Good afternoon dear readers,
First off, a little heads-up that we will be trialling a same-day, local delivery service on Thursday 26th March. Full details in next week's newsletter.
On the pastry counter this week we have rhubarb and almond financiers and our Easter biscuits make their first appearance of the year; rich, pale shortbread, made with heritage wheat flour and Berkeley farm butter, studded with currants and flavoured with lemon zest and mixed spices. As Harriet says "The perfect accompaniment to a late morning cup of tea."
With St Patrick's day coming up, we are showcasing a couple of our favourite Irish farmhouse cheeses this week. Coolea is made in County Cork and closely resembles a mature Gouda, smooth textured, rich and buttery, combining butterscotch sweetness and brothy savoury notes. Gubbeen, also from Cork, is a semi-soft washed rind cheese, nutty, savoury and eminently sessionable.
That's all from Kate and Hugo for this week - thank you as always for reading. Now over to senior baker, Auriol, for a report on her recent Cornish baking adventure.
In January I had the absolute privilege of staging at Coombeshead Farm in northern Cornwall. To ‘stage’ is to spend time in a kitchen, observing and learning about what they do there, and this was my first stage - a big moment in my culinary career! I drove down to Coombeshead via Bristol, stopping at Farro for driver’s fuel in the form of a Kouign-amann pastry (delicious) and arrived at the farm just in time to catch a glimpse of the bakery in the long January afternoon light. What followed can only be described as a baking retreat. It was two glorious weeks of total immersion in the bread-world created by Coombeshead’s head baker Ben Glazer. I stayed on the farm in a beautiful room opposite the bakery, and synchronised myself to the bakery schedule, rising with the sound of Ben or Hope steaming a deck of bread in the early hours of the morning, finishing up early and heading out on a run through the wet and sultry roads surrounding the farm just like Ben and Hope, sleeping early tucked into my cosy bed just like the loaves tucked away in the bakery overnight.
In my first few days I hounded Ben for temperatures, ratios and percentages. I wrote a timeline of the day and compared it point by point to the timeline we follow at Hamblin, trying desperately to find and understand the differences in what many would consider to be very similar breads. You see, Kate Hamblin and Ben Glazer are cut very much from the same cloth, having both honed their craft at a very special bakery called Farm and Sparrow in North Carolina which sadly no longer exists as a bakery but continues to operate as a grain restoration project and mill. It was there that they both learnt how to work with low protein, stoneground flour. How to treat it ‘like a muscle’, building strength gradually through gentle rotation and a lot of rest. The result is a particular style of bread that you may be familiar with as a Hamblin customer - a dark, glossy loaf which tends to be shallower than sourdough you can buy elsewhere, with an incredible chewy texture and unmatched flavour. All that being said, I wanted to understand how our bread does differ as such differences would shine a light on my own work back at Hamblin and help to contextualise the choices Kate has made about how we work.
Things that struck me were the humidity - I thought Oxford was a humid place but it’s really nothing compared to this valley near Launceston which sits in the middle of the temperate rainforest zone in Cornwall, noticeable by the beautiful lichens hanging from the surrounding trees. This humidity aids fermentation, easing that process somewhat, but making a sticky mess of their equipment that requires continual attention. There is a difference in flour makeup, Ben opting for a darker loaf with a higher percentage of wholemeal flour, which is grown by Fred Price at Gothelney farm in Somerset and milled on site in their lovely wooden stone mill twice a week. There was a technical difference in the earlier addition of the leaven into the dough, which allows for a slightly more reliable proof, I speculated. But the main difference to me was in Ben’s intuitive attitude towards the dough. Here at Hamblin we keep a fairly rigorous record of our water temperatures, dough temperatures, room temperatures and hydration percentages. We also, by necessity, have to follow a precise schedule throughout the shift, executing each part of the process at almost exactly the same time each day. But at Coombeshead, temperatures are measured by touch and final hydration quantities by eye. For various reasons there is also more freedom in the schedule of the day at Coombeshead, which allows the bakers to follow the bread’s lead a little more than we can back in Oxford. I found this incredibly challenging, feeling like my rulebook had been thrown out of the window, but also immensely compelling. Although I don’t feel that I mastered the feeling of the optimum temperature or hydration of their dough in my short two weeks, it left me with a desire to learn how to make bread with this kind of intuition. How incredible, to form a relationship with a certain style of bread so strong that no matter what changes take place - be that in the type of flour included, the harvest of that particular grain, the weather or season - you can read it like a book just by touch and know exactly what it wants and needs to become the loaf you intend.
I stood with Ben on his bakes while he lovingly loaded and unloaded the oven and I picked his brain on all this, whilst munching on a fresh loaf smothered in farm-made butter and marmalade with fennel seeds, made and traded by a local for a loaf of bread. We speculated on touch as the ultimate measure of how your bread will come out and it made me think of Morgan Williams, the head baker at Jolene in London and the person who first taught me to make bread, who wrote his masters on the relationship between the baker and the dough. Morgan argued that the two were intrinsically linked, bread being the product of a co-production between these two living bodies. He drew my attention to the fact that so much of an experienced baker’s knowledge is embodied, rather than in their head, something which became so clear over my time at Coombeshead. It was a privilege to observe the team working with the dough and I left feeling humbled by their dedication to the craft, and with a desire to one day reach a similar level of intuition in my baking.
Big thanks to Kate and Hugo for setting me free once again, and providing me with such an enriching experience. I hope you will be able to taste it in the bread I make at Hamblin one day soon.