This Saturday 16th April I’ll be speaking at “From Crop to Crust” conference, aiming to encourage more bakers to use the flour milled at their local windmills and watermills around Britain. Organised by The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, in association with the Traditional Cornmillers Guild and Sustain’s Real Bread Campaign, we’re hoping to tackle the issues that have made the connection between baker and miller problematic in the past: getting the flour that the baker wants to bake with and the miller is happy to mill, deliveries from short-staffed mills to busy small bakeries, getting customers to pay more for loaves that are made with hand-milled flours that struggle to compete in price with cheap flour from the supermarket.
There’s also the issue of working with authentic stone-milled flour, that has a coarser texture that the more typical roller milled type. There are ways I’ll discuss that will help you get a dough that’s easier to shape with a good crumb structure from real stone-milled flour, and ways to combine it with roller milled flour so that you still capture the strong flavour and colour of the artisan milled type.
Simply, anyone who wants call themselves as an artisan baker can’t honestly do so without using at least some flour from a traditional cornmiller…otherwise you’re just hiding behind factory ingredients hoping no-one will notice. It’s time to come out and support the traditional mills that will help you make the best bread.
Saturday 16th April 2011,
The NFU Mutual’s HQ,
Tiddington Road,
Stratford-Upon-Avon,
Warwickshire CV37 7BJ
Tickets: £50, in aid of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
I’ll be speaking at 12:00 midday, in a session called “The Baker’s Tale”
Download a pdf booking form here
or go to www.spab.org.uk for more information
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