All Bread and Butter Bakery wheat sourdoughs will once again be made with stoneground organic wheat flour.
The wheat grain comes from Willomere Organic Farms. Located on the Canterbury Plains, Willowmere Organic Farms has been providing New Zealand with BioGro certified organic produce for over 25 years. This family farm is now run by son, Kelvin Hicks, who has practised organic farming for many years and strongly believes in the benefits of regenerative agriculture and the importance of positively impacting the environment around him. He grows wheat, rye, potatoes and carrots, using crop rotation to allow pastures time to rest and the microbes to revitalise. He has a mix of sheep and cattle and plants a variety of pasture species (a minimum of ten grasses, plantains, clovers and other feed crops) for them to feed on. Farming near the base of Mt Hutt ski field, the temperatures are often freezing in winter and 30+ celsius in summer. Kelvin uses this to his advantage, choosing a specific mix of crops to ensure the weather plays its part in pest control.
Not only is the climate in Canterbury much more suited to grain growing than dairy farming, diverse operations such as Willomere Organics are also not dependent on just one income stream (i.e. the farm gate price for milk solids), making them more resilient and profitable. Farming in a regenerative, organic way allows them to mitigate issues that could otherwise be problematic.
At Chantal Organics in Napier, the grains that Kelvin Hicks sends up from Canterbury are milled using a German Heger stone mill. Using smaller batch stone-grinding is a gentler way to extract the nutrients, thus leaving more of the wholesome goodness in the flour. The stone-ground flour is not sifted quite to the same refined state as standard white flour, and this makes products darker in appearance and higher in fibre and minerals. While this may mean a small amount of volume is lost, it also means the breads have a higher nutritional value. More fibre is more goodness for your gut microbes.
At Bread & Butter Bakery we then slowly ferment the flour in our sourdoughs, allowing the microorganisms of the starter to extract and transform nutrients in such a way that they are optimal for
your health.
We will be introducing the New Zealand flour to our sourdough range only, as the stoneground quality is not refined enough to use in pastries and whiter breads such as baguette, ciabatta or lighter buns. If you purchased the white sourdough range breads such as Parisien, Batard, Sourdough Baguette, Sourdough Rolls, or Ancient Grain before, you might notice the change in colour of the crumb. We will also be using the flour in our Campagne –5 Grain Sourdough, Walnut Sourdough, and Red Quinoa Sourdough, however these are breads that contain other wholemeal flours, so the change in colour may not be quite as apparent. In any case, I can assure you that all will be delicious and even more healthy than before. (Isabel Pasch)
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