Scotland The Bread

29/09/2025

Nice work The Dunbar Community Bakery! A very entertaining sneak peek into a day in the life of a baker.

24/09/2025

A fascinating historical snippet from our good friends at Mungoswells Malt & Milling.

There's a little more on the Shirreff story in an essay by Andrew Whitley here, woven into a wider tale of diversity, intensification and commodification. Shirreff had the right idea back then, and is an inspiration to those of us also working to play our own part in breeding wheat fit for a future of food security and climate resilience: https://scotlandthebread.org/2021/01/06/rediscovering-wheat-diversity-for-the-public-good/

A lone plant at Mungoswells started a cereal revolution.

In 1819, after a hard frost, Patrick Shirreff noticed one wheat plant that stood apart, untouched by the cold and carrying a heavy head of grain. He saved its seed, multiplied it, and within two years introduced a new variety, Mungoswells wheat. It was the first documented case of a farmer deliberately selecting a single plant to create a new cereal variety.

By 1857, his nursery contained more than 70 unique strains of wheat and oats, many of which spread across Britain, Europe, and America. Shirreff is considered the first commercial cereal breeder, effectively making him the “father” of modern wheat and oats breeding. His work caught the attention of Charles Darwin, who cited Shirreff’s experiments to help frame the theory of evolution and natural selection.

The fields of Mungoswells were more than just farmland, they were the birthplace of modern cereal breeding. They played a quiet but important role in the history of agricultural science, helping to lay the foundations for the wheat breeding practices we still rely on today.

(N. Scott Shirreff, 2017)

18/09/2025

The season has turned and the temperature has dropped 🍂 Prompted by a recent comment on one of our recipes asking for advice on how to keep your sourdough / bread dough warm while it's proofing, we thought others might be wondering the same. After all, the optimum temperature for yeast fermentation is 27ºC, and most of us don't keep our homes anywhere near that...

Did you know we have an extensive list of sourdough FAQs on our website? Here is our advice on boosting the temperature for your sourdough to get to work more efficiently:

🍞 Use warm water in your starter/bread dough (ideally around 22ºC).
🍞 Wrap a filled hot water bottle in a blanket and place the starter next to it.
🍞 Fill a bowl with warm water and place the container or bowl of starter/bread dough in that.
🍞 Place the starter/dough in a switched-off oven along with a bowl of boiling water.
🍞 Keep it in a lidded insulated box (like those polystyrene boxes used by fishmongers).
🍞 Place on top of a piece of wood or cork then onto a plant propagator, which is a heat mat that normally sits at the ideal 27ºC temperature (the wood/cork will prevent the bottom of the starter or dough being cooked by the mat).

Do take care if placing the dough somewhere very warm (such as above an Aga) as this may make the yeast work uncontrollably quickly!

You can always just factor in more proofing time: at 27C, it will take 2 hours for each yeast cell to divide into two (this is called a cycle of fermentation). For every 5ºC drop in temperature, it will take twice as long for the yeast to ferment. For example, at 22ºC, it will take 4 hours for a yeast cell to divide itself. At 17ºC it will take 8 hours to divide and so on.

Do you have any top tips for a toasty starter?

You can find the rest of our FAQs here: https://scotlandthebread.org/flourandgrain/sourdough-baking-recipes/sourdough-faqs/

15/09/2025

Crafters - we currently have some sheaves waiting to be threshed, and are happy for folk to arrange to come and cut off the spikes to use the straw for weaving and crafting, for a small donation to STB. Email info@scotlandthebread.org to organise a visit 🧡

15/09/2025

Still some spaces available on next month's Baking with Rye workshop! We're not able to run these classes often throughout the year so do spread the work to those who might like to come along.

Saturday 25th October
10.00 – 16.30
Courtyard Classroom, Bowhouse

This full-day workshop will provide an introduction to Scotland The Bread’s Evolutionary rye flour and how to incorporate it into your baking.

Scotland The Bread director and regular rye bread baker Alison Ramcharran (pictured here at a recent Sourdough September demo) will lead you through all stages of mixing, shaping and baking her famous seeded rye loaf and a combination wheat / rye loaf. You will also learn how rye can be included in other bakes in ways that enhance their flavour, texture and nutrition. The day will include a tour of the Scotland The Bread mill and the chance to experience working with freshly milled flour.

Refreshments and a light lunch will be provided (please let us know of any dietary requirements when booking).

You will take home the bread made in class, a bag of organic Evolutionary rye flour and a Scotland The Bread dough scraper, all in one of our lovely Flour to the People tote bags!

Full details and booking link here: https://scotlandthebread.org/product/bread-for-good-workshop-baking-with-rye/

15/09/2025

08/09/2025

'Bread of Heaven', by Charlotte du Cann: recently republished, this long read feels as timely today as when it first came out in 2009. It spans many talking points centred around bakers, bread and grain, and features Andrew Whitley back in the Village Bakery days.

There are strong parallels with our current work, particularly the People's Bread (more on that here: https://scotlandthebread.org/advocacy/the-peoples-bread/). It would be nice to be looking back on a 'resilient loaf' available to all as a problem solved, but progress has undoubtably been made.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-08-28/bread-of-heaven/

04/09/2025

And finally, in the last of our Sourdough September intro posts, a few of our favourite sourdough recipes from our website:

Connie's wholewheat sourdough - a recipe from our previous Miller-Manager, Connie's recipe is simple and no-nonsense, and proven through weekly use for her lucky team at . Reviews include: "Hi Connie, just to say I’ve been using a variant of this recipe for about 6 months now and is fantastic! So simple, delicious results. Thanks!"
https://scotlandthebread.org/2022/05/01/connies-scotland-the-bread-wholewheat-sourdough/

Doughlicious's seeded wheat sourdough - from our good friend Liz Grieve at the Doughlicious baking group in Dumfries, who sets the standard both for building community around breadmaking and for advocating for Real Bread for all, and also making wonderful loaves! https://scotlandthebread.org/2021/09/13/doughlicious-seeded-wheat-sourdough/

Wild Hearth Bakery's Scottish lowland rye - from the Scottish Bread Championship Supreme Champion bakery, this recipe has this glowing review in the comments: "This is a fantastic recipe. Just like my childhood rye as I remember it. Absolutely delicious bread, perfect structure, great crust." https://scotlandthebread.org/2022/09/29/wild-hearth-bakerys-scottish-lowland-rye-bread-recipe/

If you're in the East Neuk of Fife area and would like a more detailed insight into making the best possible rye bread, come along to the Bowhouse Market on Saturday 13th September for one of our Trustee Alison Ramcharran's famous rye demos - you can pick up some of our rye flour and everything else you need to get started at the same time!

Wishing you a delicious Sourdough September, whether you're baking it or buying it. Don't forget to support the The Real Bread Campaign , and keep an eye out for sneaky !

Bowhouse Wild Hearth Bakery Doughlicious D&G

Photos credit to, in order: Connie Hunter, Liz Grieve, Wild Hearth Bakery

03/09/2025

As well as producing and selling our flour to home and professional bakers, Scotland The Bread runs community engagement projects aiming to create local resilience and inspire people to look with fresh eyes at their daily loaf.

Through the Flour to the People project we partner with community food hubs to host workshops and demos sharing breadmaking skills and knowledge. We hope to empower local people with the confidence to bake delicious bread for themselves, their neighbours, food pantries and community meals. We have developed a number of resources to help them do so through both this and a sister project, The People’s Bread, which sets the standard for a bread that nourishes both people and planet.

Our third project, Soil to Slice, encourages and supports communities to learn all about where their bread comes from by growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking their own local grains. A network of over 20 school, community, hospital and art centre gardens are discovering that even a tiny patch of wheat can change the way we think of growing spaces and connection with our food. Each small plot invites passers-by to consider the origin of their daily loaf and how they might become involved in its creation.

At Scotland The Bread we believe that everyone has a right to access nourishing bread as well as the chance to get involved in a more healthy, equitable, locally-controlled and sustainable bread supply. By collaborating with community food hubs, gardens and other local organisations, we hope to bring these opportunities to more people across the country, particularly where this might not normally be the case. If you are interested in running a breadmaking workshop, using our local and nutritious flour in your community meals, growing grains in your community garden or partnering with us in another way, please get in touch (Lyndsay.cochrane@scotlandthebread.org) – we would love to work with you!



Photos 3 & 4 from Comrie Primary School's Breaducation project

02/09/2025

What makes our flour different?

As well as a commitment to growing organically, we have researched and selected grain varieties which are more nutritious, grow well in Scotland’s climate and most importantly, taste delicious! Our ‘Balcaskie Landrace’ flour is a mixture of different varieties of wheat, including a purple wheat from Scandinavia. This diversity ensures that our crop is more resilient than modern intensive monocultures, where all plants in a field are identical and equally vulnerable to the same threats of pests, disease or changing climate.

These grains are then processed on-farm with our innovative Zentrofan cyclone mill. This is a low-energy mill in which the grain is blown by a fan around the sides of a block of volcanic rock, eventually grinding itself down to produce a very fine flour. Normal stone mills can produce heat which damages the nutrients in the grain, but this cyclone mill keeps the flour relatively cool and therefore conserves more of the important vitamins and minerals. The flour produced is a fine and soft wholemeal, without the large flakes of bran normally present. By producing a flour which contains the whole of the grain, there is very little waste within the system and we are ensuring that all of the goodness of our specially selected grains is transferred into the final product.

Our flour also tastes better! It is often described as having a rich, nutty flavour, which it imparts to make the most wonderful pastry, cakes and of course bread.

Bowhouse

01/09/2025

Happy Sourdough September! It's been a while since we ran an overview of what we do, and a month when people are encouraged to look at their daily loaf with fresh eyes seems like a good time to take it from the top.

Scotland The Bread is a charity dedicated to growing biodiverse organic wheat and rye flour, and helping pass on the skills that enable people to make the most of it. We’re based on the Balcaskie Estate in the East Neuk of Fife, and we keep everything on-site here so we have oversight of the whole process and keep food miles to a minimum: we grow here, mill our own grain at Bowhouse, and host the annual Scottish Festival of Real Bread and the Scottish Bread Championship here in February (the latter organised by the our great friends at Scottish Food Guide ) .

Our aims are to increase the amount of breadmaking grain grown here in Scotland; to improve the nutritional quality and biodiversity of those grains; to increase the number of people who feel confident baking them into nutritious Real Bread; and ultimately to create a bread lab here at Bowhouse to continue this research, upskilling, create sustainable businesses and continue to build a community around the sharing of Real Bread.

We are a collaborative project, meaning we work with as many different organisations and community groups as possible to maximise our collective impact, including of course Balcaskie Estate and the Real Bread Campaign. Our Soil to Slice project is one example of this work – more on our community engagement later.

The Real Bread Campaign

Photos one and two: credit Jason Taylor, thesourceimage.com