Your Scotland The Bread December Newsletter
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Welcome to the final Scotland The Bread newsletter of 2023, and we would like to open with a heartfelt thank you from all of us in this small team for continuing to support our work this year. It has been a year of highs and lows, from the successes of the first ever Scottish Real Bread Festival and sold-out performance of The Breadagogues' Arise! (Youtube link below), to some fundraising disappointments. The successes couldn't happen without you turning up, and your support as customers is what gets us past those low points. So thank you for being part of Scotland The Bread's community, whether that's as a shareholder, customer and / or supporter, and we wish you the most delicious of festive seasons.
We know diaries have a tendency to bulge at this time of year, but we have some fun / important dates to add in over the next few months. Read more about each of them below, and we'll do a quick summary up here too:
Scottish Real Bread Festival: Sat 24 February
Last day to order from our website: Tue 19 December
Sourdough workshop (booking open from today): Sat 27 January
Christmas market at Bowhouse: Sat 9 & Sun 10 December
Pondering gifts for the loaf-lover in your life? The sourdough workshop would be that famous gift that keeps on giving, we're offering Christmas packs and have beautiful hand-made ceramic bread domes available to order after a long hiatus. More details on all of these further down.
We also update on some important campaigns we've been involved in, as well as community harvests and grain test plots. Read on for more.
Scottish Real Bread Festival & Scottish Bread Championship 2024  Talks, demos, stalls, workshops and maybe even a rare performance of The Breadagogues' glowingly reviewed Arise! (film link below)...Save the date for the second Scottish Real Bread Festival, which will be held at Bowhouse in Fife on Saturday February 24th. There will also be the announcement of the winners of the Scottish Bread Championship, judged the day before the Festival. Entry for the Championship is open to all: could this be the year you submit your prize-winning loaf (or pastry, baguette, bun or brioche)? We'll share details of how to enter on social media soon, and in a special newsletter. Can't make the Festival but keen to watch Arise!? We've added the performance from the Scottish International Storytelling Festival to Youtube - watch it here. |
Christmas at the Mill
In the next few days our popular Christmas gift packs will be available once again on our website, and we'll also be stocking them at the Bowhouse Christmas Market (9th & 10th December). The packs are being finalised but will come in three sizes, with the choice of contents including flours, sourdough starter, a copy of Bread Matters, a dough scraper, lame, a recipe for Andrew's sourdough Christmas cake, a tote bag to wrap it all in and more.
We will also soon be adding gift vouchers to the website, in denominations or for a sourdough workshop.
We're delighted to be working once again with Midlothian-based potter Douglas White to offer hand-blown ceramic bread domes. These domes are designed to go into an ordinary domestic oven, where they create the effect of a brick oven, producing a beautiful, rounded loaf with a crisp crust and moist crumb. Most of the baking aromas that normally drift round the kitchen so temptingly are trapped and concentrated in the crust, which tastes remarkably sweet and nutty. Douglas makes the domes to order, which you can do in our online shop here.
Milling and ordering dates
Orders should be placed by Tuesday 19th December to ensure you receive them before Christmas: any order placed after that will be processed in the new year when the mill re-opens on Thursday 4 January.
Campaigning We recently contributed to two important campaigns. One is a consultation: 'Marketing of Organic Heterogeneous Material'. This sounds dry but concerns the crucial ability to sell organically grown seeds that contain biodiversity within their population, just like our Balcaskie Landrace wheat. The second was a crowdfunder, now fully funded, launched by George Monbiot, Georgia Elliott-Smith and Steve Hynd called: 'Stop microplastics and 'forever chemicals' poisoning our food'. It addresses the problem of the millions of tonnes of toxic 'sewage sludge' being spread annually on farmland, in the process releasing thousands of tonnes of microplastics and unknown quantities of dangerous 'forever chemicals' into our soils, streams and food system. Organic regulation (and our own principles) ban Scotland The Bread from this practice, and this fund is to pay for a lawsuit to fight for an urgent update to the decades-old rules for testing and regulating sewage sludge and other landspreading wastes. Finally - a very happy birthday to the Real Bread Campaign, which this week marked 15 years of championing sourdough, fighting for a legal definition of the term, supporting artisanal and micro-bakeries and generally working hard towards a future where nourishing Real Bread is available to and affordable for all.  |
Threshing: Soil to Slice and Test Plots
In the first of two recent threshing events, in early October we dusted off our crowd-funded Alvan Blanch thresher to help process the larger crops grown by members of the Soil to Slice network. Joe from St Paul’s Youth Forum brought along a healthy harvest of Balcaskie Landrace winter wheat which has been growing and adapting to the climate in north-east Glasgow since 2020, while Tom and Toby arrived with a carful of Rouge d’Ecosse wheat sown on Granton street corners and at Lauriston Farm. It was fascinating to examine the baking qualities that could be observed in the threshed grain and particularly to note differences between two crops of the same variety grown just a short distance apart in Edinburgh.
Many thanks to everyone who helped us to harvest and thresh the grains from our trial plot at Balcaskie last week (including the work done to prep and repair the thresher). We processed a varied range of rare and traditional grains:
Shirreff, grown in the walled garden at Stenton Farmhouse (surviving seed from Vavilov Institute 2014)
Oak Farm Naked Barley (from Ed Dickin, UK Grain Lab and Harper Adams University), grown in the walled garden at Stenton Farmhouse
Haig Black Oats, grown in the trial plot at Stenton
Potato Oat (from 1788), ditto
Storm King Oats, ditto
Old Cromarty Barley, ditto
Dalarna wheat, an old Swedish landrace, grown by Bosse Dahlgren at Ardross Farm
If you'd like to be involved in the care and tending of these test plots we're always looking for volunteers, from sowing to harvest and threshing. Send an email to our volunteer coordinator Alison at info@scotlandthebread.org.
Sourdough Workshop, Sat 27th January  Many people expressed enthusiasm for attending workshops after our last one in Sourdough September, encouraging us to combine forces again with baker Clare Fennell of Bruntlands Bread to offer another full-day class. It will provide an introduction to the basics of sourdough, giving you the knowledge and skills to make and bake with your own sourdough starter. There are eight spaces available, and booking opens here this morning. Last time it sold out quite fast, but we will add other dates later in the year if you miss out on this one. Sourdough workshop gift vouchers will soon be available in our online shop for this and future workshops. |
