Spent a glorious afternoon yesterday scoffing wholemeal pancakes and milling beautiful
@shimplingparkfarm organic landrace wheat with generous Mr Biddle
@biddlesbread 🌾 on Alice Pawsey's Osttiroler stone mill.
We played around with different extractions and I came home with a boot full of flour to experiment with in the bakery. I'll be using the freshly milled wholemeal in our table loaves this week and might try a brioche recipe with some of the whiter flour later on...
It's so invigorating as a baker to connect with this process and makes my job feel even more fun, interesting and tangible/corporeal/substantial (not sure on the word ..All of those and more...!)
It was exciting to exchange recipes and share different processes and baking methods, as we both mostly work alone. We spoke about the ways, as bakers, we favour flour with high protein contents, looking closely at gluten formation, but what if we shifted our gaze to include favouring flour with a high 'life' content! The more alive the flour, being stone milled and retaining the bran and germ, the more active the fermentation and fuller the flavour. And more vitality brought into the baking process.
We questioned the value of this work, what we should be charging for our bread and the salaries that we realistically need to make to pay our mortgages etc. Vitality extending to the lives and livelihoods of everyone involved at each stage of the farming-to-eating process.
Here are a few snaps and some from Dom
@biddlesbread of the wheat growing in the field
@shimplingparkfarm - note the differences in the ears - this is all one variety! (Albeit an unknown one 😆)
