Botanical Blends

Redefining wholegrain flour

We mill our own wholegrain flour  and we call them botanical blends and although you may not have a mill you can still create diversity in your bread by blending your own.

This is life project. It is about redefining flour and creating a new approach to baking.

As its name suggests here are over 20 blends now) was inspired through standing in a field and looking around at what was growing. Not just looking, but really connecting. Seeing beyond the crop, because when you stand quietly and observe, you will see that meadows and fields have the most incredible range of diversity.

There are wild herbs and flowers, fruits in the hedgerows and leaves on the trees. There are wild grains. Not just wheat but barley, rye and oats. And under the ground there are roots. We didn’t evolve eating a monoculture. The diets of early humans would have included a wide range of grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, berries, tubers and flowers. So, part of our teaching here at the school is to go back to the core of a healthy diet and apply that to baking. And that means starting with the flour.

As the principle of the breads we bake is nourishing not only ourselves but our gut microbiome too, we are creating flours that contain a diverse range of ingredients. We’ve used our extensive research to select ingredients that could potentially help improve and maintain a healthy and diverse gut community. Each of the botanical blends is given a diversity score. This is something we have developed alongside the blends and the New Sweet Sourdough School book, and I’ll be telling you more about it over the coming months.