Baking

Explore sourdough recipes, resources, ingredients and more for the Real Bread Campaign's 10th annual international Sourdough September in 2022, encouraging people to bake, buy and enjoy genuine sourdough bread.

As a nation we really love bread. It's a staple of almost all British households, with 12 million loaves baked and sold every day. At Hodmedod we’re a little more particular. We love real bread.

Diversity is at the heart of resilient agroecological food systems. For that reason and just in time for Real Bread Week, we're delighted to be welcoming Flanders wheat into the Bean Store.

This photo from July 2017 marks an ending and a beginning. The end of a long search for bakers willing to work with the population wheats developed by Martin Wolfe. The start of a new phase that has seen YQ widely grown and used, alongside a blossoming of alternative grain systems in the UK. 

Kimberley Bell of Small Food Bakery reflects on four years of YQ grown for the bakery and the people-centred systems that have emerged and continue to emerge, around it.

We only sell stoneground whole grain flours, these are made by milling the whole cereal seed and not sifting the flour. We do this because we know that wholegrain flours taste better and are better for us. But we've started selling bran and semolina, the by-products of white flour production - Josiah explains why.

We’ve started selling bread from the Penny Bun Bakehouse. Just one ‘Hodmedod’ loaf for now, you can find it here, but if it works maybe more in time. Here's why:

If you haven't caught up with them yet you really mustn't miss the new Cereal podcast series from Farmerama Radio and Wendell Steavenson's Guardian long read Flour Power. Pus more food for thought we've digested recently.

A little over 10 years ago Nick, William and I began working with Transition City Norwich on the Resilient Food Project, a community initiative that asked whether the city could feed itself in a low impact, low input way from the fields around its walls and that was the catalyst for Hodmedod. One of the many things we needed to get to grips with was grain, flour and bread (we're still on that journey). Here Charlotte Du Cann, writing in 2009, records one of our early explorations into fields and bakeries.

Learn to bake with fresh-milled grains such as our YQ wheat. Expert home-baker Sue Hudson, who runs Bread Workshops in East Anglia, has begun offering courses where you can mill our grains with a Mockmill and then bake with them. As Sue explains, there's nothing quite like the flavour of a loaf made with fresh-milled flour.

If you are following a gluten-free diet it's not always easy to buy British ingredients with clear provenance. Hodmedod has now launched a range of gluten-free flours, all milled in Essex from pulses and quinoa grown on British farms.

Feasting on pulses is something the Hodmedod team are happy to do any day of the week but on January 6th we had two extra reasons to celebrate. As well as an almost belated Christmas lunch, January 6th marked the launch of the UN’s International Year of Pulses with hundreds of people across the world celebrating with a pulse feast.