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The Real Bread Campaign, part of Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming,
is funded by the Big Lottery's Local Food programme and the Sheepdrove Trust. |
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Real Bread blog
Infrequent musings from Real Bread Campaign project officer, Chris Young and the occasional guest blogger.
If you have something you'd like to share here, please drop us a line.
NB Blog posts are the views of their respective authors and might not necessarily reflect those of the Campaign or Sustain.
GM wheat? Not in my loaf!
Wholesome news
Ducks (and we?) need better bred bread
Real Bread spokesman in Stocksbridge
Real Bread on the rise in e5
Melton Big Bake
Kids: Junior Bake Off wants to hear from you!
In case you needed another excuse…
Bread and breakfast
Mending library
Better bred sandwiches
Fare's fair
A trail of Real Breadcrumbs
New adventures in sourdough
Crumb together
Ciabatt-outta hell
The bakerer's apprentice
Ode to a French baguette
Spelt grass roots
A time for giving
Jimmy's Food Factory
Biofuels: a letter to The Times
Brixton's better bread
Hit the road, Jaques
A Local Loaves for Lammas diary
Lammas loaf
Lammas: a national celebration of Real Bread
Mary Queen of Shops needs you!
Kerching!
Hidden processing aids: allergens and GM
GM wheat? Not in my loaf!
17 January 2012
A guest blog from Eve Mitchell, co-ordinatior of GM Freeze.
Real Bread has a heart of real wheat. In 2010 UK farmers grew enough wheat to cover an area 90% the size of Wales. But this spring Rothamsted Research will plant an open air trial of a new genetically modified (GM) strain of wheat in Hertfordshire. It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and a growing number of people, organisations and businesses are saying it just isn’t worth the risk.
The wheat in the trial has had transgenic material (i.e. genetic matter from outside the species*) spliced into its structure to cause it to produce a ‘chemical alarm signal’ that aphids give out when they are attacked. Rothamsted hopes the chemical will drive aphids off the crop and attract aphid predators to the area.
The first problem is that this might not work: previous research shows that aphids may get used to the alarm and ignore it. Even if it does work, changes in aphid behaviour could have big impacts on the wider ecosystem, especially on birds and insects that eat aphids. Or it might simply drive the aphids onto neighbouring non-GM crops: a disaster for farmers working with nature to control aphids, rather than against it.
And that’s before we consider the potential consequences of GM material crossing into other organisms (as has been reported with some GM maize) or undergoing unforeseeable mutations in the future.
The fact is, encouraging natural aphid parasites and predators like ladybirds already works without the risks of GM. No other country is growing GM wheat because there is no market for it. We just don’t need it, and precious research money would be better spent elsewhere. Find out more and help us to keep GM wheat out of British food and farming now at gmfreeze.org/gmwheatnothanks
Download the leaflet ‘GM wheat: What’s happening and what you can do’.
* This is different to traditional wheat breeding, in which new genetic material comes only from wheat and other cereals with which wheat can breed naturally.
Wholesome news
11 November 2011
It's always nice to have a study that reiterates what has been known for years. As reported across the media today, an Imperial College study published in the BMJ has found that for every 10g a day increase in fibre intake, there was a 10% drop in the risk of bowel cancer. Hooray for wholemeal Real Bread!
One thing - other research has found that to get the most out of wholegrain cereals, they should be fermented in the presence of lactic acid bacteria - e.g. genuine long-fermented sourdough Real Bread.
Cereal bran contains phytic acid, which inhibits the body's ability to absorb certain nutrients – e.g. it binds with calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc, making them unavailable to us. The bacteria found in sourdough cultures provide an environment favourable to the production of phytase, which breaks down the phytic acid, allowing the body to absorb more of those nutrients.
Be sure it is real sourdough, however, not a short process loaf made with commercial yeast that has just had sourdough powder added for flavour.
Ducks (and we?) need better bred bread
A letter by Chris Young that the Mail declined to print...
2 November 2011
In response to Richard Littlejohn’s somewhat hysterical rant entitled ‘Armed police! Drop the bread and step away from the duck pond', the fact is that not all loaves are created equal.
Though the Real Bread Campaign champions the many pleasures and benefits of long-fermented loaves baked from stoneground wholemeal flour, we also celebrate people’s right to choose and enjoy locally-baked white Real Bread.
When it comes to nutritional value to ducks, however, the RSPB has made it clear that factory white sliced (I single this out as sadly it’s the stuff that makes up the majority of sales in the UK, therefore most likely to be tossed to the birds) is deficient. They will stuff themselves full, leaving no space for the natural foods that would provide them the nutrition they require. Oh and no, we’re not just hearing about this now – the RSPB gave this advice at least as far back as May 2008, and the Mail ran a similar story back in October last year.
Instead of insulting the people of Manchester and Hampstead, perhaps Mr. Littlejohn’s energy might have been better spent asking ‘of how much use is white sliced to our kids?’ Despite the big manufacturers’ insistence that any loaf makes a valuable contribution to the daily diet, even the body that represents the industrial loaf business admits that eating six slices of their white sliced stuff would only contribute around 20% of the average fibre requirement for adults. As for other nutrients, much of the iron, calcium and B vitamins in a white loaf are synthetic versions added in an attempt to compensate for the nutrients stripped away by modern flour milling. A government report way back in 1981 reported that two of these – iron and thiamin were added in forms that the body probably doesn’t absorb well.
So, if you’re lucky enough to have a local independent bakery, instead of buying supermarket white sliced, this week consider picking up a delicious loaf of Real Bread for your family, and leave the ducks and fat cats to find others way to feed themselves.
Real Bread spokesman in Stocksbridge
Guest blog from Knead to Know reader Dave Foster of Stocksbridge, who describes himself as 'a keen cyclist, runner, baker and chef.'
22 July 2011
I have always baked my own bread and sought out organic or local produce. Until April I was a manager in education increasingly demotivated by a combination of the state of public sector finances, the state of education and a declining enthusiasm for management. The opportunity came to jump ship and it seemed to me a good opportunity to start my own business.
In my past life I had been a chef and I have always been a keen amateur caterer doing family weddings, club barbecues, dinner parties etc. Bread making was just something I did for myself, making all my own bread since university days and always developing techniques, extending recipes etc. I thought long and hard about what I should do in my new life and how I could combine my recreational interests to create a business opportunity. Cooking was at the fore and cooking in other peoples houses seemed the sensible way forward as I did not want to have huge outlay nor did I want to have to work a five to seven day week. Transport wise I wanted a sustainable means of transport and cycling was the obvious choice. That was my initial idea catering for people in their own homes travelling by bike with my batterie de cuisine towed behind. Then I sought business advice!
It seemed that my idea was okay but on the way to the initial meeting with enterprise advisors I started to fantasise further. What if I towed a small catering operation? Here the idea of griddled cheese sandwiches came through. I would cycle to running, cycling events towing a trailer carrying sourdough bread and local produced cheese. The trailer would be designed to transform into a catering outlet with a portable griddle serving hot griddles sandwiches. Being a cyclist I could get to fell races, cycling events. Competitors would finish their events and I would be there waiting to serve them.
The advice was met by raised eyebrows but a general nod that in principle it was okay. Baking from home was not a problem and would only required minor adjustments. So I planned my bakery. I researched the field, read Knead to Know from cover to cover and back again. Contacted bakers around the country, visited bakeries, sought more business advice.
Along the way I got in touch with European bakers and even bought a Rofco oven from Belgium on the advice of Dutch bakers. I also sought locally sourced produce and get all my flour from Worsbrough Mill in Barnsley.
I had the bakery, the web site was in the design stage and in May I started to expand my customer base initially from friends and colleagues. The reaction was generally positive although sourdough was not a universal taste. I adapted, changed, sought further advice, new recipes more taste tests. I now have twenty regular customers, forty who buy less regularly, and I have done two country fairs and several running events.
My expansion plans are for regular farmers' markets, Christmas markets, 'pop up' events and the bicycle delivery service. To date 60% of my delivery has been by bicycle and it is seen as integral to the service. I also intend to return to education and provide lessons on baking to the local community.
Knead to Know is a regular reference and reassurance book. It provides me with advice and accounts of other bakers' experiences. Most importantly it provides me with contacts which I have used continually. The website further has given me information on operations throughout the world and I have just returned from Berlin where I visited a community bakery and the Soluna bakery.
I still have much to learn but it is an interesting experience and I always wanted to be my own boss and to do something enjoyable, healthy, evangelical and a little bit wacky.
Real Bread on the rise in E5
Chris Young is invited to the launch party of an east London bakery’s new home and sees the beginning of the latest chapter of a Real Bread success story.
29 June 2011
It was just eleven months ago that I visited Ben Mackinnon at the E5 Bakehouse. Having begun baking professionally since January 2010, he’d recently moved his baking operation from his kitchen, via an Italian restaurant, to a railway arch in London Fields. From there he and a part-time baker were producing around 28 loaves at a time. Campaign members can read more of Ben’s story in issue 6 of True Loaf.
So it was fantastic last night to see that less than one year later, demand for Ben’s Real Bread has grown so much that he’s had to move to larger premises a few arches along. In that time, production has swelled to around 160 loaves a day, making Real Bread available to people to many more people locally – a key aim of the Campaign.
E5’s meteoric rise can’t have been harmed by praise for its bread from the likes of restaurant critics AA Gill and Fay Maschler in their reviews of the restaurant Brawn, and from Michelin-starred chef Michel Roux Jr on BBC 2’s Great British Food Revival.
As important as the loaves, the bakery is now providing skilled employment for six bakers, plus counter and delivery staff. And not only is the bakery offering Real Bread and fulfilling jobs for local people, it now has a café as a place for members of the local community to meet. They are also running courses to help pass on Real Bread making skills.
Let’s hope the success of the e5 Bakehouse in such tight times provides inspiration for other people wanting to bring Real Bread to the hearts of their own local communities.
If you have a story about the rise of a Real Bread bakery near you that you’d like to share here, please email it to realbread [@] sustainweb.org
Melton Big Bake 2011
28 June 2011
by Chris Young
I had a great day at the Melton Mowbray Country Show on Sunday with a peel (there’s an online moot in The Real Baker-e on the subject of collective noun for Real Bread bakers and that’s my current favourite) of Campaign members.
After a night helping local baker Paul Jones stock up for the event, Vincent Talleu of The Artisan Bakery and Dilly Boase spent the day in blazing sunshine inviting visitors to have a go at making and shaping Real Bread. The popularity of this mini-masterclass resulted in an almost endless stream of mini-baguettes coming from Paul’s two wood-fired ovens.
Meanwhile, my dad (who’d come along to see first hand what I get up to these days), The Brockwell Bake's Andy Forbes (another veteran of the previous night’s baking) and I took kids and several parents back to the start of the Real Bread journey. Starting with great display of sheaves of heritage wheats, we explained how these are threshed to free the grains. Visitors then had the chance to grind wheat using Andy and Paul’s collection of hand-turned stone mills, then bolt it through progressively finer sieves to separate out the bran, semolina and flour.
The professional baker categories of this year’s Melton Big Bake was more or less a two-horse race, with Hambleton Bakery just pipping Northfield Farm to take the most engraved bread boards back to the bakery, including the Upper Crust award for their sourdough.
I plan to add a few snaps to the Real Bread Campaign Flickr feed but in the meantime, you can see a few at the Great Food Magazine website.
Well done to Sallie Hooper and co of Leicestershire Food Links for organising the show, which hopefully will see even more Big Bake entries from professional and homebakers in 2012.
Kids: Junior Bake Off wants to hear from you!
26 May 2011
A guest blog from Love Productions, the makers of The Great British Bake Off.
Does your child love baking and fancy putting their skills to the test? Can they make the most mouth-watering shortbread; are they potty about pies or simply bonkers about bread?
CBBC is looking for junior bakers aged between 9 -12 across the country to take part in the brand new Junior Bake Off.
The series is about promoting and celebrating British home baking and we want it to demonstrate the diversity of baking in the UK today. This new and exciting series stems from the successful BBC2 show The Great British Bake Off.
Do you have or teach kids who love baking? Do you know family or friends who have children who love baking?
For an application form or more information, parents and guardians can visit: www.loveproductions.co.uk
Email: juniorbakeoff@loveproductions.co.uk
Tel: 0207 067 4876
Twitter: @juniorbakeoff
In case you needed another excuse…
13 April 2011
This guest blog is from Christine Haigh, a food justice campaigner for the World Development Movement.
As Campaign members may have read in issue 6 of True Loaf , the banking sector, not content with causing the financial crisis and awarding themselves record-breaking bonuses while everyone else is tightening their belts, has yet another offence to answer for: pushing up the price of your daily loaf.
This is because in recent years big banks including Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital (the investment arm of the high street bank) have lobbied governments to water down regulation of commodities markets. Since the 1930s, this regulation had prevented excessive involvement of financial institutions in the futures markets that were set up to allow farmers and buyers of food, such as millers and bakers, to protect themselves from fluctuating prices for produce such as wheat and maize.
As a result, recent years have seen the number of contracts traded on these markets increase fivefold, and food prices become increasingly volatile, hitting record highs, as in the food price crisis of 2007-08. Though other factors such as climate change and demand for biofuels are also pushing up food prices, speculation rides on the back of supply and demand fluctuations, exacerbating food price spikes.
Just last summer, following a drought in Russia that caused wildfires and damaged the wheat crop, the price of wheat skyrocketed. Yet with a bumper crop in the US, the global wheat harvest was the third highest on record – there was no shortage of wheat. The price spike was due to speculators piling into the market, anticipating a shortage and looking to make a quick buck.
While this type of profiteering is affecting people’s grocery bills around the world, the World Development Movement is particularly concerned about the impact of food speculation on the poorest people in developing countries, who typically spend 50-90 per cent of their income on food.
The good news is that the US has already passed regulation to prevent excessive speculation on food, and the European Union is bringing forward similar proposals. Even the G20 leaders are talking about the need to regulate food speculation right across the globe.
WDM is calling on the UK Government to support proposals from the European Union to regulate the commodity markets to prevent excessive speculation. The bad news is that with the UK’s historic tendency to favour “light touch” regulation, we’ve got our work cut out. We need everyone who wants to see a food system that serves people rather than profits to join the fight – you can do so now at www.wdm.org.uk/food.
Christine is also a project officer on Sustain’s Children’s Food Campaign.
Bread and breakfast
2 March 2011
Guest blogger, Ike Gibson of Woodland Bed & Breakfast, with a tale to inspire hoteliers and home bakers alike…
I started baking our own bread during the bread factory strikes in about 1974, while living in Hertford. Having been served by Real Bakers for 18 years, when they retired, one of the factory bread makers offered to continue the round as there were no other small local bakers. A few months later the factories went on strike and I had two children, six and eight years old, with no bread in the house. So I got angry and said we'd make our own. I followed a recipe (knowing nothing about bread making) and it said "allow to rise for 1 ½ hours, knead and divide into tins. Allow another 1 ½ hours and bake". Great - if your kitchen is at 37°C!! Mine was at about 15°C - but knowing nothing, we followed instructions and baked three loaves, which ended up something akin to breeze blocks. My poor wife and kids ate it grimly with me saying "not bad" when in fact it was terrible. The second batch was much the same but on the third attempt (I’m amazing we weren't deterred) I mixed it together and Ann, my wife, was due to do the rest. I then went to work and she went shopping. Ann returned about five hours later hours and, even in our cold kitchen, the dough was climbing out of the bowl. We've never timed a rise again – it’s risen when it’s risen!!
Of course, we've improved and experimented but we've very rarely bought any bread since then. We make excellent loaves of several types (white, wholemeal, seedy, fruit etc.) along with fine rolls, panini, bagels, muffins, stollen, panettone, and real teacakes - all of which we and all our friends enjoy. We also make a very heavy fruit and nut loaf (the idea came from the New Farm Market in Brisbane, Australia) with about 5 lb of mixed fruit (including chopped apricots and dates) and nuts (hazels, almonds and walnuts) and only 2½ lb of white flour, plus mixed spice - delicious, especially toasted, but far too expensive to be commercial.
After the first few goes, we've always bought our flours in 16Kg or 32Kg sacks directly from bakers or mills - much better quality than the supermarkets. In Hertford the rise was often quite slow as the water there was very hard. When we moved to Ullapool 16 years ago, a friend here talking about bread recipes said "add a slosh of white vinegar." When I asked why, she said yeast worked best in slightly acid conditions. I knew that - I was a lecturer in the biology department of Hatfield Poly. Although I never had cause to use yeast at work, many of my biochemical colleagues did - and so I well knew that it was always grown at pH 6.5 - I'd just never connected yeast growing at work with bread making at home.
I now always use a 'slosh of vinegar' even though the local water is very pure and neutral, and the rising is usually pretty quick. We've run a Bed & Breakfast for the last sixteen years and all of our guests get a fresh hot white roll and white and wholemeal toast for their breakfast (with homemade marmalade and jam), alongside home-smoked kippers and salmon. We must be doing something right as, according to the latest edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Britain, we serve a "memorable breakfast". In previous editions it was "arguably the best breakfast in town."
And you're right - no smell is more welcoming than freshly baked bread!
The Mending Library
14 February 2011
Just a humble lending library, I could be so much more.
I’ll be the centre of your world if you just come through that door.
Bring your Real Bread Campaign, your flour and sourdough
Share your gluts, exchange your seeds and help someone to grow
I am the custodian of knowledge I want you now to share
Use me for your skills exchange, swap all that you have spare
Let me help in your transition to a low-tech life
Bring your darning, knitting, yarning, bread, cheese and a knife
Show a student how to darn, learn to mend your boots
Swap recipes for local food, starting at the roots
I have the books and DVDs, the peacefulness and quiet
On the high street, not out of town. I’m not inciting riot...
Just a quiet revolution, a reclaiming of our spaces
From supermarkets and the like to people who have faces.
Oh, let your lending library become the place to dare,
To make and mend and do and think, to cook and eat and share
Make me this year’s Valentine. I will be yours forever.
Make me your mending library. Let’s get ourselves together.
The hardest times can bring good things and I have waited years.
Come on, baby, thrill me, fill me, with the language of ideas.
by Veronica Burke at Fried Green Tomatoes and Bread Matters
Better bred sandwiches
7 January 2011
As Bee Wilson pointed out (City of Sandwichistas, London Evening Standard, 6th January), 'to make a great sandwich you must care deeply about the provenance and quality of food.' Sad, then, that in the scramble to differentiate one lot of chilly wedges from another, attention is focussed almost exclusively on the fillings. What about the bread? In his book, Eat Britain! 101 Great British Tastes, Andrew Wheeler says: ‘The people of Britain need to be reminded that bread isn’t just something to keep your fingers dry when eating a sandwich.’ So it is great to read that London is having something of a sandwich epiphany, with more and more people who truly understand and care about real food offering consumers a growing choice of Real Bread alternatives to the additive-laden excuses that are to be found interred in the strip-lit morgues (sorry - chiller cabinets) of chemists, newsagents, petrol stations and supermarkets across the land. We believe that it's high time that purveyors of pap get real or get out of the sandwich trade.
Fare’s fair
11 June 2010
The perennial issue of the price of a loaf came to bloom in the press again recently. The Real Bread Campaign believes in an honest price for an honest loaf but that doesn't mean that all loaves of Real Bread could or should be priced the same.
Some Real Bread bakeries do produce a number of loaves that come in at around the same price as additive-laden branded wrapped sliced or re-baked supermarket in-store bakery loaves. However, there are a multitude of variable factors that influence price differences, both between bakeries and between types of loaf in a bakery.
By its nature Real Bread does not have a uniform set of production costs that applies to everything under this banner. There is room in the market for Real Bread in almost all price brackets but using a 50p ‘value’ wrapped sliced factory loaf as a benchmark price simply is not fair.
Beyond basic economies of scale, just how is a supermarket is able to sell a wrapped sliced loaf at this sort of price?
Here are some questions that you might like to consider:
- I might be getting a cheap loaf, but what about the baker, the miller and the cereal grower? Are these hard-working people all getting a fair price for their work to help them feed their families?
- Is a supermarket doing me a favour by taking a small loss to make the loaf more affordable, or is it simply making up the minor shortfall in its multi-million (or billion) profit elsewhere in my basket?
- What corners might have been cut in terms of quality of ingredients?
- What 'performance enhancing' additives might have been used to force the dough to be oven-ready sooner than if it had been left to ripen naturally?
- Has anyone studied the long-term effects of a cocktail of such additives?
- A tomato that has been forced to ripen (well, redden, at least) using ethylene gas just doesn't have the flavour of a sun-ripened one - doesn't the same apply to 'forced' factory loaves?
- More importantly, an unripe tomato can contain toxins that that can irritate the gastrointestinal tract – what effects might an 'unripe' loaf have on me?
In short, what are the true costs that could be hiding behind the price of a ‘value’ loaf and how high might our national thriftiness be driving them?
Perhaps harder to answer is the question – why do we not value our daily bread? As a nation why are we bent on driving the price we pay at the till for a loaf down as low as possible no matter what negative effect this may have on purity, taste, quality of ingredients, the livelihoods of those who produce it or perhaps even our health?
A trail of Real Breadcrumbs
11th May 2010
Four days holed up in London’s Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre flew by in a flurry of flour as several Campaign volunteers and I (thanks again to each of you) joined millers, Real Bread bakers and hundreds more producers and passionate foodies for the Real Food Festival.
Highlights of the trail of Real Breadcrumbs that we laid through the weekend included Campaign working party members Richard Bertinet and Andrew Wilkinson of Gilchesters Organics ranting on the Rude Health soapbox and the Festival Loaf taste-off, which saw festival goers voting for Give Peas a Chance by Artisan Bread Organic over loaves by Flour Power City and Campaign member Pullins Bakery.
For sustenance, Campaign working party member Tom Herbert of Hobbs House Bakery grilled his co-star of the recent BBC Four documentary In Search of the Perfect Loaf, as The Shepherd’s Loaf became toast. Meanwhile, Jim O'Brien of DeGustibus laid on his usual charm whilst talking customers through the bakery's range.
I'm looking forward to The Real Food Festival 2011 already and in the meantime you can see holiday snaps in the Real Bread Campaign photostream on Flickr.
New adventures in sourdough
12th April 2010
Since adopting an unloved breadmaker a month or so ago, I have been determined to prove that making a loaf of Real Bread using natural leaven is possible. Other than Andrew Whitley’s bread machine recipe on this website, none I have found has even permitted fresh yeast, let alone a starter culture. In fact, all but one has decreed ‘thou shalt use instant yeast only.’
Each time I come across a new bread machine recipe book, eagerly I turn straight to the index, look up sourdough and, if it promises one, flip to find the elusive secret. Without exception, my hopes have been dashed. All require you to throw in an extra raising agent and as for those recipe writers who think that an overnight sponge seeded with additive-laden instant yeast counts as sourdough starter…
Given the cycles on my model (the longest being under five hours from start to finish), making real sourdough requires a workaround (turning the machine on and off at appropriate times) to allow the sourdough colonies to build up and sufficient proving time.
After a few abject failures, I have started to get some pretty decent results. Olga (my rye starter of Russian extraction) and I have baked a few loaves that, whilst not yet as good as handmade sourdough, have tasted great and made pretty good toast.
Though going off menu with your bread machine might produce a brick or two and could well invalidate the guarantee, if you are prepared to take the risk, we’d love to hear how you get on with your own genuine breadmaker sourdough.
You can read the notes from my more successful experiments here.
Chris Young
Crumb together*
Second in the batch of two blogs by Chris Young from his stint at Fifteen London.
I’m a tea drinker but having managed only a few hours’ sleep during the day, the coffee Kenny passed me as I arrived for Saturday’s night shift was unusually welcome.
As we began to set up, Kenny and I chatted about his plans for Fifteen London’s bakery. Until last year, the restaurant had bought their bread in. It was having seen – and tasted - what Kenny was up to with the apprentices at Fifteen Cornwall, that London executive head chef, Andrew Parkinson, realised what he was missing.
Though being prised away from his beloved daily surf was a wrench, Kenny’s enthusiasm for the opportunity he now has is infectious. Reeling off the specials planned for the rest of the year, the field trips he’s working on for his team, the ideas he has for linking in with other local organisations and bakers around the city, Kenny rarely pauses for breath. In all of this, what really seemed to excite him the most was that, of the three sections in which Fifteen’s apprentices can choose to specialise, so many of this year’s intake had picked bakery. “They’re a good bunch of kids and it’s gonna be great, man. You should come back.”
Overnight (well, day) I’d forgotten half of what I’d been shown but Kenny and Stu weren’t fazed, they just showed me again and repeated that over time, things would start to stick. Even now on just my second shift, this was the case with moulding and shaping the muffins, which had begun to feel familiar and comfortable actions.
Though adeptness at coaxing the traditional form and crumb structure out of unbelievably slack ciabatta dough is some way off for me, slathering and massaging ladles of rosemary oil into acres of focaccia was effortlessly therapeutic.
As it looked like time and oven space would not be as tight as the previous night, Kenny decided there’d be chance for Salvo and I to try our hands at an enriched bread. Working from a basic flour, milk, egg, sugar and butter dough recipe, Kenny gave Salvo and I suggestions for fillings and forms, then told us to get stuck in. The resulting pecan and cinnamon buns from Salvo and my walnut and cardamom loaf looked and smelled amazing.
Though my days in professional kitchens – which I must stress didn’t amount to much more than holiday jobs on pot wash – are behind me, after two days at Fifteen, I cannot help but envy the apprentices who’ll be getting the opportunity of Kenny and Stewart’s demystifying grounding in traditional craft baking.
You can see photos from Chris’s mini-apprenticeship on Fifteen London's Facebook page.
*for more of these dreadful (breadful?) puns, see our silly loaf songs top 10:
Ciabatt-outta hell*
8th February 2010
In the first of a two-part blog, Chris Young of the Real Bread Campaign reports on his weekend on the night shift at Fifteen London, getting a glimpse at the training in bread making skills on offer to the restaurant’s apprentices.
“Here, Chris – get yer nose into this.”
“Squeeze that.”
“Feel how this is gassing up already.”
Within minutes of arriving on the last Tube to Old Street for the first night of my mini-apprenticeship at Fifteen London, head baker Kenny Rankin had me smelling and touching everything.
Though it’s been over a decade since I’d been anywhere near a restaurant kitchen, it was all very familiar. After a wade through the health and safety bible and a grand tour of the fire exits, I was back in the twilight world where Joy Division blares out from a battered stereo and non-stop ribbing between the crew belies mutual reliance and respect.
“I want you to get yer hands on as many of these breads tonight as you can,” said Kenny. He threw me two lumps of white dough that, assuming I didn’t mess things up, were destined to become muffin-like oven bottom cakes. Along with his right hand man, Stewart Bowen, Kenny then showed Salvo Licciardello – who was joining us from the front of house team to learn about the bakery - and I how to shape both at once.
The purpose of repeated prodding became apparent immediately upon feeling the difference between the original shapeless lump of dough and one of the glossy, taught spheres we’d created.
“People don’t realise how clever their hands are but after not long of doing that over and over again, you won’t have to think about it because they’ll remember for you.”
For now, the window in which Kenny and Stewart have to bake is very short. For example, after dinner service on this particular Friday, it was after midnight before the chefs had cleared enough of the kitchen to allow the bakers to start mixing up. From then, the four of us had only until around six thirty to make from scratch all of the loaves, flatbreads, and pancakes for both the restaurant and trattoria; on most nights, the bakers work as a pair or even solo.
Despite the time-pressure and unpredictable kitchen temperatures that required constant re-jigging of their to-do list, Kenny and Stewart remained fully-focussed on their two apprentices. They showed us the different handling required by the each of Fifteen’s range of Italian and English breads, giving Salvo and I continual reassurance that we were on the right track.
As dawn passed, I became aware that I was losing focus and asking the same questions more than once but Kenny simply demonstrated again. “I don’t hold with this idea that the only way you can teach someone to be a good chef is by yelling and calling them a t**t, “he explained. “Treat people with respect and they’re more likely to put their heart into it.”
By the time the breakfast chefs arrived to begin their prep, we’d produced eighteen loaves of ciabatta, enough for a few hundred portions each of two different focaccias, a mountain of piadinas, dozens of breakfast muffins, four triple-sized white bloomers, half a dozen or so barm breads and sticky malt loaves, plus a bucket of pancake batter for good measure. And that’s not to mention mixing up the bigas and overnight sponges that would give the next day’s loaves their characteristic depth of flavour, refreshing sourdough starters and recycling leftover loaf ends as the breadcrumb coating for arancini.
I collapsed into bed at nine a.m. exhausted but looking forward to night two.
Come back for part two next week. You can see some of Chris's photos from his mini-apprenticeship on Fifteen London's Facebook page.
The bakerer's apprentice
29th January 2009
Time to roll up my sleeves: I’m going baking.
To help celebrate the official announcement of their first in-house Real Bread baker, Kenny Rankin, Fifteen London has invited me to spend next Thursday and Friday nights alongside him in their bakery.
As part of the campaign’s work towards developing an officially accredited Real Bread training scheme, this is a brilliant opportunity for me to get a taste of one of the country’s best-known existing apprenticeship schemes for myself.
Fittingly, my ciabatta-filled stint alongside Kenny and Fifteen’s real apprentices falls in National Apprenticeship Week 1st – 5th February.
I’ll be sharing my experience in this here blog, so keep an eye out.
http://www.fifteen.net/restaurants/fifteenlondon/Pages/Fifteenlondon.aspx
http://www.apprenticeships.org.uk/Awards/Apprenticeship-Week-2010.aspx
Ode to a French baguette
18th January 2010
Real Bread Campaign supporter and 'half-French, Real Bread obsessive' Nadia Bunce kindly dropped us a line with her personal homage to the baguette...
…well more specifically to bread in France. I spent a year abroad in France for my degree and there was nothing like a fresh baguette filled with soft French cheese, lettuce and tomatoes. Nothing topped it. Lunch was the highlight of my day just for that midday baguette.
My passion evolved into a quest to try every bakery and baguette in Bordeaux. Towards the end of the year I realised there was one bakery that I hadn’t sampled, a few miles out of the city centre and consequently threw a tantrum when my hungry boyfriend refused to cycle 20 minutes with me to go to this bakery.
This all sounds like obsessive behaviour. And perhaps it was a little on the strange side at times, but only a product so good, so tasty could spur me to such lengths.
Once back in England the desire for bread somewhat dampened. The rows of sad looking, spongy breads which miraculously remain in this state for days on end seemed artificial and lacklustre. This ‘bread’ seemed to be fit for only one thing-toasting.
French bread seems to have this wonderful texture which doesn’t crumble upon tearing, it's crusty on the outside and wonderfully moist, chewy and has a fantastic mouth feel on the inside. The crumb of the bread cannot be rolled into that doughy ball so many of our breads here can. And best of all I can eat bread by itself. That’s right French bread doesn’t need spreads, mayonnaise, hundreds of toppings to taste good. Bread is a meal and pleasure in itself.
So what are they doing in France? Well first of all, true artisans bakers stick to the principal ingredients of bread: water, yeast and flour plus any necessary grains and seeds; then a long fermentation time. The flour is also of a much higher quality. How do I know this? Many of the bakeries in France will slip those fresh baguettes into a paper bag exalting the benefits of bread, and the quality of the flour they use; bakeries’ pride brimming from the bags themselves.
The French even have a greater number of adjectives to describe bread, mie being my personal favourite. This best translates as the white of the bread i.e. that soft part in the centre of the bread, or the crumb. My difficulties in translating this word just demonstrate how much more significant bread is to the culture-much like Inuit’s vast range of adjectives to describe snow.
Of course things are changing in France. Pain de mie, that sliced bread which is so ubiquitous in England, is becoming more popular due to its ease of use, the fact it lasts so much longer, it is easily toasted and is particularly useful for that famous French dish croque monsieur.
But I still maintain that for the French, a high quality, crusty baguette remains a significant cultural trait and integral to family meals. Indeed I found it quite comical that my French grandmother insisted on having bread with a dish of pasta. Or this summer riding around Arcachon, desperately looking for a bakery open at 8pm, since the worst case scenario had struck: there was no bread to accompany dinner. In these cases, French toast often substituted as a second best.
So what can I conclude from this? For the French bread is not a soggy sandwich, nor an attribute, it’s life itself…
Nadia currently works for Wedge, a reward card for local shops. Wedge gives holders access to hundreds of offers from traders across London, helping to keep your high street independent. http://www.wedgecard.co.uk/
Spelt Grass Roots
7th January 2010
Having moved on from Mulberry, the fashion label he founded, Roger Saul has proved that he is as gifted at sowing as sewing. In this guest blog, Roger shares with us his passion for spelt, the cornerstone of the farm business he now runs from the family home, Sharpham Park.
Real Bread has to start at the beginning. Understanding about the grain – the selection of the grain type, the intricacies of the sowing and growing process, the care of the land where the grain is grown and how that grain is milled and stored, plus the provenance and flour processes are fundamental to ensuring a fine loaf. All of these can make a difference to the quality of the bread that we break at our tables every day.
Spelt became a part of my life when my sister was trialing different foods to fight the side effects of drastic radiotherapy and she found it easier to digest than wheat. The journey we have taken with spelt since this has led me to be a true and passionate ambassador of this amazing grain. Spelt does contain gluten so it cannot be eaten by coeliacs but for those who want to vary their grain intake or just try something naturally delicious and highly nutritious, spelt is perfect.
After carefully selecting a type of spelt that we thought would grow well in this region, we chose a pure, traceable strain. As spelt is the only cereal crop we grow on our organic farm and as the only thing that goes into our mill is our own spelt, there is absolutely no possibility of cross contamination with any other type of grain. In order to take control of the whole chain, we are now growing our own seed for certification.
As an organic grower, we operate a four year crop rotation and in the years where we don’t grow spelt we grow beans, vetches and clover/grass leys which help feed the soil with vital minerals and nitrogen. In the fourth year, we allow the land to rest. Both the beans and haylage from the leys are given to our animals (along with spelt of course), who also help us nip out the weeds and are the best natural fertilisers we know! The husk from the spelt is composted and spread back onto the land to give a more friable soil and we operate a minimum till cultivation technique to disturb the weed seed as little as possible.
The meat from the animals we sell in our farm shop at Kilver Court, Shepton Mallet and we turn the skins into everything from rugs and cushions, to door stops and keyrings. We try not to let anything go to waste.
Our dedicated spelt mill opened in 2007 and Pete our miller keeps everything running smoothly, taking great pride in walking any buyers or members of the press through the process from start to finish. This year, we have taken on the first ever spelt mill apprentice, and it is good to know that all the hard-earned knowledge that we have gained over the past five years will be passed on.
We work with the Food For Life partnership, an initiative started by the Soil Association, and as part of this scheme Pete recently took a mini mill to a school in Bristol where he showed the students how grain is turned into flour and thereafter into bread. It was fascinating (and somewhat disturbing) to find that this was not general knowledge and so we hope to do more of this in the near future as we head out and spread the good spelt word!
The most important fact about spelt though is that it tastes great. Try baking with it and resisting its naturally deep nutty flavour, though I’m sure as Real Bread enthusiasts we may be preaching to the converted. Or at least we hope so!
Real Bread Campaign working party member Roger Saul is the owner of Sharpham Park organic farm and spelt mill in Somerset. www.sharphampark.com
Campaign members can read another article on spelt in issue two of True Loaf magazine, out later this month
A time for giving
10th December 2009
Christmas is a great time for awakening the inner benefactor, and at Hobbs House Bakery we have found a brilliant way of putting our unsold bread to work. We have teamed up with FareShare, a national charity with a base in Bristol, to give something back. FareShare tackles two of this country’s biggest problems, food waste and food poverty, by connecting businesses like ours with people that need quality food. Our famous overnight dough breads, spelt soda breads and multi-award winning organic sourdoughs (most of which are actually best on day three) are now being enjoyed in places in and around Bristol where food poverty is being tackled.
Until the BSE crisis, any left over bread we had was snaffled up by local pigs. Subsequent changes in the law prevented this amicable process and since then, any surplus from our four shops has been made into compost in an industrial worm farm. Food waste to land fill is this country’s mountainous and filthy secret. At Hobbs House Bakery we are delighted to be part of the solution. The fact that our lush bread is now going to people that need it is ‘living companionship’ ( Latin com- ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread’ ). Until we find an accurate way of knowing how many loaves we will sell every day, we are honoured to play a titchy part in sharing the blessing of real bread with people that need it.
Tom Herbert, Hobbs House Bakery and Real Bread Campaign working party member
http://www.hobbshousebakery.co.uk/
http://www.fareshare.org.uk/
Jimmy’s Food Factory
29th October 2009
“I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed,” said Jimmy Doherty as he inspected the ‘abomination’ of an additive-laden loaf he had made. We believe ashamed.
Starting his recreation of a supermarket loaf in a dustbin seemed to us highly appropriate, as this is where nearly 2.6 billion slices of it end up each year*. Sadly, like the manufacturers of industrial loaves, he went into little detail of the purpose of the individual components of the ‘improver’ he added. He said they stopped the bread going stale, where what he meant was slowed the progress of the effects of staleness.
When judging the end results of his experiment, Jimmy considered the texture, smell, prolonged softness and speed of making his ‘monster’. What he failed to do was to raise questions of what the long term effects of such a cocktail of additives might be; or suggest additive-free solutions to staling, such as buying smaller loaves, freezing bread or longer fermentation by sourdough.
Shame on you, Jimmy.
Jimmy's Food Factory: What's in My Sandwich? First Broadcast on BBC1 Wednesday 28th October 2009. Available on BBC iplayer until 2nd December 2009.
* The Food We Waste, WRAP, July 2008
Biofuels: a letter to The Times
8th October 2009
The following is a letter sent to The Times on 6th October 2009 in response to an article on Biofuels. Sadly it was not published.
Sirs,
The scenario outlined in “Hunger for biofuels will gobble up wheat surplus”, Business, Oct 5” is misguided both environmentally and socio-economically.
Bread should be used for feeding people, not cars, trucks and ships.
Biofuels might provide a partial replacement for dwindling supplies of fossil fuels caused by reckless over-consumption but they do not solve the interlinked problems of global warming or (currently) foreign food supply crises.
Turning UK wheat into biofuel will just feed a positive feedback loop in which increased imports of grain will require greater amounts of fuel to power the vehicles transporting it. Simultaneously, land that could be used for local food growing overseas is sequestered to fill the shortfall caused by us pumping our own wheat into 4x4s, with the increased overall demand for grain contributing to ever-ascending international grain prices.
We need to concentrate on re-establishing resilient, localised producer/consumer food networks, reducing energy consumption and on genuinely sustainable (not just renewable) sources of it.
Yours...
Brixton's better bread
1st October 2009
Brockwell Park, south London: perhaps an unlikely spot to find an ascending star of our national Real Bread calendar.
But that’s what The Brockwell Bake proved to be. Now in its second year, the event attracts some of the key players in the Real Bread baking scene of Britain and beyond.
Following in the footsteps of the likes of Dan Lepard in 2008, the judging panel of this year’s baking competition comprised miller Michael Stoate of the renowned Cann Mills in Dorset, Mount Pleasant Windmill and True Loaf Bakery owner Mervin Austin, and Ken Hercott of Daylesford Organic. This expert basket of bread heads was led by revered Melburnian artisan baker John Downes, who has been called the father of the modern sourdough movement in Australia.
The entrants were no less accomplished. Those waiting nervously outside the tent to hear the results of the professional categories of the competition included Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, who, before settling at Judges Bakery in Hastings, worked for Gordon Ramsay, at The Savoy and as the award-winning head baker at Daylesford Organic in Oxfordshire.
Marking itself out as not simply a baking competition, The Brockwell Bake also featured a series of talks from experts. Between them, Jon Cook of the Traditional Cornmillers Guild; archeobotanist John Letts of the Oxford Bread Group; Brockwell Bake organiser, Andrew Forbes; and craft baker Graham Cotton took a packed tent from growing fields of mixed medieval wheats; the benefits to our communities, environment and health of stone grinding flour locally by wind and water power; through the toll taken on British bread by the wartime National Loaf and the Chorleywood Bread Process; and on to the ever increasing light at the end of the tunnel being by a growing number of champions of the cause of Real Bread.
Perhaps the most popular features of the event were the Traditional Cornmillers Guild stall of stoneground flours from wind and water mills around the UK and kids being invited to make their own pizzas, which were then baked in a portable wood-fired oven. Together the two stalls raised over £400 for a project developing more energy efficient bread ovens for a community in Manica province, Mozambique.
Personally, I had a great time. The bread barter picnic a fine way to round off the day, with visitors swapping cheese, jam, fruits and other nibbles for bread and cakes from the competition. I look forward to seeing The Brockwell Bake becoming even bigger next year, hopefully with plenty of Real Bread Campaign members volunteering to help Andy organise and run the event.
Hit the road, Jaques
18th August 2009
Little Cyril is a baker. Though he’s pretty good at his job, cracks are beginning to show and his co-workers, Andy, Richard and Peter Jaques, foresee that he may need to be replaced soon, that they might need to take a hammer to him.
Named after their granddad, Little Cyril is the homemade wood-fired oven of The Jaques Brothers Travelling Pizzeria & Bakery. Every Saturday, the little trailer on which it sits is hooked to the back of their car and towed a few miles from their home near Richmond to Acton Market. Once there, Little Cyril is fired up for a day of baking hand-stretched pizzas, focaccia and other flat breads.
Andy, the eldest brother, head baker and chef, is particular about the ingredients that go into their products. These include 00 flour from Shipton Mill and organic buffalo mozzarella from Alham Wood, which has a neighbouring stall on the market. The two different natural leavens they use were brought back from Italy and fresh basil comes from a box that lives on a windowsill at home.
“In Italy, mobile pizza ovens go way back,” says Richard. “They would set up in nearby markets or fairs, then walk round with the pizzas on special hats. People would take the pizza, bite off the portion they’d paid for and then put the rest back on the hat.”
With an inkling that the environmental health officer might have something to say about a revival of the pizza hat, the brothers are considering alternative developments for their mobile baking outfit. High on the list is a new two-chambered oven, lighter in construction but better able to cope with the different needs of pizzas and flat breads in one part and with raised breads in the other. They are also looking into roasting coffee in the oven and installing a mini boiler in the chimney to heat water for the brew.
Clearly a keen practitioner of the fermentative arts, as well brewing his own beer, Andy is just itching to try his hand at making salami, “though I’m not sure why because I’m a vegetarian, so I won’t be able to eat it,” he mused.
http://www.thejaquesbrothers.com/
A Local Loaves for Lammas diary
5th August 2009
Though from the south of Staffordshire, I take no shame from using any and every opportunity of promoting the oatcake indigenous to the north of my home county. Even though its damp flannel texture may look less than appealing on the page, on the plate and in the mouth, the Staffie oatcake beats pretty much any other flatbread going. A south Indian parotta could give it a pretty good run for its money but it’d be a close thing.
And so for me began the day’s farinaceous fun with a multicultural take on huevos rancheros. One of my favourite breakfasts – which sounds much better in its original tongue than translated as ranch-style eggs – this Mexican dish is usually based on a pile of cornmeal flatbreads. As my other half isn’t too keen on these and as I was up early, I decided to knock up a batch of the Tunstall tortillas, too.
Going for half oats, half wheat flour, made up with fifty-fifty milk and water, as this was a spur of the moment culinary frenzy, I leavened the batter with instant yeast, rather than sourdough starter. Smothered in the tomato, onion and chilli sauce I rustled up while the batter was proving and topped with a poached egg, they brought about a tinge of jealousy as I tucked into the more traditional version of the dish on my own plate.
The next leg of the Lammas tour was a disappointment – a bakery that said they would bake a special loaf, hadn’t. Happily, over in Walthamstow, volunteers and friends of the Hornbeam Centre (pictured above) had entered into the spirit of things fully. One of the team had baked a loaf depicting a wheatsheaf and several regular customers of Hornbeam’s community café and local food co-operative market stall had brought along home-baked loaves to share with others.
Onward to Dalston, where the collective EXYZT has built a working windmill and artist Agnes Denes’ wheatfield is being restaged as part of Barbican Art Gallery’s Radical Nature exhibition. Although I’d found someone from the Growing Kitchen project in Shoreditch to teach breadmaking there the previous day for Local Loaves for Lammas, somehow I’d missed that The Dalston Mill also was hosting a bready event on the day that I was visiting.
The brainchild of Alex Bettler, Full Dinner Design invited visitors to a bread making session using flour from the mill itself. The latest in Alex’s ongoing, pain-European discussions around bread, the idea was to create edible crockery and cutlery for a shared evening feast. It was a really enjoyable afternoon, with children and adults, several of whom had just been drawn in from the street by the intrigue of a windmill on their doorstep, rolling up their sleeves to shape plates, beakers and spoons. These were then baked, alongside some more ornamental creations from the kids, in the mill’s two wood-fired ovens.
The afternoon’s drizzle turning to torrential rain only served to push closer our group that had been drawn together by shared activity. Sitting side by side around the long communal table, eating from our handmade trenchers and drinking beer brewed by another of the impromptu bakers was the perfect way to end Lammas.
Do you have any pictures from Lammas this year? If so, please feel free to share them with The Real Bread Campaign group on Flickr. If you have any stories from your event, please drop me a line.
Local Loaves for Lammas from the Real Bread Campaign will rise again on the weekend of 31st July - 1st August 2010
Lammas loaf
31st July 2009
This week, we have a guest blog from David Rose, Sustain's farm co-ordinator. In this first entry (hopefully, we'll persuade him to find time in his hectic schedule to bring us updates), he tells us of how things are going on his mission to bake a Local Loaf for Lammas with specially bred wheat from his own farm.
It’ll soon be the 1st of August, Lammas day - the highlight of summer, it’s a day we have planned for all year and we were so excited the baking of our first Loaf for Lammas.
However, here I sit, looking out on a sodden field of wet wheat, my plans in a puddle of clay brown rain water.
Never mind, there’s always tomorrow. You cannot be a farmer if you’re not prepared to beat the weather; my loaf will just have to wait a little longer.
My name David Rose and I’m 50 this year. I started working at Sustain six months ago and it’s changed my life. They say life begins at forty - well for me it’s come a little later.
As an arable farmer growing mainly wheat and oilseed rape, I assumed supplying direct to the public was not for me. Working for an organisation that brings together different groups who care about food, the environment and the future sustainability of food production, has shown me ways to reconnect to the consumer.
Martin runs Wakelyn's Agro-Forestry, a pioneering research farm in Suffolk, and leads Defra-funded studies into plant breeding for a post-petroleum world at The Organic Research Centre at Elm Farm in Berkshire. Elm Farm’s work is to develop and support sustainable land-use, agriculture and food systems, primarily within local economies, which build on organic principles to ensure the health and well-being of soil, plants, animals, men, women and their environment.
Martin told me about a project that was set up to research wheat production that allows farmers to be able to develop their own local varieties. This sounded fantastic and we were asked to become part of the HGCA trial - we were the only non organic farm to join the research - to develop these farm-specific varieties.
Basically, twelve milling and nine feed wheat varieties were cross-bred to produce the a high yielding (Y) population and a high protein/quality (Q) population. All parents were crossed to produce the Yield-Quality (YQ) Population. The populations these crossings produced are genetically diverse, as is indicated by the different heights of the wheat in the picture above - modern monocultural planting leads to more or less uniform straw length. From the successive saving and re-sowing of seed under particular local selective pressures, the idea being that the resulting crop may have the capability to adapt to variable environmental conditions, pests etc that are locally specific to the land on which the wheat is bred. Local resilience is particularly important for organic farms and with global climate change, increasingly so for all farming systems.
Well that was three years ago and we are now just about to harvest our second crop. We have set up links with a local miller and baker to see what sort of bread we can make on our farm. My real concern looking out onto the ever-darkening wheat field is that we have lost the protein levels we require within the wheat to make a local tasty loaf.
But never fear, we haven’t given up yet. Wait, is that a blue cloud I can see in the distance?
Catch you next time.
Farmer David
David Rose, is a co-founder and co-director of Farmeco UK Ltd, a contract farming company established as a collaborative farming venture by four neighboring farms in Nottinghamshire. David also works part time with the Campaign to Protect Rural England on a mapping project as part of Making Local Food Work.
You can read more about David's work at:
www.farmshop.net
For more information on Elm Farm's composite cross population wheat research, visit:
www.efrc.com/?go=ORC&page=Research#Crops%20Programme
Lammas: a national celebration of Real Bread
22nd July 2009
With the end of July hoving into sight, Lammas is almost upon us. We’ve had a great couple of months of chatting to Real Bread Campaign supporters around the country, who have been sharing with us their plans for 1st August. Up and down the land, local bakeries, millers and keen home bakers are marking this ancient harvest festival with activities such as baking loaves from locally milled flour and hosting breadmaking classes. You can find details of those we know of so far, here.
One local collective (pictured) that is keeping it real is being coordinated by Gilchester Organics in Northumberland. Having grown the cereal organically, Gilchesters then grinds its grain in the only registered organic mill in the north of England. Sybille Wilkinson of Gilchesters, which is supplying the grain to eight bakeries in the north east to bake a loaf to a recipe by Real Bread Campaign co-founder Andrew Whitley, says:
“We felt it was important to celebrate the coming harvest, a critical point in our calendar and one much overlooked by modern Britain. We would like to bring this celebration back onto the High Street and remind families and bakeries locally just what it means to get the harvest in.”
So, not that we need an excuse to celebrate locally produced Real Bread but Lammas is a perfect one. Even if you can’t see anything near you on the list, please have a look on our Real Bread Finder and buy a locally baked loaf of Real Bread anyway. For those of you not fortunate to have a bakery nearby, it’s a chance to roll up your sleeves to get baking and seize control of the bread you eat.
In addition to the round up at www.realbreadcampaign.org, which will be updated closer to the day, you can let others know about your own plans and share your ideas for Lammas on the wall of the Real Bread Campaign’s Facebook group and by tweeting @RealBread on Twitter.
Mary Queen of Shops needs you!
Thursday, 2 July 2009
There now follows a message to local, independent bakers from those Optomen people what make telly programmes...
Due to the huge success of earlier series, we are now making a 3rd series of BBC2’s ‘Mary Queen of Shops’ and offering a unique opportunity to an independent business like your own. Britain’s leading retail guru, Mary Portas turned Harvey Nichols into a modern powerhouse and she has a phenomenal talent for unlocking the potential of retail businesses – both large and small.
In this series we are championing the British high street and looking to help the shops that we hold very close to our hearts.
We are looking for independent bakeries that feel they may be getting ‘left behind’ and may be not doing as well as owners would like
- Are you finding it hard to make the money you would like to?
- Are you unsure about what to do to increase your takings?
- Maybe you have tried some changes that haven’t worked as well as you’d hoped?
- Would you like some help from Britain’s leading retail expert?
It is extremely difficult running a small business and with the current economic climate as an additional factor, it is no wonder that up to 100 shops a day are closing in Britain. But, through expert advice, sharing the tricks of the trade, and devising a solution specific to your store, we can try to get your bakery on the road to success. It’s a very special, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Please contact us to find out more. We would love to hear from you.
Please call Tom or Nikki on 020 7967 1285 or email queenofshops@optomen.com
Kerching!
Thursday, 18 June 2009
After months of hard work, the Real Bread Campaign is now celebrating securing a Local Food grant from the Big Lottery Fund. Woohoo!
This new funding will help Sustain to appointment a permanent project officer to co-ordinate the campaign, a role filled until now by volunteers.
Over at least the next four years, we’ll be working around the country with independent bakers, public institutions such as schools and hospitals and local community projects including food co-ops and community cafés, to help make Real Bread accessible to more people from all sectors of society. We’ll also be continuing to promote the pleasures and benefits of locally produced Real Bread and helping to spread both commercial and domestic breadmaking skills.
All in all, it’s pretty exciting.
Hidden processing aids: allergens and GM
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Some processing aids available on the market for use in the baking industry are of GM origin, whilst others are known allergens.
Although food labelling law allows processing aids to go undeclared, allergens and substances of GM origin used in food production do have to be listed.
But not all of them.
Having contacted the Food Standards Agency for clarification, we have learnt the following:
Allergens: as they are not on the list of specified allergens*, enzymes derived from fungal sources do not have to be listed. So, even though it has been found to cause an allergic reaction in some people, fungal alpha amylase does not have to be listed.
Genetically Modified Organisms: Processing aids do not fall within the scope of the GM food and feed regulations (EC/1829/2003). Therefore, even if the production of a loaf involves a processing aid that is an enzyme produced by a GM fungus or bacterium, the label does not have to declare so. The same applies to enzymes from non-GM fungi and bacteria that are cultured on material of GM origin.
It’s now pretty certain that production of any factory loaf could involve the use of processing aids. We are assured by The Federation of Bakers that their members use nothing of animal origin unless stated on the label but as for processing aids, they are remaining tight-lipped.
If any of this is concern and if you are lucky enough to have a local baker, we suggest you pop round and have a chat. He or she should be able to let you know exactly what is and isn’t used in their bread. Hopefully, you’ll find that they are baking Real Bread (see our Real Bread Finder for more) without the use of any processing aids or artificial anything.
* Allergen labelling regulation means that the use in food of wheat, rye, barley, oats, crustaceans, molluscs, eggs, fish, lupin, peanuts, nuts, soybeans, milk, celery, mustard, sesame and sulphur dioxide (at levels above 10mg/kg or 10 mg/litre) and any derivatives thereof must be listed on the label.
