Last year I grew wheat for the very first time.
It was only a small patch but hopefully the start of something much bigger.
It was really interesting to grow wheat, as it's so different from the vegetables that
I'm used to growing, and it is such a beautiful crop.
It is a relatively easy process to grow the wheat itself, but harvesting, threshing and
cleaning the grain is more difficult, although it was a manageable amount of work with such
a small batch that I grew.
I ended up with about 6kg of wheat, some of which I will keep for growing another batch
next season, but I wanted to bake bread with the rest.
Thankfully for this I have the help of one of the best bakers in Ireland.
Joe and Julie run the Riot Rye Bakehouse and Bread School in our community, and Joe has
been baking for years, specialising in sourdough breads.
He bakes his bread in a retained heat wood burning oven, and he uses local firewood as
the source of heat.
It was through Joe’s connections that I got the wheat seeds in the first place.
It is a diverse population of varieties and the aim is to eventually develop landrace
population of wheat that is adapted to the Cloughjordan soils and climate.
It will produce a very different flour from what Joe currently buys from the mill, where
grains with different qualities are blended to produce a flour that has specific and consistent
characteristics that bakers want.
This wheat that I grew is different, it has unknown properties, and each batch or seasons'
harvest will vary in quality and characteristics, and no doubt will benefit from different methods
of baking.
There are many different methods for making bread and the subtlety of technique can apparently
produce quite different results.
Joe worked out a method for baking a few trial loaves with this local grain and it was wonderful
to watch Joe work and to talk about options and possibilities.
Of course to start with, the grain was ground into a wholemeal flour.
A portion of this flour was mixed with some water and some sourdough starter to make a
stiff levain, which was left to ferment overnight.
Another small amount was mixed in with hot water and wisked to produce a gelatinised
mix which will change the texture of the loaf.
The rest of the water and flour was mixed in and left to soak overnight to soften the flour.
The next morning the levain was mixed in with the rest of the flour, salt was added and
the dough was set aside to rest.
Rather than kneeding the dough at one time, Joe decided to stretch and fold the dough
and then allowing it to rest, repeating the process several times.
This process stretches the gluten and traps air in the dough.
After 4 rounds of stretching and folding, the dough was divided, shaped into loaves,
placed into tins and set aside to rise for a while.
They were then baked in the oven until the loaves had the right internal temperature.
We then had to be patient enough to wait until they were cool and had finished baking before
slicing into them.
This wheat produced a dark whole wheat bread with a good even crumb or texture, it was
soft and very flavourful, actually it was delicious.
It felt like a really important moment to savour, the first loaf or bread produced from
locally grown wheat, baked with local sustainable energy.
So the wheat, water, energy, skills and knowledge, was all local, only the salt and bit of the
flour in the sourdough starter were imported from ourside the local area.
Both Joe and I felt that this was quite an achievement, and of course we wanted to share it with others.
So I served this bread as part of a big feast in our house, with a bowl of squash soup from the gardens.
This was a small but important step for us, the beginning of a long journey, to where
we can produce an abundant amount of local wheat.
Growing wheat in any quantity is much more difficult that with vegetables.
When growing anything larger than a small patch, harvesting and threshing requires mechanisation,
or a huge amount of manual labour, and good drying conditions, which we don’t normally
get in Ireland.
There are very few options for growing at a scale between a small trial batch and the
huge field, the equipment just doesn’t seem to be available.
So while we figure out solutions to the issues of harvesting, threshing, drying and storing
at progressively larger scales, there's also a parallel process of figuring out how to
bake with this diverse mix of grain.
Joe is definitely going to lead the way on this, but I'm looking forward to baking more
of my own bread.
It seems that this is a process of adapting to what you can produce, rather than trying
to produce what you expect or have become used to.
And I think there is a valuable lesson in this for how I manage my vegetable gardens.
This is the first video that I’ve uploaded in a while, after a break and a trip home
to Canada, and I thought I’d start with something different.
I hope you liked it.
If this is the first time you’ve seen one of my videos, I hope you’ll subscribe to
my channel, and check out some of the other videos the I’ve uploaded.
I’m really looking forward to this coming season, with all the different explorations
in the RED Gardens and in the Black Plot, and I’ve got plans for lots of different
videos throughout the entire season.
If you’d like to support me in this project, and to ensure that I’ve got enough financial
funding to be able to continue to make videos like this, please check out my Patreon Page
linked here or in the description below.
But most importantly, thank you for watching.