Bread Matters

Colin bakes all the bread at The Lint Mill for us and for our guests. Thankfully, it’s a long time since we suffered the pappy, white blandness of shop bought loaves crammed with industrial enzymes and ‘improvers’.

About this time last year, I wrote a blog about Colin’s bread making; Home Baked Bread.

Colin has never used a bread making machine. He does make good use of our KitchenAid food mixer with its dough hook but he always finishes the kneading by hand. Our Rayburn offers a place of gentle warmth to prove the bread slowly. We use only organic flours and yeast. Colin’s everyday bread is a light and crusty organic white tin loaf but he also makes soda breads and enriched dough mixtures for brioche.

Keen to move from home enthusiast to artisan baker, I knew it was time to gift Colin a ‘Bread Matters’ course for his birthday. Now, I admit to a certain self interest here, but justified it by saying how good it would be for our B&B guests!

The course is led by Andrew Whitley who started one of the UK’s best known organic bakeries in the 1970s. After many years as a full-time artisan baker, he knows what he’s talking about. We’re very lucky to live just half an hour from the venue which is a converted farm steading on a five-acre organic smallholding in Macbiehill, and Colin is looking forward to developing a greater understanding of the processes at the heart of breadmaking.

I can’t deny that I’m looking forward to him coming home with several loaves of various kinds from his weekend course.

I’ll post again to let you all know how it goes. Meanwhile, take a look at the excellent Bread Matters website.

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