Making a Baker: a breadmaking journey

How do people get into breadmaking, either as an enthusiastic amateur or a professional? Many thanks to Paddy for sharing his breadmaking journey with us.

I started baking bread in 2018 following a birthday present of a sourdough breadmaking course at Breadshare in Portobello. I was enthusiastic but I was not always very successful; my bread at various times flat, over-salted, under-salted, over-proofed, under-proofed…I persisted and bought myself more day courses and even began to volunteer with Breadshare, and later Granton Garden Bakery which has a pay as you feel pay scale and grows wheat as part of the wider Granton Community Gardens projects in the local area.

I began to learn about our food systems, permaculture, seed saving and economics. All of this coincided with Covid which came with other opportunities; I became, unexpectedly and overnight, a bicycle based Community Gardener with Edible Estates and later Leith Community Growers dropping off growing materials and advice for people to grow herbs and peas and beans at home.

Our project was offered use of a 3msq raised bed in a temporary space in a car park off Leith Walk surrounded by Tram Works, a skate ramp, artists containers and building sites. A small team of folk that gathered weekly to try to grow things, make planters from pallets and make some small community during that challenging time. Learning about local food, bread and growing I inevitably came across Scotland The Bread and their Soil to Slice programme which seemed to offer a solution for what to do with our new found growing space. An email to Lyndsay [Scotland The Bread’s Project Coordinator] and soon we were preparing our field and sowing our own grain. Our group was very enthusiastic about whether we could grow wheat in a 12-inch deep raised bed on concrete next to an enormous building site in one of Scotland’s most densely populated areas.

In a very short time rows of our grain began to flourish.

I got carried away and even got a wheat tattoo.

In September we celebrated with a harvest party of volunteers and special guests: a baker, a grain expert, and Lyndsay of course, who came to join us in our garden to harvest our very own grain and to teach us as a group about grains and bread.

Lyndsay running a workshop with Leith Community Growers

I stored and dried the sheaves in our flat and we gathered again to thresh it a few weeks later. In time we would have a bread making workshop using some of our own flour that we had grown on Leith Walk.

By spring 2023 I was working in an office on Leith Walk and Leith Community Growers was by then being run by better organisers then myself. I began to wonder if working in an office was what I wanted from my time, and decided that it wasn’t. I began to think again about grains, and bread and baking. I was still volunteering in Granton when time allowed and I was baking my own bread at home but I wanted more opportunities to learn. Following the death of my father I wanted to make a change.

I quit my job and began a short stint learning at Kvasa bakery on Leith Walk. After two months or so I was looking around to find where I might get more experience and maybe a job and yet another email to Lyndsay (thanks again, Lyndsay) saw me arrive at Sunrise Bakehouse in Burntisland, Fife. Sunrise is an outstanding and award winning bakery owned and run by Liviu and Hajni, where I have been delighted to continue to learn about flour, salt and water and their various combinations ever since. Now my volunteering at Granton Garden Bakery has become a day of work and suddenly I am an almost full time baker as a part of two excellent bakeries learning all about real bread and artisan baking methods. My bread at home has also improved but the quest for the perfect home loaf continues!