There was a bit of a scare this week, when on Wednesday afternoon I heard the terrible news that Birmingham City Council’s Highways department had decided not to renew Kings Norton Farmers Market with their road closure license, and therefore the market was faced with either finding a new venue or closing altogether. A flurry of tweets, blogs, letters and emails were written to local councillors and MP’s, and on Wednesday evening came the brilliant news that there had been a ‘communication error’ in the Highways department, and the market would get it’s license renewed after all. Phew, nothing to panic about after all then, but the debacle certainly did show how passionately people feel about their market, and how desperate we are to keep it. It’s my most local farmers market, so I try to get down there when I can and support some of the great local producers that do the market – the likes of Lightwoods Cheese, Harvest of Arden preserves, and Augernik Fruit Farm.
It’s market day tomorrow Saturday 9th January, so it’s a great chance to battle through the ice and snow and show your support to the market! According to Duncan’s farmers market blog there’s a slightly reduced line up tomorrow, but there’s still plenty to choos from, and hot food on offer to warm the cockles. See you there tomorrow!
If you’re thinking about subscribing to Loaf Community Bakery’s ‘bread club’, where you get a weekly loaf of bread in return for a monthly subscription of £11, then this Friday, 8th January, you have the opportunity to buy a sample loaf before the scheme gets in full flow on the 22nd of January. These loaves must be pre-ordered by 11am Thursday morning, and will be ready for collection from Cotteridge between 4 and 7.30pm on Friday. The two loaves available to order are:
Revolution Rye (pictured above) – A 100% rye sourdough bread. This loaf is baked with a 2-year old rye sourdough starter, and UK-grown organic light rye flour, topped with pumpkin and sunflower seeds. It has an amazing depth of flavour and surprising moisture. Like a good cheese or wine it gets better with age, and is at it’s best 2 or 3 days after baking. It will be in good condition for 5-7 days. Approx 800g, £2.75.
Cotteridge Sourdough – Flour, water, salt, wild yeasts. Nothing else. A loaf born and raised in Cotteridge using a 4-year old wheat sourdough starter, and UK-grown organic white flour. This is a great everyday bread that has a subtle sourness, light airy crumb, and a hint of smokiness from the wood-fired oven it is baked in. It keeps well for 5 days, and freezes well too. Approx 800g, £2.75.
If you’d like to preorder one (or two) of these loaves for collection on Friday between 4 and 7.30, please email tom using bread@loafonline.co.uk before 11am on Thursday 7th January, and I will send you the address details.
At my recent festive breads course, I had a load of lemons leftover from grating off the zest for the ‘flowerpot panettone’. I asked around for ideas of how to use them, and one clever student piped up with the idea of lemon curd. Seeing as i needed some last minute christmas prezzies for family etc, it was the perfect solution. My hens provided the eggs so all I had to buy was butter and sugar – therefore very cheap presents! I know it’s too late for you to make presents, but it’s still worth giving this a shot, especially if you’ve never done any preserving before, as it’s a pretty easy method. The recpe was inspired by Pam Corbin’s River Cottage handbook on preserving, which is well worth investing in. This recipes makes 3-4 1lb jam jars.
Ingredients:
Juice of 4-5 lemons (about 275ml)
Finely grated zest of 2 lemons
450g granulated sugar
125g unsalted butter
5 large beaten eggs
Method:
Add the lemon juice, zest, butter, and sugar to a stainless steel or glass bowl over a pan of boiling water. Heat slowly, stirring until the butter melts, then immediately add the eggs through a sieve (if you have a jam thermometer make sure the mixture is no hotter than 60C when you do this). Stir over a gentle heat for 10 minutes until the mixture is thick and glossy (at about 83C), and coats the back of a wooden spoon. Don’t let it get hot enough to boil. Pour this into warm, sterilized jam jars, and seal immediately. It will set as it cools. Tie a ribbon round it – Voila!
Well, I had the honour today of making the winners list for the inaugural MAD’s (McComb Awards for Dining) brummie food awards in the Birmingham Post. Amazingly, I shared a page with such brummie foodie greats as Glynn Purnell, Luke Tipping, and Richard Turner. Not only that, but I seemingly had a whole category named after me, winning the ‘best outdoor-cooked eggs and muffin’ category. You can see the whole article by clicking here or see below for the full text of the mention:
Tom Baker, Cotteridge
Food evangelist, founder member of Birmingham-based LOAF social enterprise and self-taught cook, Tom Baker combines a democratic, culinary zeal with down-to-earth rustic cooking. Yes, like his surname, he is a baker – and an outstanding one at that. One of my food highlights was sharing freshly cooked muffins with the man, topped with fried eggs, all cooked in his adobe-style wood-fired earth oven. Dining alfresco in Cotteridge has never been so good.
Well that just about tops off a fantastic 2009 for me and I hope I can retain the tile in 2010! Tom.
Loaf Community Bakery is our new bakery in Cotteridge, South Birmingham, specialising in sourdough and other artisan breads. Bread is baked at the home of Loaf director Tom Baker, in both a conventional and traditional wood-fired earth oven. The bakery sells bread through a “˜community supported bakery’ scheme, as well as selling some wholesale to specialist local delis. Bread is made with organic flour, grown and milled in the UK.
Thanks to everyone who responded to the two polls about the bakery – they’ve helped inform what day we’re going to bake, and the price. I’ve set the price by taking the mean of all the options voted for, and multiplying it by 4 for a months worth of bread.
Loaves are going to be baked on a Friday, and need to be collected that evening. Collection is from Cotteridge currently, although an alternative Saturday collection point will be arranged depending on the location of subscribers. A large white sourdough (Cotteridge Sourdough) and a large 100% rye sourdough (Revolution Rye) are available initially. Both breads keep well for 5 days and are suitable for freezing. Other specialities such as brioche and ciabatta will be available occasionally on a first-come first-served basis.
Invest in Loaf Community Bakery and subscribe now for just £11 a month!
We’ll be supplying a weekly loaf to subscribers from mid-January onwards, so get in touch soon if you want to subscribe as we can only take a limited number – email tom@loafonline.co.uk to register your interest.
Next Saturday 19th Dec, Loaf will have it’s first stand at a fair – and it’s the Birmingham Friends of the Earth Christmas Fair at Moseley CDT/Moseley Exchange, from 10-4pm. Fortunately it’s the same day as the farmers market across the road, so do pop down to both and come and say hi! On offer will be fresh sourdough bread (including revolution rye and cotteridge sourdough), fresh homemade stollen and ‘flowerpot’ pannetone, and the chance to buy Loaf gift vouchers for your loved ones, and sign up to subscribe to Loaf community bakery. If you’ve read this and come along, please come and introduce yourself too. Tom.
Just a quick note to tell you about two ways you can purchase Loaf gift vouchers for your loved one’s this Christmas! Firstly, Loaf director Tom Baker (that’s me!) is a registered bread making teacher on the excellent School of Everything website, and is one of only a handful of teachers chosen to take part in their Christmas gift scheme. You can purchase a day on one of Loaf’s ‘Bread: back to basics’ by visiting the gift’s section. It’s also worth hunting around for other interesting teachers on their too – you could buy a knitting lesson, photography tuition, or even a twitter masterclass!
Secondly, you can now purchase Loaf Cookery School gift vouchers direct from us. They are sold in multiples of £10, or if you want to buy a place on a specific course, a personalised voucher can be created especially for you’re loved one. Find out more on the new gift voucher page by clicking here.
Two inner city areas are to be transformed on Saturday 5th December when Erdington Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad creates two unusual urban orchards. The orchards are unusual because winners of an Urban Orchard Competition have individually named each tree. Eleanor invited local people to enter the competition to dedicate a fruit tree to someone important to them. Nearly 100 people entered and these were narrowed down to 10 winning entries which range from the personal: Molly Wrights entry ‘my grandmother Violet Wright: I would like a part of her to be with me here in Erdington even though she is in Jamaica’ to the inspirational: Donna Gray’s entry ‘Charles Darwin: for the discovery of Evolution’.
The orchards will include cherry, apple and pear trees. The first trees will be planted at Kingstanding Leisure Centre between 11am and 12pm on Saturday 5th December as part of the BBC’s Breathing Places, Tree O’clock attempt to break the world record for the most trees planted in one hour. Five more trees will then be planted in containers in the Central Square in Erdington from 1pm. The fruit trees will each have a plaque installed with the winning names. Some of the ten winners will be helping to plant their trees and all will receive a certificate.
The Urban Orchard is part of the ‘Prepare’ project run by Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad and her volunteers. Eleanor has set up the scheme to make use of fruit growing in the city that would otherwise go to waste. Traveling by bike, spotting fruit trees overhanging walls and fences Eleanor has harvested hundreds of apples, pears and damsons from the Erdington and Kingstanding area. The second stage of the project is to plant more fruit trees and celebrate them.
Eleanor Hoad Artist in Residence said “The competition entries were so moving, they really showed how much value people place on trees as a way of remembering a loved one; through a tree a persons memory can live on. Planting fruit trees in the city is just one way we can rethink how unused patches of land can be utilised and used to produce food. Even the smallest patch can become an abundant source of fresh organic fruit and vegetables with a little thought”
The new year brings big news for loaf – we are launching Birmingham’s first community supported bakery. What the heck is a community supported bakery I hear you ask? The idea is simple, and it’s borrowed from the American community supported agriculture (CSA) model. Each month you ‘subscribe’ to a farm (or in this case, a bakery), giving a set amount of money upfront. Because of your monthly investment and commitment to the farm (bakery), the farmer (baker) has a guaranteed income and so can invest in equipment, tools, supplies, labour etc, in order to repay your investment with an agreed amount of produce every week. The farmer (baker) gets some security and a leg-up in surviving against the industrial food system, and you get wholesome produce, produced responsibly and sustainably, at a fair price.
Loaf Community Bakery will be launching in January 2010, and will provide bread to a limited number of monthly subscribers. Some of our bread may also be available at a local retail outlet for those who don’t want to commit to subscribing. However for the immediate future this will be a very limited scheme, we’ll take up to about 20 subscribers who’ll need to be able to collect their weekly loaf from Cotteridge, South Birmingham, although we will look at an additional pick-up point depending on demand. The bread will be mainly, but not exclusively sourdough, and mainly made with UK-grown organic wheat and rye flour. There’ll definitely be a white sourdough loaf and a 100% rye (which is almost impossible to find these days, especially fresh). Over the next few weeks, we’ll be asking you on here and on twitter how Loaf Community Bakery can best serve you – what day, time, price, variety etc. In the meantime if you have any thoughts or questions please leave them in the comments section below, or send an email to tom@loafonline.co.uk.
If you’ve read this far, why not answer this poll:
Well last week saw Loaf’s first week of doing business. We started on Thursday evening with a ‘Handmade Pasta’ workshop. Five people came along (six is our maximum class size), and by the end of the evening had successfully mastered kneading, rolling, and shaping fresh egg pasta, and made three classy sauces to accompany their handiwork. Alongside a nice Chianti, we enjoyed seasonal vegetable tortellini with a butter and blue cheese sauce, paperdelle puttanesca, and taglietelli carbonara. Oh and we made some orechiette with the scraps and a quick gnocchi demo. Phew, it was a lot of fun and the talented students picked up the techniques extremely quickly, without even using a pasta machine!
Saturday saw the first full day ‘Bread:back to basics’ course, and it was a sell out. We had a fabulous day, and produced some great breads.
Despite the weather we were dashing in and out to the earth oven to bake our white and multigrain loaves, in which we had earlier made our own pizza’s for lunch and fougasse to show off! We covered a couple of different kneading techniques and made some stunning ciabatta’s too. We covered the principles of sourdough baking, and I’ll be seeing some of the students next year when I do a Friday eve/Saturday morning ‘simply sourdough’ course – should be great fun! We finished off making brioche dough, and each student left with a bit of dough to refrigerate overnight, and bake at home. Check out this review of the day on the No Love Sincerer blog, and see our upcoming courses here.
All in all a great first week, knackering stuff though!
Just a quick post to highlight the latest exciting addition to our local food directory – Barrow Boy. Barrow Boy are a great new service operating in the Moseley and Kings Heath area, that deliver fresh fruit and vegetables directly to your door. The friendly face of Barrow Boy is Pauline Findlay, who collects class 1 produce daily from Birmingham wholesale market, much of which is grown locally (especially the veg), and drops it off (in her Morris Minor) to you at your convenience. She even gives 15 minute time slots so you don’t have to stay in! There is a huge amount of choice, and the quality and prices are reportedly amazing. You can find out more on the Barrow Boy website or by calling 0121 777 0344. Please mention Loaf when you get in touch.
Loaf has recently got through to the second stage of an application to the National Lottery Local Food Grants scheme, for our application to fund a local food campaign in Birmingham. This is great news, but we haven’t got the cash yet, there’s a lot of work to do before that happens.
My hope is that the little funding that we’ve applied for will kickstart a social movement around local food in Birmingham. I’m convinced there is people out there who care about food, and want to do something about it. If that’s you then I’d love you to be more involved – I want to get together a campaign group who will bring drive, enthusiasm, and action to help kickstart this campaign. If you want to get involved please send me an email to tom@loafonline.co.uk. I envisage meeting up once every month or two to share ideas, plan stuff, and of course, eat and drink local refreshments! When there’s a few people involved I will set a meeting date for end of November / beginning of December. If you don’t want to come to a meeting but want to support the campaign in another way, get in touch too!
We’ve been featured in the local papers again, this time in the Birmingham Mail. We were on the front page of the Mail’s Food and Drink section on Thursday 29th October, with another half-page inside that section. It’s all good stuff, and the earth oven features a bit more prominently in the print version, and there’s a bigger photo on the online version too – you can read all about it here.
In less than a weeks time I make my speaking debut representing Loaf, where I have the pleasure of ranting about my favourite subject, food, at Birmingham’s inaugural ‘Green Drinks‘ event. I am titling my talk ‘bread and the environment: towards a greener loaf’. The event takes place at Locanta Resaurant in the Jewellery Quarter, from 6.30pm on Tuesday 3rd November. Full details at the bottom of the post.
I have a strict 10 minute time limit to introduce the topic, and my job is to spark off some lively debate. I’ll be talking about the problems with manufactured bread from the big bakeries to set the scene, and be profiling some alternative ways in which we can get our daily loaf, hopefully slightly ‘greener’. I’ll be talking about Sustain’s Real Bread Campaign too, which you can sign up to here if you haven’t already.
Green Drinks is a loose international network encouraging people who live in a certain locality, and who work or are interested in environmental issues, to meet up once a month to debate, network, drink, eat, and socialise. There are over 600 green drinks groups across the world. Find out more at www.greendrinks.org. Birmingham’s Green Drinks is being organised by Malcolm Currie of Globally Local. Here are the details:
Date: Tuesday 3rd November. Time: 6.30 for 7pm
Venue: Locanta Restaurant, 31 Ludgate Hill, St Pauls Square, Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham B3 1EH
Other stuff: You can eat in the restaurant whilst we talk, or just come for a drink. Ekran, our host, will be putting on some tasty fare, and I’ll be bringing a couple of loaves of sourdough for you to try if you never have before. It’d be helpful for Malcolm to know numbers beforehand, so if you’re thinking of coming along, drop him an email at dmc@globallylocal.net.
I had a great time at my first 24 Carrots Farmers Market in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter on Saturday, it’s only been going since July, but it’s already a decent size and was still fairly busy when I arrived at 2pm. I quite like a market when it’s starting to calm down after the midday buzz, it gives you plenty of time to chat to the producers themselves, and often literally ‘shake the hand that feeds you’. I had a good hour at the market chatting to Kiss Me Cupcakes, Holly and the Ivy, the Big Pan Man, Brynmawr Farm and the 24 Carrots organisers too. I also had a brief chat to Hopesay Glebe organic farm, near Craven Arms in Shropshire (sadly just outside our 40 mile ‘local to Birmingham’ radius). The farmer (sorry didn’t catch his name) sold me a beautiful onion squash, otherwise known as uchiki kiri squash, with a glint in his eye. He described to me it’s soft edible skin, sweet flavour (not dissimilar to sweet potato apparently), and chestnutty earthiness, with the pride of a man that remembers the very day he planted it’s seed in the earth. On his recommendation, I decided to try my best to bring out the sweetness and nutty qualities by roasting it with some complementary flavours. After a muddle around in the store cupboard and garden, I lumped for some dried rosemary (from our sadly departed rosemary bush), last-of-the-season fresh chilli, garlic, some pine nuts and finally pumpkin seeds (to remind me from whence this beauty came). Here’s what I did (serves six as a side dish/accompaniment):
Ingredients:
Extra virgin olive oil
1 large uchiki kiri (onion) squash, skin on, seeds removed, cut into 1-inch thick half-moons (requires a sharp knife and a strong arm)
2 small red chillies – finely chopped, seeds and all
3 cloves garlic – finely chopped
Tablespoon of dried rosemary
Tablespoon of pine nuts
Tablespoon of pumpkin seeds
Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Preheat your oven to gas mark 9 (240C). Drizzle a decent layer of olive oil all over a large flat baking tray. Lay out your squash segments on this, avoiding piling them up on each other too much, and drizzle a bit more oil on top of them – don’t be stingy, this squash absorbs a fair bit of oil, and can dry out if you don’t give it enough to drink. Dash all your other ingredients liberally across the tray, and rub them in a little to the squash segments. Place the tray in the hot oven for for 45-55 minutes until tender to the knife-prick and starting to caramelise round the edges. I served it with a simple herby wholemeal cous-cous accompaniment, which worked well as a simple supper. I also used the leftovers to make a risotto that was utterly oozy and irresistable, with a beautiful saffron colour.
