Loaf Goes Wild

Since our high street opening in September 2012 Loaf has been involved in some inspiring and innovative food collaborations, from baking Art Bread with Eastside Projects, to Beer Bread with Stirchley Wines and Spirits and Brewdog Birmingham using a range of their selected bottled beers. Our most recent collaboration has taken Tom even further afield, to combine wild food with Real Bread.

Forest Baking

Over the years Tom has met many inspiring real food evangelists including Chris Bax, the founder of Taste The Wild. It is here in their 18 acre woodland in Yorkshire that Tom recently lead a hugely successful open air bread making course. Going back to nature, this course with a difference included cooking in a wood-fired oven without any electricity or running water, and with endless wild forest ingredients to choose from. Transforming Loaf’s usual bread making course to this rural location, the results were equally impressive. A unique and enjoyable collaboration to be remembered, and hopefully repeated.

Here are some forest bread baking pics, by Jane Baker:

Bread Making course at Taste the Wild in Yorkshire — Loaf bread making course in the 18 acre Yorkshire woodland home of Taste the Wild

Shaping the dough before proving. Copyright Jane Baker — Tom demonstrates how to shape the dough before proving

Chris Bax (centre) of Taste the Wild. Copyright Jane Baker — Chris Bax (centre), expert wild food forager and founder of Taste the Wild

Loaf course participants. Copyright Jane Baker — Loaf course participants get stuck in to making real bread under canvas at Taste the Wild

Fresh pine needles, one of the added foraged ingredients for making wild bread

fougasse before baking. Copyright Jane Baker — A fougasse before going into the wood-fired oven

Earth oven bread baking. Copyright Jane Baker — Earth oven bread baking in the forest.

Launching – The Loaf Loyalty Card

Last week we sent whispers around that we would soon be launching a Loaf Loyalty Card. Well the card is now up and running and available in Stirchley Stores. Just pick one up or ask at the till.

The Loaf Loyalty Card is our way of saying thank you to all our regular bread customers and local supporters, without which we would not exist. So, thank you!

Stirchley CANeat, oh boy can it eat.

We’ve had some great pop-up dining experiences at Loaf from the uber-rammed burger night just before opening in September, the Pizza night shortly after, the intimate pig-out in October, the amazing Popstrami Redux in December, and most recently Stirchley Brewhouse last Saturday. Some of these will no doubt make a return in 2013, along with some other exciting one-off’s but I wanted to draw your attention to a regular eating opportunity that will be happening here very soon:

Stirchley CANeat is a regular, intimate dining experience with a set menu advertised in advance. We’ve got a fantastic team of food enthusiasts together to put this on, spearheaded by Dom (our breadchef), Vic (his better half), and Lap (our fish Sensai). I don’t really need to say any more as it’s so good we’ve given it it’s own blog. Please check out stirchleycaneat.wordpress.com, and if you’re on twitter follow updates and menu-releases at @can_eat. Go book a table, first date is 28th Feb.

BrewDog Birmingham – Beer Bread

A brand new beer bar has opened in Birmingham City Centre: Brewdog Birmingham, and Loaf are proud to be providing some of the bread for their menu – a special Brewdog Hardcore IPA bread that they serve with a great cheese and meat platter, and as part of a locally made sausage dish. You can find Brewdog Birmingham at 81-87 John Bright Street, Birmingham, B1 1BL.

You can still get Loaf Beer Bread every Thursday at Stirchley Wines and Spirits, so don’t fret if you like to keep your beer and bread activities Stirchley based!

BrewDog Birmingham – Beer Bread

You can still get Loaf Beer Bread every Thursday at Stirchley Wines and Spirits, so don’t fret if you like to keep your beer and bread activities Stirchley based!

Sarehole Community Bakery??

Sarehole Mill is one of the hidden treasures of Birmingham, if you’ve never visited you should definitely check it out. The fantastic curator Irene along with the city council have managed to secure a significant amount of funding to restore the mill to working order to start selling flour again, and to refurbish the 180 year old coal-fired bread oven on the site to start baking bread. You can read all the details on Councillor Martin Mullaney’s blog – here and here. I took a tour around the site today with Irene, and we chatted about the possibility of baking on-site in the original oven. We’ve identified the possibilities on the site as well as some major hurdles to cross, but hopefully we will be able to help Irene and her team to get the oven back into working order and start baking (and hopefully selling) bread from the mill. Meanwhile here’s a few photos of Sarehole Mill on this gorgeous day…

The silted up mill pond - this will be dredged soon. Anyone got a truck to distribute the silt to allotments?

The bakehouse opposite the mill. Oven is in the left hand room.

The oven is still in fairly good nick after 180 years.

Shaping a boule – video

Have been playing around with a posh camera (not mine) that does HD video, a lot of fun. I decided to shoot this short video with the camera mounted on a tripod whilst I shaped some boule (classic round shaped) sourdough loaves. I may have messed around with the speeding up and slowing down of the film a bit, hope it doesn’t make you too dizzy. instructions on screen during the video, but feel free to ask questions in the comments too. Enjoy!

p.s. Here’s what the finished loaves look like the next day:

Kneading and Shaping

A couple more bread videos for you. The first one is the three main kneading techniques that I teach on our basic bread making course. The first is a French Kneading method with Richard Bertinet as it’s main proponent. Great technique, especially with a sticky dough, search for him on youtube and he’ll take you through it in more detail. The second is a more classic stretch-along-the-bench technique where you stretch it away from you with the heel of one hand (holding the dough firm with the other hand), fold it back with your fingers, turn the dough ninety degrees, and repeat. The third is a two handed kneading method where I’m using traction between my hands and the bench to stretch the dough and the side of my hand to fold it back on itself. I would do all of these three methods quite a bit faster if it weren’t for film.My preferred kneading method, especially for larger amounts of dough, is actually more hands-off then any of these three and is championed by Dan Lepard and others. I’ll cover that in a future vid.

In this second vid I’m shaping a couple of oblong bloomer loaves from a quite-sticky spent brewing grain dough. I’ve slowed it down as much as I can to show the essential steps, but with a sticky dough like this it’s best to work fast. First I stretch the dough a little to form a rough square in front of me. I fold in the four corners of the square to the middle, pinching down the folds and the dough now forms a diamond. I fold in the four corners of the diamond (the right and left corners slightly less so) and the dough now forms a rectangle in front of me. I fold this in half towards me to form a more oblong shape and then roll back and forwards with a little downward pressure and nice long rolls from wrists to fingertips to get the desired shape. It then goes into a floured linen couche to prove. The second one I shape is a bit better.

Bread videos

Got a new iPhone4 and the video camera seems much better on it than my old 3GS, so I thought I’d start shooting a few bread videos and posting them on here. It may become something significant, it may not, but here’s the first three.

First up one of my students on Saturday invented her very own kneading method. I like it.

Second this is me mixing the dough for the borodinsky bread’s on sale tomorrow at Stirchley Market. This is a 6kg batch and includes rye sourdough starter, water, salt, malt extract, molasses, caraway seed, plus rye flour.

Finally this is me shaping that dough into tins. It only has the one rise or proof, directly in the tins – 3 hours after this and it’s in the oven. Always have wet hands when shaping rye!

Stirchley Market Tomorrow

It’s the wonderful Stirchley Market tomorrow, and we’re going to be down there again selling fresh bread. There’s going to be a slight change to our stall from now on though as we’re doubling the size of it, and sharing it with South Birmingham Food Co-operative. As some of you may know we are moving Loaf into a new HQ later in the year (hopefully in December). In this large premises there will be room for a cookery school, bakery, and a nice little shop. We’re hoping that the shop will not only sell products from Loaf (i.e. bread), but also general grocery items and wholefoods from South Birmingham Food Co-op as well. Therefore it makes sense to start trading as one on the market stall aswell so shoppers can get used to the idea. So from tomorrow as well as coming down for fresh bread, we’ll be stocking lentils, rice, oats, sugar and other general provisions – come down and check it out and if you want to earn extra hippy-points, bring your own tupperware to fill up (although free paper bags are available too!). The bread on sale will be:

Cotteridge Sourdough

Borodinsky Rye sourdough (with caraway, malt, molasses)

Ciabtatta

Stirchley Potato bread

White split tin

Bournville Babka (chocolate swirl bread)

New Course: Earth Oven Building Weekend

Just a brief post to notify you of a brand new course that we’re offering this summer which we’ve just advertised on our cookery school pages. Our Earth Oven Building Weekend will take place on the 16th and 17th July, and is a unique opportunity for you to come and learn how to make an earth oven for outdoor cooking and bread making in your own back garden. We’ll be making an oven together over the weekend in the very same style of the oven that we use to run our bread courses and community bakery from. You can see all the details of the course over on this page, and if there is enough demand for the first course we may run a second course this year before the weather turns.

Stirchley Community Market Today

Today see’s the fifth Stirchley Community Market since its inauguration in July. We’ve moved the market indoors for the winter, although there is still some hot food happening outdoors, and it’s at the same venue, the Stirchley United Working Mens Club on Hazelwell Street, from 4-7.30pm. We’re doing bread at this months market and will be taking down about 75 loaves of various kinds. You can find details of the loaves and prices below:

White Tin – small £0.80

Malthouse Granary – small £1.10

Cotteridge Sourdough – large (800g) £3, small (400g) £1.80

Revolution Rye (100% rye topped with Pumpkin and Sunflower seeds) – small £1.80

Borodinsky Rye (100% rye with molasses, malt extract and caraway) – small £2

Ciabatta – small £1.50

‘The Stirchley’ (Crusty part-wholemeal potato loaf) – small £1

We normally sell out before the end so head down early to grab some!

Sourdough loaves for sale today

I had lots of dough leftover after yesterdays wash-out food festival at Winterbourne Gardens, so I called up my mate Carl who has an enormous wood-fired oven in Stirchley. He fired it up mid-afternoon, and we popped round in the evening to bake the remaining dough, and turn it into these whopping 1kg loaves of sourdough bread. Wander down Dell road in Cotteridge today and you can pick one up for £3, or email tom@loafonline.co.uk to reserve one. Now what to do with all the leftover cheese and ham…

Wellesbourne White Loaf

Earlier this week a historic exchange took place, as a miller handed over a sack of white flour to a baker on a normal street in South Birmingham. Nothing extraordinary about that you might think, it’s a transaction that echoes centuries of intertwined relations between these two ancient professions. There was something special about this exchange though – the flour being handed over was the first batch of commercial flour from Wellesbourne watermill since the 1950’s, and the baker (me), runs Birmingham’s first and only community supported bakery. I felt honoured to receive the 25kg sack of white flour from talented traditional millwright Adam Marriot, who together with his wife Vicky have taken on the tenancy of the mill and lovingly restored it back into production. During the exchange, Adam told me of his future plans to restore a threshing machine too, and to rent 40 acres of land so that they can start growing, threshing and milling their wheat all on the same site.

The flour will be put to work over the next two weeks for Loaf’s community bakery, making our white sourdough loaf and being part of the flour in our granary sourdough (the other flour comes from Charlecote Mill a few miles down the road). I couldn’t wait quite that long though to have a play with the flour, so on Tuesday I made a couple of white tin loaves using a basic yeasted bread recipe. I had to go out before they were due in the oven, so the slashing and baking was entrusted to Jane – she did a great job: