Making Good Bread
The latest Lecker series explores industrialised grain testing. Here's how we made it.
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Earlier this year, Jo Barratt from Farmerama sent me an email asking if I’d be interested in making something for the podcast. I was so pleased to see his name in my inbox; Jo is someone I’ve known for a few years from our paths crossing at radio events, and Farmerama is one of my favourite podcasts, always producing consistently excellent, thought-provoking content but also at the same time succeeding in working in genuinely innovative ways with contributors and production teams alike.
The project in question was a commission to make an audio exploration of something called ‘Body Lab’, a project undertaken by baker Kimberley Bell and artist Ruth Levene and funded by Farming the Future. Body Lab is an effort to fully understand how industrialised grain testing affects the majority of the bread that is produced and eaten across the country every day, and to explore whether there is a potential alternative system. This testing is carried out by mills, and affects the grain that farmers choose to grow, how they grow it, and simultaneously impacts and is also directed by the bread that bakeries are choosing to bake, which in turn is led by consumption habits of the public. And that in itself is led by many factors, particularly now a globalised online media, both social and otherwise, ‘serves’ us pictures of food from all over the world on a daily basis. It’s complicated!
Kim runs a bakery called Small Food in Nottingham, and is also the founder of the UK Grain Lab, an annual gathering intending to advance an alternative grain economy in the UK. Small Food began as an experiment, as Kim puts it, and grew out of that; the bakery is very very deliberate in what it puts on the counter and the suppliers it works with. What they produce is guided by the ingredients they have committed to using. The flour they use in their breads and other goods on the counter (from biscuits, to egg custard tarts, to ‘Seely Road’, a local take on Rocky Road) is entirely directly traded, locally milled and partly locally grown. The rest of the grain bought in comes from farms like Gothelney in Somerset (more on them shortly) and Wakelyns Agroforestry in Suffolk and is predominantly produced from diverse population wheat (such as YQ, or more recently Mariagertoba (PDF), brought over as seed from Andreas Borgen in Denmark.) A large proportion of the fruit and vegetables the bakery uses in its bakes (and sells directly to customers too) is grown within a 15 mile radius and anything else is from specific growers that Kim has built a relationship with personally.
Ruth is an artist whose work unpacks large scale systems such as water, and a number of projects she’s founded or is involved in are related to wheat. Along with the artist Anne-Marie Culhane and a Lincolnshire-based farmer called Peter she undertook A Field of Wheat in 2015, which involved the growing of an entire field of commercial wheat and through the year-long process considering our relationship to grain and bread. Ruth is also a founder of Sheffield Wheat Experiment, an ongoing project exploring the idea of creating a Sheffield ‘landrace’ by empowering around 200 ‘micro-growers’ – people who live in the city – to grow a certain variety of wheat wherever they have space; fields, allotments, gardens, pots on balconies. During harvest, the wheat is gathered and milled collectively, and then baked with. I remember when I first read about Sheffield Wheat Experiment my initial gut reaction was, “you’re allowed to just grow wheat?!” which I thought was very interesting and very telling about the system in which we generally consume this crop.
Good Bread was produced over several months in early-mid 2023. Ruth, Kim, Jo and I first spoke while I was travelling around Europe for a few months and I did the video call in an Airbnb in Ostia Lido, just outside Rome. When I came back from my trip I travelled to Nottingham to meet Kim and Ruth in person. Kim made us all lunch, and I recorded with them in her living room for a couple of hours as they talked about what they’d done on the project so far and talked around some of their background motivations for Body Lab. After that, just three days after moving house which made for a slightly chaotic week, I joined Kim on a trip to Gothelney Farm in Somerset, where I recorded a Walk in the Wheats (which formed the backbone of episode 2) and interviewed Fred Price, who farms there, and Rosy Benson, who mills farm-grown grain and bakes onsite with it at Field Bakery. Via Zoom I also spoke to Chris Holister at Shipton Mill, who have been very generous with their time and resources throughout Body Lab.
I’d love it if you listened to the series in full! It’s available on both the Lecker and Farmerama feeds so if you’re subscribed to either it should be in your podcast app right now.
Here’s a little overview of the series.
Part 1: What is Good Bread?
The title of the series seems obvious. The metrics that the milling industry has in place are to ensure that the grain it processes is ‘good’. But what does ‘good’ – an incredibly and deliberately subjective descriptor that means many different things to many different people – actually mean?
As part of production, Jo set up a voice mailbox and we put a callout asking people to ring in and explain what makes good bread for them. You can hear a montage of some of these responses at the beginning of episode 1 and I’ve cut this audio out and pasted below so you can listen. I also asked everyone I spoke to for the series, including Kim and Ruth themselves. The results are vastly different and really emphasise the idea that everyone has a different understanding of what quality means when it comes to bread.
At the heart of this episode is understanding what is actually being measured when it comes to ‘good’ quality wheat. A story that came up in our very first conversation was the Body Lab trip to Shipton Mill, where Kim, Ruth, Rosy and Fred were taken on a tour of the mill and shown the equipment used to test grain on intake. They also took some diverse population wheats grown at Gothelney and which Rosy and Kim both frequently bake with, and at the end of their tour, these wheats were put through Shipton Mill’s testing equipment and the result was…unexpected.
I won’t spoil it for you here, but I kept coming back to this story as a central pillar of the Body Lab story because it seems to sum up so many of the tensions that Kim and Ruth had identified and articulated. I wanted to tell this story from all sides so we hear from all of the attendees as well as Chris from Shipton Mill, whose perceptive I was really grateful for in helping me to understand where the motivation for these processes come from.
Fred, Rosy, Kim and Chris all came together to explain some of the specific metrics that mills test for: things like specific weight, protein level, Hagburg falling number. All of these things were completely unknown to me and I found it fascinating that all of this work was going into making the bread that I eat without me even knowing about it.
One of the things that Chris said really stayed with me: that the demand for certain types of loaves is led by the consumer. They want to buy something, so bakeries produce that, and buy their flour accordingly. And in bakeries which are more industrialised and which might use the Chorleywood process, consistency in the flour is crucial to produce a specific product, because the machinery, unlike a skilled human baker, cannot adjust itself to allow for variation within the flour. Which leads us on to…
Part 2: The Price of Consistency
In episode 2 I really wanted to unpack this idea of consistency a bit more and the perfect opportunity to do so came when I joined Kim on a visit to Fred’s farm Gothelney, not far from Bridgwater in Somerset. The farm has been in Fred’s family for a few generations, although Fred only took it on around 2009. What’s particularly fascinating about Gothelney – and the people who make it – is the journey they’ve all been on together over the past few years, as the farm is transitioned into agroecology: “reimagining a new small farm future where farms feed people justly rather than via an extractive cumbersome & commodified food system.”
What this means is that Fred can speak from different perspectives as he previously was a spray contractor and grew commercial wheat on the farm, predominantly for animal feed. What this taught him, as he explains in the episode, is that not only is this approach to farming part of a system having a hugely negative impact on our soil and wider environment, but that it’s also extremely disempowering for farmers. A race to the bottom, as he describes it.
On the Walk in the Wheats that Fred had organised with Rosy, the pair led around 30 people across Gothelney’s farmland: past their pigs, through fields of oat, peas and barley that are cultivated as animal feed and into a series of fields filled with beautiful tall golden wheats. Along with bakers, growers, regular bakery customers, and people who had heard about the event and were simply curious enough to attend, I listened to Fred tell us how every sixth field of wheat you encounter anywhere in the country will probably be the same variety: currently KWS Extase. And the selection pressure this creates is large enough that this variety has to be changed every couple of years, meaning farmers of these varieties have little control over what they grow.
But there is an alternative: diversity. Fred now grows diverse population wheats. This year he’s grown and now harvested the Mariagertoba I mentioned earlier that Kim bakes with. Rosy mills this wheat herself as Field Bakery has its own New American Stone Mill which allows her to freshly mill for each week’s baking.
So what does this have to do with consistency? Well, everything. Working with different wheat varieties that haven’t gone through the same punishing tests aimed to weed out inconsistencies as a lot of commercially milled wheat has means that, sometimes, failure is inevitable. But Ruth and Kim’s argument is that there has to be space for this. If we want to genuinely reimagine the system of making bread, then we have to stop trying to reproduce what already exists. Bakers need time and space to play – and to fail – if they are going to be able to work in an adaptive way with different grains.
And what we might perceive as failure doesn’t have to be so. I was really moved hearing both Kim and Rosy talk about how their approach to baking means they have relationships with their customers that play out in a way we might not expect. Kim described how her customers respond if she has an off day in the bakery:
They come to the bakery to buy something, and they're not going to walk away without buying it. And if my bread's not very good on a given day, I'm standing in front of them, and they're going to buy it anyway.
Because they can see that I've done the work for them, and that just because I've had a bit of a crap day at work it doesn't necessarily mean that they're just going to leave empty handed. And they're very kind, because they know that we're trying to work with local grain. They know that we're trying to break new ground.
They appreciate it, and that's why they come to the bakery. So, when the bread is looking a bit flat, or it's a bit burnt, or we didn't have a good fermentation day, so it's a bit sour. The customers will offer kindnesses in response and, and instead of rejecting us, they'll say, oh, it all goes down the same way, or it still tastes just as good, or, you know, we'll just toast it anyway, and we'll see you next week and they're with you.
And that's the difference, that the bread is no longer a commodity and I'm no longer a commodity.
Part 3: A Common Language
How would you describe the taste of wheat? One of the ways in which Kim had envisaged building an alternative system to industrialised grain testing was to look at the language we use to quantify and qualify what we taste and try and find common ground. As part of this, Kim and Ruth organised a sensory workshop at Small Food with Alice Jones, a sensory scientist from Nottingham University, and asked participants to taste cold, unsalted pasta made from different wheats, and then describe the flavour. When you’re tasting bread, you’re not just tasting the wheat, Kim explained, so the best way to taste the actual flavour of the crop is like this, although it can be quite “challenging”.
The variety of words collected and organised over the course of the workshop was extraordinary. And beautiful. Here’s a small sample:
Hay, rain, smell when it rains, chalky, wet plaster.
Dry flour, sawdust, chaff.
Hard plastic, Lego, malty ale, leather.
Honey, like heather honey, buttery, oily smell, courgette.
Toasted rice, like when rice cooks onto the bottom of a pan, barley.
Or sunflower seed like, sesame seed, roasted sesame seed, pumpkin seed, chestnut, meaty.
Lactic, like milk or cream.
Ruth and Kim coined the phrase ‘intention and attention’ to refer to this type of exercise, articulating that this knowledge is within us already, we just have to mindfully focus on it and practise it. And if you compare these words to a graph, a series of numbers, the outputs from the kind of industrialised testing that goes on in mills, they’re much more relatable when it comes to really capturing the characteristics of wheat. Although the practise is unfamiliar, the words are familiar and give people a way in: permission to build a closer relationship with the grain they’re putting in their bodies. However, they did realise somewhere along the way with this process that there was a possibility that they were trying to somehow replicate an existing system, as Ruth explained.
And I remember at one point when we had all the bakers round the table, we started talking about the fact that essentially we were trying to calibrate all the different bakers understandings. And that we were, like, adapting these bakers to become a machine, that could speak to each other across the board, level the playing field so we could all produce, or understand what we were using to produce the stuff. So there's this constant, yeah, this obsession with... Trying to make everything the same so that we can reproduce and have consistency.
And that's where the Body Lab reveals where the industrial meets the human thing and how which one's taken over which and how there's some unpeeling to do with kind of freeing ourselves a little from our industrialised, mechanised mindset. Because we present ourselves as, you know, that we've got this artisan baking kind of movement, isn't associated with those industrial metrics, but at the very heart of it, it still is.
Body Lab is ongoing. Kim and Ruth continue to work together and I’m excited to hear more about the project in the future. But in capturing this small snapshot of what they’ve done so far, I ended up questioning my own relationship to wheat. Where I can, I try to buy locally grown veg and when I buy meat and fish I want to know that it’s come from an environment that isn’t destructive to the land (and the sea). But it’s almost impossible as far as I can tell for me to easily buy locally farmed and milled flour. [Note: after writing this I felt that I should try harder and have actually just ordered some flour from Mike Pinard’s Heritage Wheat, which is farmed and milled not too far from where I now live in Sussex.] It’s almost like we don’t, on a broad level, consider it to be a food, with its own distinct flavour and character. It’s just a sort of neutral building block that sits in paper bags on our shelves for months at a time. I remember the first time I heard flour described as a fresh ingredient (by Kim, actually, in Cereal, the fantastic in depth series that Katie Revell made about bread for Farmerama a few years ago.)
I’ve tried to give you a sense here of what the series is about and provide an insight into some of the decisions that went into making it but I’d really recommend listening to it yourself! It was a privilege to spend time with the people who feature in it, and listen to them talk about changing the world, essentially. Ruth commented that the way the podcast ended, after a round of edits, felt like a call to action. I hadn’t actually intended it as one, but making the series had left an impression on me and I felt changed by the knowledge I’d encountered along the way, so it makes sense that I would want others to feel the same.
In making this series, I wanted to reflect how this has been a learning experience for me. And I know many people listening will understand and know this industrialised testing system well. But there will also be many others who, like me, had no idea of how... this huge scale opaque system worked. And I love that what's emerged from the work that Kim and Ruth have been doing is the idea of giving bakers permission to play and create and mess around with grain.
To end on Ruth’s words: “Rather than chasing forward to fix the problem, we realised the Body Lab became more about slowing down. Starting where we are at, and not being in pursuit, so we could go on our own journeys of unschooling and discovering.”
Kim and Ruth continue to work on the Body Lab project, and are currently exploring different routes to making hidden industrialised metrics visible, to trusting their own instincts. And creating opportunities to make the magical, emotional, poetic, spiritual, enchanting, and aesthetic more part of our everyday – and our daily bread.
Good Bread credits:
Hosted and produced by Lucy Dearlove.
The Body Lab is a project by Kimberley Bell and Ruth Levene, funded by Farming the Future.
Thank you so much to Fred Price and everyone at Gothelney Farm, including of course Rosy Benson at Field Bakery. Thank you to Chris Hollister and Shipton Mill for their generosity in being part of BodyLab.
Thank you to everyone at Farmerama who has helped with this series in various ways. Jo Barrett, who was a fantastic exec on this. Abby Rose, Dora Taylor, Olivia Oldham, Annie Landless, Eliza Jenkins and Lucy Fisher.
The music is by Owen Barrett. The fantastic artwork for the series was by Hannah Grace.
And one more reminder that if you haven't already listened to Cereal, the Farmerama series about bread, incredibly in depth series made by Katie Revell a few years back, I really urge you to.
This sounds brilliant, Lucy! I can't wait to listen to the series this weekend.