Armed with science degrees in Microbiology and Biochemistry, John Reid has unified his love for science with his love for home cooking, in running a bakery with a difference.
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He has been baking sourdough in scotch ovens for almost 25 years and now practices his craft at Trentham’s Red Beard Historic Bakery.
Driving change
Mr Reid is one of a number of bakers driving change in an industry which has long been driven by agricultural producers.
“Wheat breeding in the last 100 years has had nothing to do with flavour and everything to do with disease resistance, yield and ability to put the resulting flour through industrial machinery. A group of us bakers are driving agricultural change from our end of the business instead of sitting back and getting what is on offer, which is mostly modern wheats,” he said.
He said what should be one of the most important factors when it comes to buying bread, taste, had long been a redundant idea.
“Nobody has paid any attention to taste for a long time. Some of our most beautiful wheat varieties, like Federation and Turvey, bred in Australia back around 1900, were prized around the world as some of the nicest bread wheat available. But they just fell out of use.”
He said this mostly came down to the rise of industrial machinery, which saw the emergence of bread factories.
“So what we’re doing as bakers is trying to drive change back to the past. We are saying to farmers ‘look we really want to support you to grow stuff that works for our customers, who actually really like the taste of some of the flavours of these old wheats.’”
Grain genebank
In an attempt to remedy this problem, Mr Reid has been cracking open wheat storage vaults at the Australian Grains Genebank in Horsham.
“They have all the varieties of wheat that have ever been commercially grown. There is something like two and a half thousand varieties of wheat that have been grown in Australia. The Genebank has them all,” he said.
“The Genebank is absolutely delighted we want to break out some of these old crops and try to grow them again. We already have a number of people who are starting to grow trial plots.”
Engaging farmers
Of all the drivers, Mr Reid is most interested in the welfare of farming communities.
“The idea that we have in setting up local grain economies is to work on the idea of setting up co-ops. Meaning farmers, millers and bakers all working together in small communities on a small scale production, sharing the costs,” he said. “There is a high rate of farmer suicide here, it is a really big issue in Australia. It comes from farmers dealing with corporations who screw them over. So we’re talking about actually supporting the farmers in our community to grow much better flavoured, quality wheat that we can get a higher price for.”
This idea is nothing new. It is merely a reproduction of the relationships society used to share.
“In the past, the mill was the centre of an agricultural area. Farmers all used to send grain to the mill and it was then sent out of the bakeries, which fed the community. Relationships, for me, are key to this whole idea. It’s about knowing the farmers, knowing the miller and being prepared to go that extra yard for them because they’re your mates. They’re part of your community,” he said.
He said this idea of relationships had disappeared in the current climate where big anonymous, producers were in control of farmers and food production.
Market pressures
Mr Reid said Australian farmers grow only a couple of wheat varieties, with much of the harvest exported. He said limiting ourselves to a slim variety of crops could have dire effects.
“It makes us really vulnerable from a biosecurity point of view. If a disease got into the crops, they would all be wiped out. Then what?”
Apart from biosecurity, one of the other forces behind the idea was the slow foods movement and consumer demand for locally grown food.
“One of the things we are hoping to do with cracking out these old varieties is to start talking about identity. There’s a whole movement of people wanting to know the grain’s identity, where it’s farmed. People are increasingly wanting to know where their food is coming from. They don’t want to just accept what supermarkets tell them.”
He said this market pressure was new to Australia but the notion of re-localising grain systems was very popular in the United States.
“We are starting to grow varieties of wheat that are appropriate to particular areas, which would not only work well in terms of disease resistance, but would also work well for the millers and bakers,” he said. “The re-localisation movement is big money in the U.S. We are seeing the same things start to happen here but we are seven or eight years behind.”
The bakery
At Red Beard Bakery, the only bread on the menu is sourdough.
“If you’re using flour from a big, industrial, corporate mill, the quality of the flour is pretty ordinary so a lot of bakers use a lot of additives, emulsifiers and preservatives to try to make it taste better. Here we don’t use commercial baker’s yeast... We make sourdough, which is fermented bread. It is a living, breathing complex. We feed it everyday and use a piece to make each loaf.”
This was the type of bread baked before the advent of commercial baker’s yeast a hundred years ago, which lead to the creation of what he called “white sliced death”.
Science, however, is finally catching up as studies into fermentation are being undertaken at an academic level.
“There’s all this research into how nutritious these old fashioned practices of fermenting foods are for our gut,” he said.
“We’ve let the corporations get into our food system and bugger it up for farmers and for people who like eating beautiful bread.”