid using refined flour in our cooking, and having discovered the technique of soaking wholemeal pasty flour in yoghurt, I have to say, it's no hardship.  In the past I have found wholemeal pastry to be a little claggy in the mouth, but soaking seams to deal with this issue.  I'll give you my pastry recipe below, but it is a work in progress and I'd welcome any comments.

I wanted to have a Fife Pie, so I made some substitutions from Sarah Raven's version of the Greek.  I used Anster instead of feta, which proved to be a delicious substitution, and pinhead oatmeal instead of rice.

Fife Spring Pie.

750-1000g mix of spinach, chard or other spring green leaves - I also used nettles and dandelion leaves, and a mixed salad bag.
Large bunch fennel (our fennel is just shooting up at the moment, you could also use dill)
Large bunch flat leave parsley
Large bunch mint
1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
300ml olive oil
A handful of Welsh onion shoots - or you could use a lot of chives, or some spring onions
2 leeks, finely chopped
100-150g of pinhead oatmeal (the higher amount if your greens are very wet)
200g Anster cheese (or your local cheese of choice), chopped small (0.5cm dice)
Salt and black pepper

Wholemeal rough-flaky pastry (see below for recipe) - you need to make this the day before.

First, saute the onion and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of the olive oil in a large saucepan, until golden.
Using rubber gloves, wash the nettles and remove from the water to drain, if using.
Then wash and remove any tough stalks from spinach and chard.  Wash the other greens.
Chop the greens and finely chop the herbs.
Add to the onions all the greens, herbs and Welsh onions, spring onions, leeks, as you are using them.  Jam on the lid and allow to steam for about five minutes, until the greens have collapsed.

Add the olive oil, oatmeal and salt and pepper.  Mix well.  Remove from the heat.

Pre-heat the oven to 160C.

Butter a small roasting tin you estimate will take your greens (about 40x40x4cm).
Using half your pastry, roll it out as thin as you can (couple of mm.), and line the buttered tin with it, there should be plenty hanging over the edge.
Roll out the other half thinly also.
Put the filling into the pastry case and sprinkle over the cheese.
Brush the pastry edge with water and manoeuvre the other bit of pastry over the top to form a lid. 



Pinch the two layers of pastry together all around the edge, trim the pastry, leaving a generous couple of cm of crimped together pastry, and brush a little olive oil over the top.


Bake for around an hour.

Allow to cool a little before eating.  We also had a great picnic with the leftovers the next day.

 Wholemeal rough-flaky pastry

This recipe is an combination of the yoghurt pastry from Nourishing Traditions and Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall's rough puff pastry from Everyday

525g wholemeal pastry flour (I like Doves Farm)
1 tsp salt
About 350g live, full-fat yoghurt
250g cold butter

Mix the salt into the flour
Cut the butter into small dice and mix into the flour until the butter bits are well coated with flour and well distributed.  Add the yoghurt, beginning with 250g.  At this point you really need to get your hands involved - mix until all the yoghurt has been taken up into the flour.  You want to use as little yoghurt as possible, but you do need all the flour to be incorporated.  Add the remaining yoghurt as necessary, little by little, until the flour and butter mix holds together.

Now leave a room temperature for 12 to 24 hours.

When you want to use the pastry, squash it into a roughly rectangular block on a well floured surface.  With a rolling pin squish and roll it into a flatish rectangle (it will be very crumbly and hard to work at this point) which should be in portrait view on your work surface.  Fold into three, top down then bottom up.  Turn and repeat.  Repeat another four times, but which time the pastry should be soft and easy to work.

Avocado Sweet

Last week we were visited by Jane and Michelle from Scottish style blog, Avocado Sweet.

You can read their piece on the bakery here

It makes me feel terribly modern, being interviewed for a blog!

The First Proper Bake

The oven got its second try out today, as Matthew baked a 'lucky dip' for the Bread Clubs.  We didn't take any orders - he just baked a selection and took them round to the hub households.  I'm sure he'll give you an update soon on how the oven is working, but I thought I'd share a couple of pictures from the bake today.

Here's Matthew wielding his new peel to free a couple of little hearth loaves which had got stuck behind a massive tray of oat loaves.  They were successfully liberated, and eaten by the girls - sliced while still warm and spread with butter - in pretty short order.

And Bloomers on a rack cooling before going of to the Bread Clubs.

We're looking forward to getting back to normal baking and expanding the Bread Clubs now the oven is basically done.  There are a couple of tweaks necessary, but it feels like we can look beyond to roller-coaster ride of oven building to steady baking.