Your Scotland The Bread February Newsletter
Like the Lunar New Year, the Real Bread New Year arguably starts in February. This is the month of Real Bread Week, and now the Scottish Festival of Real Bread and the Scottish Bread Championship. We have details and dates for all of these below, as well as updates from our Miller and Project Coordinator and a coffee break diversion into the possibilities of organic farming.
We look forward to seeing many of you at the Festival later this month!
Our little team is hard at work to make the second ever Scottish Festival of Real Bread (we've tweaked the name) even better than last year. The line-up is looking so packed that our event manager suggested extending the Festival into a two-day event! Maybe next year...
This year on Saturday 24th February, Bowhouse will host a feast for the revolutionary audience. Tickets will go on sale soon for Arise!, The Breadagogues’ work-in-progress show of Songs and Stories for the Bread Revolution, as well as the first ever Scottish screening of Six Inches of Soil. This inspiring feature-length documentary tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system to heal the soil, benefit our health and provide for local communities. It will be followed by a discussion on how healthy grains from healthy soils are the foundation of Real Bread.
We'll be devoting an hour to discussing The People's Bread - more on this below - and its possible (hopeful) place in the exciting new Public Diners Infrastructure for a Good Food Nation, with a panel including Pete Ritchie from Nourish Scotland, community bakers, public health nutrition and food security specialists.
There will be talks, workshops (for adults and children, tickets will be released soon), Real Bread and artisan food and craft stalls, mill tours, The Big Thrash and more. Keep an eye on our social media and on the event page here for more updates and tickets going live.
Scottish Bread Championship 2024
The prize-giving for this year's Scottish Bread Championship will once again be on the Main Stage at the Scottish Festival of Real Bread. Organised by Wendy Barrie of the Scottish Food Guide, with support from ourselves and sponsorship from the Edinburgh Bakers Trust, the SBC is Scotland's only competition exclusively for Real Bread makers and their creations.
Entry is open to everyone, of any age, whether an amateur or professional baker. There are eight classes, including classic or enriched sourdough breads; bread made from Scottish-grown grain, milled in Scotland; a bread excelling in nutritional quality; sourdough pastries and The People's Bread. This last category was new in 2023, and represents an important ambition of ours: to come up with an alternative to industrial bread that is verifiably better, made by the people for the people. Read more about the idea here, and find an example recipe from The People's Bread bronze award winner Michael Evans on our blog here.
SBC entry closes on Monday 12th February - find all the classes, details, rules and entry form here.
We've changed up the timings a bit this year: judging will be held the day before the Festival so entrants can more readily stay on in Fife should they wish to join in the event. It also gives the opportunity for folk to bring along extra bread to sell if they so wish – more details will be given on entering.
Miller's Diary From Head Miller Clément Boucherit With the new year comes a period that is normally much more quiet in terms of mill activity: after the festive period, we always notice a clear dip in the online and wholesale orders. We'll see if it's the case this year, as January seems to have started on a busy note! This "quiet" time allows for some reflexion on the past year (what worked, what didn't), which is helped (or forced!) by the fact that January is the month of the inspection for our certification as organic food business! This generally sends the team into a cleaning and tidying frenzy, to make sure that the mill doesn't look as floury as usual and all the 2023 paperwork is in the 2023 binder... and it means it's time for me to reconnect with the joys of the HACCP method! Finally, this time of year is also good for thinking about future projects, led by board members, like re-designing our flour bags and investigating the possibility to use a bagging machine. I've diligently accepted to look into the last one, because it would greatly speed up our operations (and not only because I like shiny machinery made in France!). Hopefully more news (and pictures) in a later newsletter! But for now, there is the Scottish Festival of Real Bread to think about... |
Real Bread Week: 17 to 25 February
Real Bread Week is the annual celebration of Real Bread run by the Real Bread Campaign. It is run to focus and brighten the spotlight on the Campaign's key work of encouraging and helping people to:
BUY Real Bread from local, independent bakeries
BAKE their own Real Bread
If there's ever a month to revive your Real Bread baking, it's February. We need something warm and nourishing to ease us through the tail end of winter, and a Chorleywood-made industrial loaf isn't going to cut it. This year the theme of Real Bread Week is 'a crust you can trust', and the Real Bread Campaign is going back to its roots and encouraging people to dust off and plug back in their bread machine - or hand it on to someone who will. According to research carried out in 2023 for independent not-for-profit organisation Recycle Your Electricals, there might be around 1.4 million bread machines going unused in UK homes - that's a lot of loaf potential.
At the Scottish Festival of Real Bread we'll have a demo to help attendees get started with Scotland The Bread flour in a bread machine, and the Real Bread Campaign has a useful page to help you get started or donate your bread machine, including STB Hon. Chairman Andrew Whitley's recipe here. The Campaign always loves hearing about people's baking: let them (and us!) see your loaves on social media by tagging @realbreadcampaign and @ScotlandTheBread, using the hashtag #RealBreadWeek and adding any events you're planning to the RBW calendar here.
Lessons in Chemistry We enjoyed this wonderfully quirky and typically punchy recent piece by Colin Tudge: "Can Organic Farming Feed the World?" "It’s too early to tell. But we ought to give it our best shot." |
Soil to Slice at Limekilns Primary School
Limekilns Primary School has teamed up with Charlestown, Limekilns and Pattismuir Nature Conservation Group to set up a beautiful community garden. The children have been instrumental in deciding what to grow and this year have sown winter wheat along with their vegetables! In January the p7 class (who will be at high school during the harvest) got a taster of the final process. Alongside a lesson about the large-scale grain system, they each hand-threshed some grain, used their muscle power to mill it into flour then mixed up a couple of wholemeal flatbreads. These were enjoyed together in class, with many pupils saying they would definitely make them again at home (especially since the second ‘sharing’ bread was unlikely to make it that far!)
As one of the Conservation group volunteers noted: “It got across the message to the pupils that what grows in the garden is not just there to be looked at on a warm summer day, but can have a legacy into the year.”
