Making a crust
Many years ago, before Tesco’s took over the world, the village of St Margaret’s at Cliffe had its own bakery. Sadly, it’s long since gone and a combination of listening to the village and his wife moaning that the supermarkets are empty due to panic buying and bemoaning the demise of the local bakery, set me thinking. It was thus we found ourselves one snow bound evening hatching a plan.
Beer and bread have always been associated with one another which is odd considering nowadays commercial brewing yeast and baking yeast are literally two different animals. We’ve been making our own bread since opening 9 years ago, but always with conventional yeast, and the idea of making our own bread from a wild yeast that we had cultivated ourselves not only appealed to my masochistic side of doing things the hard way, but also my love of making something out of not a lot!
Basically, for the uninitiated or anyone with a life, the starter (otherwise known as a mother) is basically made by placing some grapes in a muslin bag and popping them into a sterilised bucket with some flour and water, leaving it for ten days and hoping for the best. After this time, you should have a pot of unpromising guck. To this you add more flour and water (known as er… feeding it) and after a few more weeks of plying it with food and water you eventually have a fizzy substance from which you can make bread. Each time you make a loaf you feed more local Crabble mill flour to the mother and she sits in her bucket ready for the next time you knead her (knead…need…., get it? Ok so I’m recycling a backlog of cracker jokes from Christmas….) Anyway, the good points of making bread this way is that it lasts for a good few days before you have to resort to a toaster, plus it should taste amazing.
Admittedly, it’s likely to be a denser loaf (the sort you know you’ve eaten!) and if you are gluten free, chances are you shouldn’t even look at it but hey, this real bread man….
So anyway, IF it works and that’s a big if, the idea is to sell locally made bread to local people and bring a semblance of a bakery back to the village. It’s unlikely that we’ll threatened Tesco’s monopoly in anyway, but if you fancy something a little less corporate all you’ll have to do is give us a call the day before baking day and, for a small fee, a nice old fashioned loaf will have your name on it (literally if you so wish!!).
No doubt there will be updates on this whole project – can’t believe it’s going to be simple otherwise the rest of the world would be doing it. Will keep you informed of all you knead to dough…. sorry couldn’t resist.