Join Your Regional Grain Network
Once you’ve established a relationship with your local miller, the next step to really supporting localised, resilient, delicious grains in the UK is to join your local grain network. See the UK Grain Lab’s page to find out what your local grain network is and how to contact them.
This is a great way to engage with others who are interested in agroecological grains, and to strengthen the local grain economy. Many farmers in these grain networks run farm open days, allowing chefs and bakers to walk through the wheat that they will eventually use. Strengthening these cultural and social relationships is a vital part of creating resilient food systems, and presents an invaluable opportunity for collaboration and shared learning amongst people who are passionate about sustainable grains.
Longstraw Bakery are a great example of how bakers can benefit from their local grain network: Frederica Bullough and James Cartwright work with 100% UK stone-milled wheat, oats and rye, sourced from smaller-scale farmers and millers, they often utilise the South West Grain Network to work directly with Somerset farmers. Here’s their take on their experience:
From time to time the flour we use as the basis of all our mixes can go from being strong and supple to hugely extensible, without any of the tensile strength required to create the fluffiness you associate with a really good bun. This is primarily due to the balance of proteins that make up the gluten in the flour; one year’s harvest might be low in glutenin and high in gliadin when the previous year the reverse was true.
As a result, we're always tweaking recipes in the bakery to account for a lot of variability in the raw ingredients we have available to us, so it's best to think of the following as a starting point from which you can create a dough that best suits your own ingredients.
If this is your first time working with UK grains, we’d recommend starting with a stronger, modern wheat like Mulika or Paragon, and then slowly adding in heritage and population varieties as your understanding of the flours increases.
When we opened Longstraw, we committed to exclusively using 100% organic, British grown and milled grain from traceable sources. We're proud to say we know the farmers and millers we work with really well. While this is fantastic for sustainability, flavour, nutrition and building strong relationships, it also creates a whole new variable for us as bakers.
Due to the damp British climate, grain grown in this country (particularly heritage and population grain) is significantly lower in protein than its eastern European or Canadian counterparts, which causes it to be very delicate to work with in comparison and requires an awful lot more care and attention. When growing conditions are optimum, the pallets of flour we receive in the bakery can be a total dream to work with and, we'd argue, are unparalleled in flavour. When conditions are sub-optimal, however, things become more complex.
