Marrow Creek · since 2016
We mill on Monday and bake while the town sleeps.
Three of us, one deck oven, four grain bins. Everything on the shelf was flour on this floor within nine days of being sold, and dough for at least twenty-four hours before it was bread.
What comes out, and when
Shelf times are when the loaf is cool enough to wrap
| Day | Out of the oven | Loaf | Flour | Hydration | Loaves |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | 05:10 | Country wheat | Hard red, 18% sifted rye | 78% | 90 |
| Wednesday | 05:10 | Country wheat | Hard red, 18% sifted rye | 78% | 90 |
| Wednesday | 06:40 | Seeded spelt | Whole spelt, flax, sunflower | 82% | 40 |
| Thursday | 05:10 | Country wheat | Hard red, 18% sifted rye | 78% | 110 |
| Thursday | 06:40 | Borodinsky rye | Whole rye, red malt, coriander | 92% | 26 |
| Friday | 05:10 | Country wheat | Hard red, 18% sifted rye | 78% | 110 |
| Friday | 06:40 | Olive and fennel | Hard red, durum | 76% | 35 |
| Saturday | 04:40 | Everything on this list | — | — | 320 |
The mill
The stone mill sits in the back room and runs Monday mornings, which is why the bakehouse smells of cut grass at the start of the week and of bread by the end of it. We buy whole grain from two farms within eighty miles and mill to order: hard red wheat for the country loaf, whole rye for the Borodinsky, spelt when the harvest is good enough to be worth the price.
Milling this way means the germ and its oil stay in the flour. It also means the flour has a short life — sweet for about ten days, flat after three weeks — so we mill what the week needs and nothing more. If a loaf is missing from the shelf on a Thursday, the honest answer is usually that we ran out of good flour on Tuesday.
Sifted, not white. There is no white flour in the building. Where a recipe calls for it we sift our own at about 85% extraction, which leaves the loaf a shade darker and the crumb slightly tighter than you may expect.
Twenty-four hours
Dough is mixed at nine in the evening and shaped before midnight. It then spends the night in a cold room at 6 °C, which slows the yeast down and lets the bacteria keep working. That is the whole trick: the acidity builds while the rise does not, and the loaf arrives at the oven sour in a way that takes time rather than a starter poured in by the litre.
The deck oven is loaded at midnight and drops from 250 °C to 215 °C over the first quarter hour. Country loaves take fifty minutes; the rye, in a tin, takes ninety and is not sold until the day after it is baked, because rye needs a day to set before it will slice without smearing.