I was contacted by someone who was asking if we would be resuming our Sourdough Tales workshops at Starnash Farmhouse, and I had to tell him that sadly we no longer had the available space, but that I had vlogged my sourdough baking back in one of the Shawpits Diaries, so I thought I would …
Botanical Bread
My kitchen smells fabulous. I saw an Instagram post on Hodmedod's feed about an interesting new grain blend from Venessa Kimbell, founder of The Sourdough School. As she rightly points out, even whole ancient grains and heritage wheats to grind at home are sold cleaned and graded, unlike the inclusions our ancestors would have inevitably …
Sourdough September 2020
It's a very different Sourdough September this year. To me, flour and bread baking have been emblematic of Lockdown, and perhaps an appreciation of the fact that flour needs to be sown, grown, harvested, and milled before it can be brought to the shelves of our supermarkets and farm shops has filtered in to the …
New toy…
When I buy flour for my sourdough, I endeavour to use it as an opportunity to support British farmers who are using environmentally sound practises on their farm, and have full traceability for the product. I have written previous posts about this but Hodmedod's and Bakery Bits are two of my go-to websites. They are …
Flour power
One of the repercussions I certainly didn't envisage about the pandemic was a shortage of bread flour. Not just the supermarket stuff, but that from artisan producers and micro-mills. I suppose the wonder of modern technology where you can type "bread flour" in to a search engine and be presented with a selection of suppliers …
Flour and friends
I am starting the sourdough courses this weekend, and have ordered some important and interesting flours to both try myself, and demonstrate to the bakers. Flour? Important? Interesting?? Seriously? Well, yes. I listened to a brilliant series of podcasts by Farmarama, where they discussed the grain used for baking bread, from growing, to harvesting, to …
Sourdough September
Apparently this is a thing, created by the hashtag gods of social media. Still, I love a good sourdough and I get a few people asking about it so here is a quick post about the loaves I make. I have been using a rye starter for a number of years, although my most recent …
Wayward Bee 