Author: andy

Apologies for the delay in bringing the second part of this article to you but there was the small matter of a wedding and honeymoon to deal with. Now we are back in Llanidloes with our heads buzzing with ideas and lots of potentially exciting things happening. Anyway back to the post!

You may remember from part one we had taken a break for a fabulous home-laid egg and home-made ciabatta lunch. We didn’t stop for long though as burnt bread doesn’t taste good or sell very well either. So we took the final load of rye bread out of the oven and then took some time to reduce the washing-up mountain that had formed.

It was now time to bake using the outside oven. Although specifically designed for making pizzas in, it can also handle a few loaves although any remaining fire needs to be completely scraped out beforehand. It’s also crazily hot, so a good idea to quickly bake some roll or batches first to make use of that heat.

From proving basket to oven you have to be really quick. With a flick of the wrist, Tom turned the banneton over to expose the jelly-like dough to the peel; and with a quick slash of the knife the dough was thrust into the oven.

We put three loaves in and kept an eye on them however they still cooked a little too quickly; it’s really hard to monitor the internal temperature of the oven so it take a bit of guesswork to find out when they are done. However we ended up with some very good looking loaves and presumably some very happy customers who collected them later the same day.

And that was the marathon baking session over. I headed back to Llanidloes on the train with my head full of ideas about how this could be replicated across the border in Wales.

I’m at a slight disadvantage in that our kitchen is a lot smaller than Tom’s but I’m sure there is a way around it all. My kitchen has just been passed by environmental health so I can now start making bread. I already have a few potential customers and the locally run community shop in Llani will take loaves off me. Watch this space for more info in the next few weeks (with no wedding to distract me either!)

Time will tell if the community bakery idea takes off but there is a growing national movement as shown by the Realbread campaign. Demand “Real bread” at every place you shop and let’s make this thing a success. No longer should the British public have to put up with tasteless, expensive supermarket bread. And as Andrew Whitley says “Le pain se lève”.

Finally, thanks to Tom at Loaf for giving me such a great insight into the life of a community supported baker! It certainly gave me lots of ideas. Loaf also run a cookery school with great bread, pasta and wild food courses. Check them out if you are in the Birmingham area.

We are delighted to announce that our article “A WWOOFer’s diary” has been published in the latest edition of the Idler #43 which is jam-packed with a range of articles focussed around the theme “Back to the Land”.

In the article we talk about our experiences with WWOOFing (Working on organic farms) over the last couple of years which culminated in us moving to Llanidloes where we now live in a housing co-operative.

The book is available from all good bookshops or the Idler bookshop and more information can be found on the Idler website.

Today is the launch of the Llanidloes Seed Exchange. We want people to swap their extra seeds and stop giving the seed companies so much money! Take a look at our Seed Exchange page for more information. Or just pop into the Resource Centre in Llanidloes and get swapping!

A couple of weeks ago I (Andy) took the train over to Bourneville in South Birmingham to visit the social enterprise LOAF. As well as running cookery courses, running a local food directory and blogging about real food in Birmingham, they also run a community-supported bakery.

Every Friday LOAF director Tom bakes loaves in his kitchen for 15 subscribers. These folk invest a certain amount each month and get a loaf baked for them which they collect in the afternoon. This benefits the small baker as they get a guaranteed income to buy the ingredients for the month and the investor gets a fabulous loaf each week. Tom bakes sourdough with a choice between a white or a rye loaf as well the appearance of an occasional guest bread .

I arrived on the Thursday afternoon for the start of my mini baking apprenticeship. I have been baking bread myself for the last year or so (before that it was with the aid of a bread machine) and feel like I have made progress from the first heavy loaves that came out of the oven as I have become more proficient with the bread making process. There is a real art to each stage; from choosing the best flour, measuring quantities, kneading, proving and baking. Things can go wrong (and have done) at every stage of the process and I’m only making a couple of loaves. Mistakes only make you stronger though and you don’t make the same mistake in a hurry.

So coming to LOAF would give me a chance to see a slightly larger operation at work, being run from home with conventional kitchen equipment, with a view to possibly replicated the scheme in Llanidloes.

The evening was spent talking about bread (I think myself and Tom will readily admit to our bread-geekery), looking through bread books and chatting about the state of bread in the UK (generally bad but with a smattering of incredible stuff happening) and how it could be improved (first steps are taking a look at what the Real Bread Campaign is up to).

We also took a look at the wood-fired oven he has built in his back garden whilst Tom chopped a bit of wood in preparation for Friday morning. Finally we made a list for the plan of events the next morning. It seemed like military precision was going to be needed to bake 40 loaves.

Tom keeps his rye and wheat sourdoughs in the fridge all week and takes them out on a Wednesday to allow them to get to room temperature and allow them to bulk them up in time for making the dough on late Thursday. Having calculated how many of each type of bread he is going to bake, he works out how much starter he is going to need using a spreadsheet with all the baker’s percentages programmed in. A nice way of keeping track of everything. So late on we were able to bulk up the last of the rye sourdough ready for the next day and also just before we went to bed, we mixed the wheat dough, kneaded it and placed it into large boxes to prove overnight.

I’m not used to being up that late or having to get up at 5.30am either. So by midnight I was asleep, dreaming of light fluffy ciabattas and fields of wheat blowing gently in the breeze.

Before I knew it the alarm went off and it was time to get up to bake lots of bread! It was a dark drizzly morning outside but we got the fire going, had a cuppa, folded the sourdough into thirds, made a ciabatta dough (for lunch) and mixed the borodinksy rye mix up. All before 6.30am…

Over the next couple of hours we gave the Ciabatta dough a couple of folds in thirds to stretch out the gluten and make it more airy before moving onto the rye mix. I’ve made a couple of ryes before but here we were making it in batches of 4kg! The spreadsheet was used to get the correct consistency. As Rye is a wet dough there isn’t any kneading involved but this means it is a tricky thing to handle. You have to get everything wet and shape it into a loaf. Bit like handling a wet fish I expect.

By 9am we had done 3 batches of rye and shaped the Ciabatta. When you are doing this much bread in a small space you really need to be organised, there is a lot going on at once. The check-list was very very important. And it worked really well. We even had time to have a few cups of tea and some bread and butter (of course!)

The oven was warmed (with a big chunk of marble inside to keep the radiant temperature warm) and we started loading it with rye loaves, 6 at a time, not something my oven at home could handle. Whilst doing this we were busy shaping the wheat sourdoughs and placing them into bannetons. Doing each 4kg batch with 30 minute breads meant that we could stagger the proving and put them into the ovens at this time difference later on. The ciabatta also came out the oven looking lovely and light.

The smell of all this freshly baked bread was too much by 11.30am, hunger had struck hard. So we had an early lunch with the still slightly warm Ciabattas and fried eggs from Tom’s chickens outside. Simply devine.

I’ll write more in part 2 about the afternoon bake in the outside oven and more about how community bakeries work later in the week.

It’s the 1st of February and slowly but surely the days are becoming a little longer; the light peeps timidly through the curtains when we wake and spring feels almost within reach. Almost but not quite. The ground is still hard and thoughts of home grown vegetables and warm summer evenings are still but a mere thought in the back of our mind.

The loop project team have been hard at work during our winter hibernation. We may be sleeping a lot and using the long nights to restore our mental and spiritual energy but we have had the fire stoked day and night, the seed catalogues have been read and re-read and preparations are being made for an allotment onslaught once the frosty fingers of winter are pulled away.

We have also been busy in the kitchen making breads. The oven has been full of Apple Cider Vinegar muffins, maize baguettes, white milk loaves, borodinksy rye and scottish morning rolls. Soups with seasonal vegetables from the organic shop in Llanidloes such as Borscht and other warming soups have kept us going during the harsh winter of 2009/2010.

Fermenting is the most exciting thing that is happening food-wise in Loop HQ. We have been busy reading a great book by Sandor Ellis Katz called Wild Fermentation. In it he has detailed fermentation processes from across the world, bringing back processes and techniques that have long been forgotten in some cultures. We started out with a simple sour beet recipe and have also made yoghurt, kefir, kombucha and there are dozens of other things we can’t wait to do. It seems like culture and society were built on fermented foods. Without them humans couldn’t store and process food – nowadays we just stick food and drink into the fridge or freeze. However I really think knowing a little about fermentation could benefit us all. Just think about what is fermented in your normal daily diet…

Plans are also being made for the Summer months. We have bought tickets for our first festival, The Dark Mountain Festival up in North Wales. Then there are plans to help at Sunrise Celebration at the end of May.

We are also starting to realise just how much goes on around Llanidloes. The Loop Project have found a very good place to call home.

After many months of planning, thinking (maybe almost too much thinking!), designing, writing and general web site designing, we are pleased to announce the launch of theloopproject.co.uk.

This is one of the ways in which we are starting to transition our lives for a low-carbon (or no carbon…) future. Before we were both working 35 hour weeks, spending most of our waking week working for the man (or woman). The little time we did have to ourselves in the evenings was just not long enough! Then during the weekends and holidays we spent the money we had earnt on stuff we probably didn’t really need (well some of it was useful I suppose!).

We realised a while ago that we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives living this way and slowly we decided to go it alone. The first step was quitting, and perhaps that was the most difficult bit. Once we were out everything seemed different, exciting and liberating. The world still turned and we didn’t end up living on the streets. The last year has been incredibly enlightening and we’ve started to learn new skills which we hope will see us good for the rest of our lives. We’ve also learnt it’s pretty easy to live without 2 salaries especially when you live out of a rucksack. But perhaps it’s just the mental changes that we have made which have simplified things. Strip away the thin capitalist veneer of 21st century living and there is a lot of good simple living to be had on this planet we call home. And luckily for us life is amazingly great fun.

However we realise we still need to earn some hard currency as you can’t barter for much these days. This website is a way for us to use our computer based skills (web and graphic design amongst others) while we learn to do things which don’t require the use of a PC (or a Mac shouts Leanne…)

So take a look around, read about what we’ve been up to and perhaps look at some of the book and web recommendations we’ve carefully selected for you.

And if you do happen to have any work that we might be interested in, get in touch and we’ll get things moving.

TLP