Putting the Meadow Back Into Your Loaf

I had a vision, standing in a field in Italy called Masi, which means together. There was an olive tree and crops from the previous year growing – grains that had been rescued from the Aleppo seed bank: barley and wheat and oats. There were rose petals in the hedgerow, and cornflowers and butterflies. The sun was coming through the field, and as I was standing there I felt totally connected. Then my foot stepped on some wild oregano and its scent rose up. And in that moment, I saw this vision of grasses and flowers growing together and I realised we needed to eat the whole meadow.

– Vanessa Kimbell

I’m talking with Vanessa about very small matters, namely the teeming diversity of microbes that live inside us, and how they thrive in the presence of fermentation and diverse diets. What it might take for us to change the way we approach food and become symbiotic with the planet on our plates.

But before we go there, she says, you have to understand the backstory.

Vanessa is a fourth generation baker, who served her traditional apprenticeship in the Dordogne in France where she grew up, though she tells me she has always been dissident, even from a young age: ‘Dissidence runs though all my work. The way I bake bread is a form of disruption.’

However, her own life and craft were radically disrupted by illness ‘just as I was about to fledge’, which stopped her from being able to bake anything made with wheat. Then years later, at the age of 30, she discovered she could eat sourdough and began her lifetime inquiry into the action of fermentation and bread on the human body.

Definitely the best thing since sliced bread.

Botanical Blend No 2 (grains) 14 grains, seeds, pulses and flowers reflecting the diversity of crop and wild plants one might find in and by a field. The flour contains: emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, rye, naked oats, flax, buckwheat, dried peas, poppy seeds, cornflower, mallow flowers, rose petals, oregano, nettle. Created by Vanessa Kimbell and blended at Hodmedod’s Bean Store from grains and seeds grown by UK farmers, this botanical base mix is designed for use in sweet and savoury sourdough baking.

Botanical Blend No. 2 (flour) is the culmination of years of research by Vanessa into the workings of the gut microbiome, the process of wild yeast fermentation and the art of baking for flavour and nutrition. The flour reflects the diversity we need to see in fields and in our diets. Originally available as a blend of whole grains, seeds and flowers for home milling, Botanical Blend No, 2 is now also stoneground at the Hodmedod mill. Any home baker can mill and add the blend to their bakes, bringing extra fragrance, flavour and nutrition.

You can buy the flour here

In 2020 the Dark Mountain Project collaborated with UK grain and pulse pioneers Hodmedod in the gathering of regenerative stories and art about grains and the people who grow them. Three writers were invited to write, in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, of days spent on different farms in Somerset, Suffolk and Essex, before and after harvest. That project led to Sheaf: Writers in the Field  and inspired a second edition of interviews, fiction, photography, recipes and reports from the field the following year. A polyphonic swarm of interconnecting stories about agroecology, roots, peas, long straw deep time, future thinking, radical producers and seed preservers.

Sheaf: Harvest 2022 can be found here. Both editions are also available here.