If you have read my blog in the past, you will know about my loathing for the mass produced bread that is piled high in every shop and supermarket in this land, and that I also like to champion local food businesses. So, imagine how my heart leapt when I found an artisan bakery in Nottingham selling sourdough!
Small Food is a craft bakery started by owner and baker Kimberley Bell, based within Primary Studios in Nottingham. The bakery is in the former school kitchens of Douglas Road Primary School situated less than a mile from the Old Market Square in Nottingham, in ‘Saturday Night & Sunday Morning’ Radford.
It is open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays selling beautiful hand made sourdough, cakes and pastries, all made fresh and in small batches.
Like me, they are a supporter of the ‘Real Bread Campaign.‘ This is a movement that says that bread, in its purest form, is simple to make and it should only have four ingredients; flour, water, yeast and salt. If you have a look at the list of ingredients on a loaf of bread that you pick up in the supermarket you will find a list of additives and “improvers” as long as your arm.
The Small Food Bakery specialises in sourdough bread. For those of you who may not have heard of this, sourdough bread is naturally leavened bread, and made without commercial yeast.
If you are baking sourdough at home, it is not a bread that you bake if you are in a hurry! This is something you fit around whatever else you are doing during the day.
The process known today as sourdough, uses a “starter” of combined flour and water, which is fermented over several days with regular additions of flour and water by the wild yeasts and lactobacilli naturally present in ground grain.
This starter is then added to the baker’s dough in place of yeast, which is left to rise for several hours, and produces delicious bread full of holes, with a firm springy crust.
If all of this talk of “starters” sounds complicated and scary sign up for the bakery’s newsletter as Kimberley hopes to be running sourdough bread classes in the future.
In the meantime make sure you pop in to see Kimberley on a Friday or Saturday to pick up a loaf or two. Bread like this is not a luxury, it is a necessity!
