So I created a sourdough starter or a sourdough culture about five years ago.
Essentially, all I did was mix some flour and some water, mixed it into a paste and
left it on the side in my kitchen for five days and every time somebody learns how to
make sourdough bread for me, I give them a little bit of that starter and that goes to
North Birmingham, to London, to Cumbria, to Norfolk and then they pass it to their friends.
It's incredible. One loaf can feed humanity.
My name's Tom Baker. I run a loaf which is a social enterprise business in South Birmingham.
So yeah, my sourdough is basically a goo which sits in my fridge. It's five years old.
Every week I get it out. I get it out on a Wednesday night. I feed it with flour and
with water and I leave it out for, you know, eight hours. I then feed it again and then
I feed it again. Even though I only keep a yogurt pot full, just 200 grams, by Thursday
night I've got three kilograms of this stuff and I can start making some serious dough
with this goo. I've been baking bread for about ten years now. I started really when
I was a teenager baking bread. My first few loaves were pretty disastrous but my family
fortunately were very tolerant of my new hobby. It was really about five years ago that I
had, I describe it as a road to Damascus moment. It was a chilly day in Oxfordshire. I was
studying for my master's course. I had a friend that was a top chef at a restaurant in Oxfordshire.
He brought me this half loaf of bread in a paper bag from the restaurant kitchen. It
was called sourdough. I'd never even heard of sourdough bread and it let alone make it.
I tasted this bread and I just had never tasted anything like it. I couldn't remember a bread
that could taste so good on its own. And, you know, I realised that this was something
a bit special. This was bread that had been made for thousands of years and really the
bread that I'd come to know in my childhood probably wasn't really bread at all. Ever
since that moment I kind of knew instantly that I had to learn how to make it myself.
So I started developing a sourdough culture, you know, wild youths and bacteria that were
fermenting in my fridge. It was quite a bizarre concept and I had to keep this kind of pet
alive. But, you know, pretty quickly it became part of the rhythm of my life and every week
I would bake a couple of loaves of bread, you know, one for the bread bin, one for the
freezer and it would nourish me and my wife for a week. Over the years this became more
and more of an obsession. I, you know, wanted to create the perfect loaf. I wanted to provide
a better looking, a better tasting loaf, you know, always slightly more pleasing than the
last. Eventually in 2009 this became a total career change. I gave up my job as a nutritionist
in the NHS and I launched into teaching people how to make bread. Pretty soon after that
in 2010 I started baking bread pretty seriously every Friday from my back garden. I built
an earth oven because... Why did I build an earth oven? Because I was bored? I baked my
bread in a wood-fired earth oven and I built the oven myself. It's kind of like making
bread, there's only four ingredients. It's mud, sand, straw and water. It's pretty simple
to make really, but you've got to know what you're doing. The walls of the earth oven
are about 10 inches thick. They build up, you know, an amazing amount of heat which
they then give back to the oven chamber. You can bake bread in there for a couple of hours.
Cooking the heat from a wood fire is one of the most elemental things you can do. It gives
bread an amazing kind of smoky quality. Cooking the most elemental type of bread, sourdough
bread that's been around for 2,000 years. To cook it using a method of firing wood,
which has been around for 6, 10, 12, 15,000 years, whatever it is. Those two things coming
together are an amazing connection, I think, and can produce the best possible bread, but
also, you know, it's an amazing thing to do. It's important that we can provide wholesome
bread to our community and can teach people in this country how to make bread themselves.
This idea of nurturing, of sustaining a culture is so important to the philosophy of life,
not only in our bread making but in what we try and achieve as a business and as a member
of our local community. So for two years now we've run a cookery school and a community
bakery for my kitchen here in South Birmingham. Pretty much every weekend, every Saturday,
I have six people right here in my kitchen learning how to make good wholesome bread
for themselves and for their families. It's such an amazing thing seeing people digging
their hands into dough. It may be I've never done it before and it's almost like you can
see the sign ups is reconnecting in their brain. They're connecting with something that has
been done for thousands of years, they're mixing flour, water, salt and yeast together
and they're creating dough. This fleshy substance which springs to life half an hour later in
the bowl. It's just incredible to see the transformation in them and the transformation
in the dough which will later become bread. It's about seeing growth, seeing ripening
in society. Two thirds of the world have bread as a staple food and it's such a powerful
metaphor for life, for death, for birth and living. It's just such a powerful thing.
It's just incredible to see the transformation in the dough which will later become bread.
It's just incredible to see the transformation in the dough which will later become bread.
It's just incredible to see the transformation in the dough which will later become bread.
