Given dough consideration

I didn’t plan to become a baker. But then, most of the best things in my life weren’t planned. It was 2020 and the pandemic gave me an unexpected gift – time. I caught that sourdough wave and nurtured my starter, following La Brea bakery founder and restaurateur Nancy Silverton’s instructions. I named my starter Ooma, after my grandmother and father. She’s still going strong.

As a women’s health coach, I already had an understanding of the science of fermentation. I had knowledge of the gut microbiome, the potential anti-inflammatory benefits of slow-fermented food, and that there’s often a difference between what marketing says and what the research actually shows. Making sourdough bread felt like a natural extension of that work. I made a loaf every week in my kitchen. Then another. Then more.

Bread takes over

What I didn’t expect was how quickly bread would take over, or how much I needed it to. After years in health coaching, I was falling out of love with the industry. Social media had flooded the space with misinformation, fast fixes and health trends that had nothing to do with genuine wellbeing. Sourdough, by contrast, was honest. The process doesn’t lie. You can’t rush a long ferment or fake a proper crumb. I found that deeply reassuring.

When I won a scholarship to Dr. Vanessa Kimbell’s two-year BALM Diploma at The Sourdough School, something shifted. I’m now midway through the programme and it continues to deepen both my baking and my understanding of Real Bread as food. The scholarship validated what I’d quietly suspected, that this was more than a hobby. Friends and family had been insisting on paying for my loaves for months. The encouragement was impossible to ignore and The Considered Loaf was born.

Philosophy

The name matters to me. We live in a world where bread, one of the most fundamental foods in human history, daily for billions of people, has been reduced to an ultra-processed commodity. Most people never consider how grain is grown, milled or made into bread. I wanted a business name that held that question and every loaf I make is an answer to it.

I buy all my flour from Ratton Pantry – always Bruern Farms' stoneground blends, milled from heritage wheat varieties, grown using regenerative farming practises. Bruern Farms mills less than 500 tonnes of flour a year, which means they’re exempt from the legal ‘fortification’ requirement that applies to most non-wholemeal wheat flour sold in the UK. That’s not just a technicality, for me it’s part of a philosophy. The grain is grown and milled with integrity and I bake with it in the same spirit.

Essential reading and relationships

The Real Bread Campaign’s Knead to Know…more has been essential to building the right foundations for my business. It’s the kind of resource that respects your intelligence: practical, honest and rigorous. Exactly the kind of thinking I want The Considered Loaf to reflect.

I currently bake small batches each week in my home kitchen. I use a weekly preorder model that lets me keep quality non-negotiable. Nicky and Garry Hall of The Kitchen Wraysbury were among the first people to believe in what I was doing. They now stock and take pre-orders for my weekly bakes through their busy village café, and that relationship means everything to me.

What’s next? More stockists. More tables with Real Bread on them. Closer relationships with local farms and millers. And a quiet, persistent mission to make genuinely good sourdough not just available but also affordable and accessible to everyone.

Real Bread, made slowly. That’s all this is. That’s everything this is.

@theconsideredloaf

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 67, July 2026.

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