Incredibly, pretty much all the 2022 crops have been harvested by mid August. In the south of England chia, quinoa and trial-plot beans remain in the field, while in the north and in Scotland there are still cereals and fava beans to come - but they’re not far off and it’s all quite extraordinary. Though we suspect it may become increasingly ordinary over coming years.
Diverse systems are more productive and they’re almost always more resilient because complex systems have ‘redundancy’ - something might fail but there’s something else to fill the gap.
Even with spiralling energy prices, cooking pulses from dried can save you money. We cooked dried whole yellow peas in a pressure cooker to make a delicious hummus style dip, measuring the peas before and after cooking, and calculating the energy used to cook them.
Miller's Choice, a wheat population, was created over twelve years by Andrew Forbes of Brokewell Bake, using 19th century (and older) tall wheat varieties as a starting point. Its heritage means it's particularly well suited to low input farming systems and our Miller's Choice was grown organically by John and Alice Pawsey in Suffolk.
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.
Hodmedod's miller (and engineer) Keith Malcolm takes a closer look at stoneground wholemeal flour to understand its properties and how they change with time.
Which variety of pulse is widely grown and eaten as a frozen immature legume but little-known in its mature dried form? It's packed with gut-friendly resistant starch, is delicious and versatile but frequently goes to waste. And it played a central role in the discovery of the science of heredity and genetics.
As COP26 closed without the strong and binding commitments we urgently need, we have to maintain pressure on our leaders and to drive change through our actions as individuals and members of communities and organisations. This is what we’ve aimed to do through Hodmedod.
We're deepening our local roots and bringing together farmers, cooks, chefs, bakers and others to celebrate and imagine the future food and farming systems of the Waveney Valley on the Norfolk-Suffolk border.
This August has seen amazing work in the face of adversity at Green Acres Farm in Shropshire, bringing in an incredibly precious crop of organic carlin peas.
Fava beans are very close to our hearts at Hodmedod, which we founded in 2012 with the simple aim of getting British-grown fava beans back into British kitchens. Still we're frequently asked, "What are fava beans?", "Aren't they just broad beans?"
