Sunshine on wheat

My baking journey began in 2018 with a friend’s birthday present of a sourdough course at Breadshare, a community bakery at Portobello in Edinburgh. They introduced me to Real Bread and fermentation, as well as a healthy dose of food politics. I gained an insight into our broken food system, how this is exemplified by much of what is marketed as ‘bread’ and how different most examples of that product are from traditionally-made Real Bread. A light switched on.

Terrible good bread

I delved into permaculture, I studied degrowth economics, I consumed all sorts of films, books and documentaries about food and the constructs that people and corporations have created to manufacture, commodify and exploit it - from seeds to systems, people to produce. I explored how we have gone from water, flour, salt and natural fermentation, to the dizzying amount of additives and processes that make up the factory sliced white, upon which people spread (equally commercialised) peanut butter each morning. I learned about sugar and money, capitalism and imperialism, debt and industrialisation, rest and restorative agriculture, making bread while I did so.

My sourdough was sometimes sublime, often sad and very often flat but it was always mine. I aspired to make beautiful bread as bread should be made, but it did not always exactly turn out how I hoped and failed often. Underproved, undermixed, forgotten overnight, loosely shaped, over salted, not salted at all... I made good bread…but it tended to be terrible. I wanted to improve my bread and Katie, my partner, wanted me to improve it too.

I bought myself another course at Breadshare and briefly volunteered there. Covid came and ended that but brought other opportunities. Whenever lockdown rules allowed, I began to volunteer at Granton Garden Bakery, where baker Ruby very patiently began to teach me more.

Accidental wheat grower

Unexpectedly and overnight, I also became a bicycle-based community gardener with Edible Estates and later Leith Community Growers, dropping off seeds and soil and pots and advice for people to grow herbs and peas and beans at home. Our project was offered use of a 3m^₂ raised bed as a meanwhile space. It was in a car park off Leith Walk, surrounded by tram works, a skate ramp, artists’ containers and building sites - who could resist!? We had no plan, but a small team of folk who gathered weekly to try to grow things, make planters from pallets and connect in that most isolating of times.

The expanse of the big bed (or The Field, as I called it) was accusingly bare until I learned about Scotland the Bread’s Soil to Slice programme. A short email back-and-forth with Lyndsay Cochrane, their project coordinator, and soon we were preparing The Field and sowing our own grain. In a very short time there were green shoots in the meanwhile garden as rows of our wheat began to flourish.
I was in love. I got carried away. I even got a wheat tattoo…

Harvest home

Green became gold and at the end of September 2021, we celebrated with a harvest party of volunteers, including Mahala the baker and Tara the grain expert. Lyndsay came along to help gather in this wonderful thing we had grown in our car park, and to teach us more about it. Katie and I dried and stored the sheaves in our Edinburgh flat, where we all gathered again a few weeks later to thresh it. In time, we would have a breadmaking workshop using some of our flour that we had grown on Leith Walk.

Combined with all of this community work and breadmaking, the sudden loss of my father in the summer of 2022 made me question what I was doing with my life. By then I had left Leith Community Growers in the capable hands of the wonderful Alva Rose and moved on to a 'proper' job in the third sector. I spent my days answering emails and staring out the window, watching the tramworks being completed and  wondering if what I was doing was what I really wanted to do. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Sourdough (re)starter

I quit in March 2023 and (thanks to the wonderful and patient Katie) I volunteered for the summer at Granton Garden Bakery and began a short stint learning at Kvasa Bakery, an organic micro on Leith Walk. After two months or so, I was looking around to find where I might get more experience and maybe a job. Yet another email to Lyndsay (thanks again!) saw me arrive at Sunrise Bakehouse in Burntisland, Fife. Liviu and Hajni run this outstanding bakery, where I have been delighted to continue to learn about flour, salt and water and their various combinations ever since.

At the same time, my volunteering at Granton has become a day of paid work so, suddenly, I am a full-time baker. I spend my days mixing, shaping and baking slowly-fermented sourdough bread, using natural seasonal produce, local flours and artisan techniques. I work alongside other passionate people, who have also found their way from broken industrial systems to community microbakeries, traditional processes, Slow Food and skilled production of nutritious, delicious products.

And my homemade bread has improved as a result, which (as Katie reminds me) is the point.

@paddyinedinburgh
@sunrise_bakehouse

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 59, April 2024.

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