Order Life in the Making: Sourdough Now

After a lengthy gestation, Life in the Making: Sourdough is here. This issue is a love letter to bread - feeding our friends and family and making sourdough as simple and versatile as possible. For this week’s newsletter, I thought I would share the intro essay about my own love affair with bread, flour and making.

Recently, I stumbled across some writing and films we made at the start of the lockdown in 2020 and I was taken back to that strange feeling we had in those early days of the pandemic.

We’d spent the previous three years building an agrotourism business around the work of our croft. We hosted thousands of visitors via AirBnB experiences, workshops, and events.

And then we didn’t.

The uncertainty, worry, and adrenaline of both losing a part of our business and watching the world change consumed us. The saving grace was a small part of our business that centered around sourdough bread. We had developed an online class about 18 months before and had been selling a small kit to go with it.

As lockdowns started and retail availability of flour dwindled, a friend of the farm put us in touch with a restaurant supply company that was struggling to sell their flour. It was a match made in heaven. We managed to source wholesale 16kg bags by the pallet load and they were able to keep their Scottish driver in a job.

Every week throughout April, May, and June of 2020, an articulated lorry's worth of flour would be delivered to the courtyard. Without a forklift or loading bay, each 16kg bag had to be loaded into our studio individually, even quicker in the rain. The dogs would set off the alarm for the truck’s arrival and we would all run out to take each bag from the courtyard and stack them on pallets in the studio. It was the kids’ PE while homeschooling.

Then each bag of flour would be decanted into smaller bags, labelled, batch number stickers attached, and sent off again. Just like that, 4 tonnes of flour were loaded and reloaded every week. We learned quickly—and often through mistakes—about logistics systems, perishable couriers, cardboard box wall thickness, and repackaging. We supplied flour all over the UK and sold 2 years’ worth of sourdough kits.

Looking back, those months were a cloudy blur of sourdough kits, flour, and back-breaking work… But they were also filled with stories of people getting flour when they couldn't get out. Our inbox was full of stories of folks baking bread for friends and neighbours. Isolation bubbles were learning to make sourdough together. Big bags of flour were decanted for single-family members who loved to bake. People who had to shield themselves from COVID were able to make bread when they couldn’t get out to the shops or get a grocery delivery slot.

Those orders saved our business. As we issued thousands of pounds of refunds for events and retreats, we could still pay the rent and bills and feed the animals. But more than that, it kept us going emotionally, a focus to keep our eye on through the motion sickness of those months of upheaval. Something that meant we could help in a small way.

For a while, we became a "proper" e-commerce store, shipping hundreds of parcels a week. Kits, meat, soap, but mostly flour, flying out all over the country. Part of me loved this. It's exciting to have orders going out and to pack pretty things, but the other part of me has at times struggled with mistakes in orders, shipping problems, and negative reviews. I am not made of tough stuff and that is ok.

Then flour returned to the shops and as quickly as we mobilised, we decommissioned that side of the farm's business. I am really proud that we met this need in our local and larger community when it was most required. And I know that we can do it again if we need to, but my back is really glad that it will not have to unload another tonne of flour from the courtyard!

Those flour-selling days have been an anchor as we move through more challenging times. A touchpoint and reminder that food has an incredible ability to connect us.

This issue is a love letter dedicated to feeding our growing family of teenagers—four, with the addition of a foster son— who are always hungry; to our small rural community, most of whom I have taught sourdough; and to our wider community united around the idea that food and family are basically the same thing.

You can buy a physical or digital copy of Life in the Making: Sourdough here.