Water

We filter all our drinking and cooking water,  so naturally the same goes for the water we use in our bread.

Flour

All our flour is organic, and ground by Shipton Mill in the Cotswolds.  At the moment, we are using their Organic Light Malthouse for our ‘scrunchy’ (granary) loaves  – this smells so delicious, it’s hard not to eat it raw! We use their  Organic Stoneground Wholemeal mixed with Organic White for our  tasty brown loaves, and Organic White for our very comforting white loaves. We have recently started baking Rye Sourdough Loaves with Figs and Caraway, as well as Wholemeal Walnut Loaves.

Yeast

We use predominantly fresh yeast. (If we do have to  use dried yeast, we use Allinsons or Dove Farm, to minimise additives.)

Salt

Again, the story is in the small print.  Did you know you were eating anti-caking agent on your chips?  Nor did we.  We now use organically certified, naturally harvested Atlantic sea salt.  And because its flavour is so true, we use far less of it.

Natural Barley Malt

Instead of sugar to kick-start the yeast, we are now using Barley Malt which naturally enhances the colour and flavour of the loaves.

Sunflower Oil

We only use this to oil the bread tins and ‘varnish’ the tops of the granary loaves.  If enough people ask us to, we will make this organic too.

Care and Attention

We love baking and we love bread.  We care about the silkiness of the dough, the shape of each loaf as it rises, the shades of golden crust.  We put our hearts quite literally into every loaf.

What’s NOT in a Love Loaf

Since we started baking for the village, we have learned a lot about our ‘daily bread’.  We had no idea how many virtually unpronounceable enzymes, for example, can be involved in the average ‘sliced white’.  Neither did we know that when you buy a bag of bread flour from a supermarket, expecting it to contain just flour, the law insists on four other ingredients being added but not listed:  thiamin, nicotinic acid, iron and calcium carbonate, or common chalk.  Only organic wholemeal flour is permitted to be sold without these, because its nutritional value is high enough in its natural state.  All this started during World War 2, when rationing made adequate nutrition hard to maintain; but the only reason it continues today is because it is more profitable for industrial millers to strip out the goodness from the grain and sell it separately (wheatgerm, for example), before adding artificial ‘value’ to their standard, depleted flour.

To find out more about what is NOT in a Love Loaf, visit www.realbreadcampaign.org and check out the Labelling page.