One year on: ode to the wood-fired oven

The Good Old Days…

Back in 2009 Tom began Loaf, baking bread in a wood-fired oven in our garden in South Birmingham for our neighbours and friends. Seeing this picture, below, again reminds me of the smoky taste and smell of the bread Tom used to bake, and the way it all started. Authentic, fresh, Real Bread. Celebrating our first anniversary on the high street this week (8 Sept 2013), we owe the success of Loaf Community Bakery and Cookery School to those early days baking in the garden, to the support of local people, a growing staff team and to Tom’s determination. And it has been worth it.

Earth Oven Course

 

Earth-Oven Building Weekend – 28th – 29th September 2013

It’s really very simple, cheap building an earth-oven once you know how. Our final Earth Oven Building Weekend for the season is coming up on Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th September 2013. So, if you missed out on our previous courses and fancy a little dabble at making your own you’re just about in time. We only have a few places left.

The course is great for both garden, food and bushcraft enthusiasts, and definitely for those that don’t mind getting their hands dirty. No experience is needed, we’ll teach you everything – just a willingness to get stuck in. You can cook practically anything in a wood-fired oven, from bread and cakes to casseroles and pizza, all with that unique smoky taste. And there really is nothing quite like it.

For more info and to book visit our Loaf Cookery School page

Jane

 

Below: The good old days – Tom featured with our earth-oven in Virgin Train Hotline Magazine (May 2010). More early Press coverage  here.

Virgn Hotline Magazine May 2010

 

Forgotten Food Skills: Shellfish

Being one of the furthest cities  in the UK from the coast it’s not surprising that so many of us in Birmingham love seafood but don’t know where to start when it comes to shellfish preparation. It’s a forgotten food skill that our coastal ancestors would have passed down through generations, but in recent years we’ve begun to lose.

Seafood Two: Shellfish

Join fish expert Lap-fai Lee for a hands-on evening introduction to cooking shellfish, including  crabs, oysters, and lobster. Identify, prepare and cook shellfish in a range of Asian & European style dishes, and discover how quick & enjoyable eating shellfish in your own home can be. The evening course will include a shellfish feast including crab linguine, dressed oysters, and chargrilled squid.

Our next course is on Wednesday 23rd October from 6.30pm to 9.30pm.

For more info and to book click here

Afterwards why not take a visit to to the fantastic wholesale fish market in Birmingham city centre brimming with a wide range of fish and shellfish, and begin to create the magic again at home.

Photo: Jack Spicer-Adams

Seafood themed CANeat pop-up dining experience.

 

 

 

 

Urban Harvest: Urgent Crowd-funding

Urban Harvest: Help save Birmingham’s fruit from going to waste

Our friends at Northfield Ecocentre need our support. They’re re-launching the fantastic Urban Harvest project originally set up by wonderful Loaf and Stirchley Market supporters Eleanor Hoad and Nigel Baker. As keen wild food foragers at Loaf (next Foraging course – 3 Oct), we know there’s loads of free edible treats in and around urban street, canals, parks and back gardens, and whilst we do our best to pick and use what we can, it’s a crying shame that so much goes to waste each year.

The aim of Urban Harvest is to turn local fruit that would otherwise go to waste from back gardens and public places into jams, preserves and juices, and to give apples and soft fruit away for free to children centres and food banks for re-distribution to individuals and families who could benefit from the good old five a day.

Urban Harvets Logo

Crowd funding – £10,000 needed by Weds 18 Sept!

They’re looking to raise £10,000 to re-launch the project and employ a part time co-ordinator, and need 2000 people to donate £5 (or more!) each to reach their target. The deadline is looming, on Wednesday 18th September, and if the target is not met they will be unable to go ahead.

To donate visit: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/urban-harvest

Urban Harvest

They’re also looking for:

  • Volunteers and drivers to help pick fruit
  • People with fruit trees and bushes who would like their produce picked (tell them how much you want to keep and they’ll use any surplus)
  • People to help promote the project and share the crowd-funding site with friends and families
  • Retailers wiling to sell juices and preserves made with local fruit
  • Local producers who need fruit to make their own preserves etc
  • Children centres, food banks and charities who can re-distribute free fruit to those who need it.

Northfield Ecocentre is working with Martineau Gardens, Urban Veg and Growing Birmingham to deliver Urban Harvest.

 

 

 

Birmingham Mail feature Syrian inspired bread for Oxfam appeal

Last Saturday 20 July, our bakers teamed up Oxfam Midlands to bake a one-off Syrian yoghurt flatbread to help raise awareness of Oxfam’s Syria Crisis Appeal. We’re pleased to say that the Syrian bread was a huge success and sold out within an hour. We were also featured with Oxfam Midlands in today’s Birmingham Mail (Thursday 25 July, page 16).

We’d like to thank all our customers for their enthusiasm on the day, and Dom for baking the bread in the Loaf Community Bakery. We would also encourage everyone to continue their support by visiting the Oxfam website or reading our previous Syria inspired bread blog.

Bakers use loaf to boost charity - Birmingham Mail (25 July 2013)
Bakers use loaf to boost charity – Birmingham Mail (25 July 2013)

One-off Dosa Making Workshop – Thurs 29 August, pm

Exciting news – we’ve teamed up with Kings Heath’s Pop Up Dosa for a fantastic one-off dosa making workshop.  Taking place on Thursday 29th August from 6.30pm to 9.30pm at Loaf cookery school, this is likely to be the only opportunity to run this course in 2013, so book while you can!

 

Dosa Workshop

 

Pop Up Dosa have been bringing fantastic street food from Kerala in the south west of India to the streets of Birmingham for well over a year now. From their home-cafe in Kings Heath to guest appearances at markets and takeovers of other cafe’s, they’re an integral part of the grassroots food landscape developing in Birmingham right now, and for good reason. During this three hour workshop Head chef Haseen will teach you the secrets of this south Indian speciality – the right consistency of fermented ground rice for the dosa mixture, the correct texture of the lentils for the gunpowder chutney, the secret flavours of the essential sambar, and of course the cooking techniques for the perfect dosa. It’s a very hands-on workshop where’ll you’ll see or do all of the recipes involved and there’s plenty of time to try out you’re dosa cooking skills on the hot tava’s at the end. And of course, we’ll be eating dosa too. Arrive hungry!

To book you place visit: www.loafonline.co.uk/shop/dosa

One-off Dosa Making Workshop – Thurs 29 August, pm

Exciting news – we’ve teamed up with Kings Heath’s Pop Up Dosa for a fantastic one-off dosa making workshop.  Taking place on Thursday 29th August from 6.30pm to 9.30pm at Loaf cookery school, this is likely to be the only opportunity to run this course in 2013, so book while you can!

 

Dosa Workshop

 

Pop Up Dosa have been bringing fantastic street food from Kerala in the south west of India to the streets of Birmingham for well over a year now. From their home-cafe in Kings Heath to guest appearances at markets and takeovers of other cafe’s, they’re an integral part of the grassroots food landscape developing in Birmingham right now, and for good reason. During this three hour workshop Head chef Haseen will teach you the secrets of this south Indian speciality – the right consistency of fermented ground rice for the dosa mixture, the correct texture of the lentils for the gunpowder chutney, the secret flavours of the essential sambar, and of course the cooking techniques for the perfect dosa. It’s a very hands-on workshop where’ll you’ll see or do all of the recipes involved and there’s plenty of time to try out you’re dosa cooking skills on the hot tava’s at the end. And of course, we’ll be eating dosa too. Arrive hungry!

To book you place visit: www.loafonline.co.uk/shop/dosa

Syrian inspired speciality bread for Oxfam

This Saturday 20 July, our bakers are teaming up Oxfam Midlands to bake a one one-off Syrian yoghurt flatbread to help raise awareness of Oxfam’s Syria Crisis Appeal.  The bread will be sold in the Loaf Community Bakery, 1421 Pershore Road, Stirchley, Birmingham, B30 2JL from 8.15am to 2pm. Look out for it on our specials table in the shop window.

Every day at Loaf we bake a different speciality bread, often inspired by cultures and flavours from around the world. As a former Media Campaigner for Oxfam Midlands and having had friends who lived and worked in Syria, this is close to our hearts. Baking bread in solidarity with the Syrian people, is one way that we can do our bit to help. What is happening in Syria is a tragedy so we want to do whatever we can to make a difference. We would encourage our customers to join us and come and buy the bread and/or make a donation to Oxfam’s Syria Crisis appeal.

www.oxfam.org.uk/syria

See our article in the Birmingham Mail on Thursday 25 July, pg 17 – “Bakers use loaf to boost charity”.

Oxfam syria appeal

Oxfam is working with refugees from Syria in Lebanon and Jordan to provide access to housing water and sanitation but the charity needs to raise more funds as soon as possible to reach thousands more refugees who need emergency help.  The situation is getting more desperate as the UN’s latest figures show that the number of people killed in Syria has reached a staggering 100,000.  Eight million Syrians are in desperate need of aid and almost 1.8 million forced to flee to neighbouring countries.

As well as at Loaf, a series of events and fundraising activities in the West Midlands have been taking place to raise awareness and money for Oxfam’s Syria Crisis Appeal.  Oxfam in the Midlands are asking local people in Birmingham and the Black Country to get in touch to find out how they can get involved to raise awareness, campaign and/or fundraise.

Katy Cook, Community Campaigns Coordinator for Oxfam Midlands said: “Many people in Birmingham and Wolverhampton will have heard about the conflict in Syria in the news but not many people will know what it is like to live there.Through the baking of speciality Syrian bread at Loaf in Birmingham and sharing personal stories of refugees in Wolverhampton we want to bring the experiences of ordinary Syrian people closer to home to people in the West Midlands.  The refugees we are working with are ordinary people like us who are bystanders to the conflict but the fighting, bloodshed and violence has forced many families to leave behind everything they know.  There are many heartbreaking stories of people who have watched their children die or lost family members but even amidst the despair there are some amazing and inspirational stories.”

For more information please go to www.oxfam.org.uk/syria or call the Oxfam Midlands office on 0121 634 3611

Jane Baker

New Round of Kitchen Essentials Dates

We’ve recently added a new round of dates for our series of Kitchen Essentials courses, between July and September 2013, so if you’ve been looking for a cookery course with Loaf, there might be one in there just for you.

Kitchen Essentials

Kitchen Essentials is a series of short evening workshops, designed to quickly improve your cooking skills in particular areas and make you a better, faster, and more efficient home cook. The series is broken down into bite-size chunks that you can dip in and out of depending on what areas of cooking you’d like to learn or improve on.

July – September 2013 dates are as follows (spaces available – first come first served)

  • Knife Skills: Tuesday 23rd July
  • Stocks and Sauces: Tuesday 30th July
  • Cooking Vegetables: Tuesday 6th August
  • Herbs & Spices: Tuesday 13th August
  • Beans, Pulses & Grains: Tuesday 10th September
  • Cooking Meat: Tuesday 11th June, Tuesday 17th September

Like all our courses at Loaf Cookery School, Kitchen Essentials workshops are very hands-on, and we guarantee you won’t leave hungry, but you will leave with a host of new skills to get perfecting at home. All workshops are led by chef and baker Dom Clarke, run on a week day evening from 7-9pm, and are priced at £30 per person (except ‘Cooking Meat’ which is £40).

For more information about each course visit: www.loafonline.co.uk/shop/kitchen-essentials/

ACE Leadership Programme Visit to Loaf

Arts Council England, with the Black Country Living Museum, is funding a 9 month programme to transform the futures of twelve museums. As part of their leadership training programme twelve successful museum applicants will visit Loaf to learn about the real life development of food social enterprises as part of a continuing grassroots food renaissance.

Alongside Tom, the programme is also working with, amongst others, famous sculptor Anthony Gormley, Andrew Lovett, Chief Executive Black Country Living Museum and Michael Day, CEO Historic Royal Palaces, so it looks like applicants will be in for a real treat.

Their deadline for senior museum professionals to apply is 14 June. For more information visit: www.museumresilience.com/faculty-page/

Loaf Cookery School
A Bread: Back to Basics course at Loaf Cookery School

Earth oven Building Course – 15 & 16 June

Sunny weather this weekend certainly brought the whiff of BBQs and outdoor cooked food in the air. For us this means firing up our wood fired oven in the garden and inviting friends and family round for a relaxing evening. Whilst we often make wood fired pizzas, and enjoy a glass of wine in the garden, we’ve been know to prepare a slow cooked roast too, plus sweet treats as the heat of the oven cools down, and even leave a meringue cooking overnight, ready for the next day.

If the idea of cooking in your own garden takes your fancy, our next weekend Earth Oven Building course is coming up on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16th June in Stirchley at the home of our baker Dom.

As well as choosing suitable materials, you’ll learn how to build the oven floor, and construct and shape  the thick oven walls using cob,  cut a door and decorate the outside. You’ll also learn how to cook in and maintain your oven. Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as drinks throughout the day.

For more information visit the Loaf Cookery School pages on our website.

Earth Oven Course

 

Earth oven Building Course – 15 & 16 June

Sunny weather this weekend certainly brought the whiff of BBQs and outdoor cooked food in the air. For us this means firing up our wood fired oven in the garden and inviting friends and family round for a relaxing evening. Whilst we often make wood fired pizzas, and enjoy a glass of wine in the garden, we’ve been know to prepare a slow cooked roast too, plus sweet treats as the heat of the oven cools down, and even leave a meringue cooking overnight, ready for the next day.

If the idea of cooking in your own garden takes your fancy, our next weekend Earth Oven Building course is coming up on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16th June in Stirchley at the home of our baker Dom.

As well as choosing suitable materials, you’ll learn how to build the oven floor, and construct and shape  the thick oven walls using cob,  cut a door and decorate the outside. You’ll also learn how to cook in and maintain your oven. Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as drinks throughout the day.

For more information visit the Loaf Cookery School pages on our website.

Earth Oven Course

 

Loaf reaches new heights

This month Stirchley featured in the May edition of Brussels Airline’s bthere magazine.

Described as a ‘destination for creativity, comedy and exciting cuisine’, it included us at Loaf and celebrated other local community food and arts initiatives such as Stirchley Community Market. Stirchley seems to be making a name for itself – not only in the UK, but now internationally!

To read more visit the be the b there website or download the full magazine as a pdf. We’re on page 74.

Brussels Airlines bthere Magazine - May 2013
Brussels Airlines bthere Magazine – May 2013

Project Artisan featured in the Birmingham Post

Way back in September 2012, we opened our cookery school and bakery doors to the public on Stirchley High Street as part of Project Artisan. Huge congratulations to our friends Soul Food Project who have teamed up with Everards Brewery too, and are soon to open The Church Inn in the Jewellery Quarter.

Birmingham Post, 2nd May 2013

Project Artisan features in The Birmingham Post

Lasagne and Watercress

Veg: Part 4 – vegetable growing diary

Read previous veg blog

It’s not every day you hear someone say that they’re pleased to have a surplus of cardboard boxes. Well we are. For now anyway.

This week Tom and I tried Lasagne gardening at our new allotment in Hazelwell Park. It’s an increasingly well-known method of no-dig gardening that originated in the USA, and is apparently great for reducing weeds. As the name suggests you lay down sheets of cardboard (the pasta) with layers of mulch in between (we’ve got dry grass, homemade compost and leaf mould) and water well. The idea is that instead of digging up all our couch grass and breaking our backs in the process we’ll suppress them and – fingers crossed – kill them, and at the same time add compost and nutrients as the layers rot down.

Lasagne Gardening
Loaf’s cardboard box surplus in it’s new home on our allotment

This way we can also avoid further compacting our clay heavy Stirchley soil, and breaking up the natural soil structure by digging into the subsoil. This could inhibit movement of water, air, minerals and biological activity, and we need all the help we can get to grow our veggies. According to Alys Fowler at Urban Veg more water is lost through evaporation than drainage so our mulching will definitely help with conserving water when we plant too.

Genius. Less work, and happier soil. And hopefully happier veggies too.

We’ve also discovered a patch of comfrey – great for making natural fertilizer, so we’re looking for a water drum to make a liquid solution in (1 part comfrey to 10 parts water). I’ve got my eye on nettles too and am hoping to learn to build a wormery. This is one area in which we have let our veggies down in previous years. Watering but rarely feeding. I’m told that new compost contains only has 6 – 8 weeks worth of food, so that’s why our vegetables have rarely grown big and strong in the past. They were hungry. Seems obvious now.

Weeding the water-cress bed
This weeks’s soup is watercress

At the weekend we exchanged garden labour for great home-cooked food and veggie growing tips at Tom’s uncle and aunty’s house in Hampshire. They have a gorgeous old saddler’s cottage which they have rented for over 50 years. It comes with an amazing riverside garden with watercress bed, wooded area and huge veggie garden to die for. However, in even the most cared for garden, diseased soil (honey fungus) has started to kill a treasured old tree. That’s where we came in – to battle with and fell the old tree. We also came home with armfuls of watercress (today’s soup) after clearing their bed of encroaching reeds. A joy to weed on a sunny afternoon. Heaven.

Weeding the water-cress bed
…thanks to our weed clearing skills

Whilst we’ve done nothing in our back garden this week, we’ve had a lot of fresh air in exchange for food growing knowledge and trial and error no-dig gardening. Last week at Urban Veg to come.

Read previous veg blog

Dine in a Convent

We couldn’t resist sharing this event organised by our friend and restaurateur Aftab Rahman. Thumbs up for a unique idea – a bangladeshi banquet in Pugin’s St Mary’s Convent!

Friday 10 May, £30. Booking: www.bayleaf-restaurant.co.uk e-mail: info@bayleaf-restaurant.co.uk Mobile: 07861 310802

Dine in the shadow of pugin