Pat-A-Cake Pat-A-Cake Baker's Man

Trying my hand at baking 

Until last Sunday, the things I knew about bread could be counted on the digits of a four-toed sloth which had lost most of its limbs. I like eating it. I have seen it being made, particularly at Pilsdon. I have even made a moderately successful foccaccia or two in Pilsdon's Aga, so I know how to follow a recipe. But on Sunday I came face to face with a real baker, a man who has bread coursing through his veins (it does make his arms swell a bit). What this man doesn't know about sourdough is not worth knowing. And he was willing and very able to share his knowledge with those of us who had made the pilgrimage to his off-grid home-cum-bakery in the depths of darkest Carmarthenshire.

One of Rick's wood stores

Rick and Maggie have lived in their off-grid farmhouse for a couple of decades already, bringing up and home-schooling about nine children as they did so. They also ran an organic smallholding. A 2.5kW wind turbine, attached to two extremely heavy-duty 700Ah batteries, provides for all their electrical needs. Seven years ago Rick returned to his roots as a trained baker, building a brick oven that could take over fifty loaves, and hasn't looked back. His bread he takes to various outlets and markets all around, including the market in far-flung Machynlleth (which is how we heard about his Open Day this Sunday.)

These are the loaves we made

The entire day Rick never stopped talking, but neither did we tire of listening to him. He made sourdough bread seem the most important thing on earth, his manner being so infectiously enthusiastic and on a topic which he so obviously knew everything about. Not only that but he got us baking it too – he had prepared some dough which some of us moulded into the correct shapes, and then we slid them into the narrow oven entrance on long paddles, depositing the largest ones right at the very back and eventually filling it with loaves. The previous night he had lit a wood fire inside the oven until it had sufficiently heated the heavily-insulated bricks, and then scraped out the ashes and cleaned it ready to take the loaves the next day. Normally he would do several batches from a single burn, the oven remaining hot enough to bake hundreds of loaves. 

Looking over into my neighbour's land

Sourdough, I learned, is simply bread that has not had yeast added. There is natural yeast in wheat flour so sourdough bread should rise almost like 'normal' breads, it's just a bit trickier to get the starter going (which itself is just a mix of flour and water). The result is supposed to be more easily digestible than yeast-added bread, something to do with the gluten having stretched more. Or possibly less. It also has a distinctive sourdough taste. And Rick is pleased not to have to add yeast, the production of which he informed us is a dirty industrial process.

Incredibly he sources most of his flour from a real old-fashioned working windmill which grinds the organic wheat between huge horizontal stone wheels. The snag is it is in Boston, Lincolnshire, so every five weeks or so he makes the huge round trip, bringing back a tonne of flour in his truck. Since the windmill is run by his old pal, he doesn't mind so much.

The autumn sun finally breaks onto my land 

Rick's bread is possibly the most right-on bread in Wales. His mission is to bring proper bread to the masses, who are being badly let down by the bread industry as a whole, the loaves we find on supermarket shelves often not having nearly enough goodness in them, and probably causing the rising tide of wheat and gluten intolerances. He's also a really nice guy. Next time you find yourself in the vicinity of Carmarthen, make sure you search out some loaves made at Mair's Bakehouse, and treat yourself to the healthiest, most environmentally-friendly and tastiest bread this side of Offa's Dyke.

The mud bath approach to my caravan