Starting the harvest season early with delicious local bread

AUGUST is a significant month in terms of farming as it marks the beginning of the harvest period. I was more familiar with the tradition of celebrating harvest in September/October but I recently discovered that August 1, or Lammas Day, is also a time to celebrate.

Lammas Day, which means "loaf mass" day, was traditionally a celebration of the first wheat harvest and a highlight was eating bread baked using flour milled from the first grains.

In modern society it’s pretty easy to forget how hard our ancestors had to work just to get their daily bread: from farming to baking, if one aspect of the process suffered it could mean that your family starved.

Much of the bread we get today is a far cry from what would have been considered bread a few hundred years ago. All you need to make bread is flour and water – with these two ingredients you can make flatbreads or nurture a yeast culture. There's really no need for any of the added ingredients that you'll find in many commercially produced loaves.

I recently began baking my own sourdough after a customer gave me some of their starter culture. There’s been a lot of trial and error and the long fermentation process means it can take two or three days before you get a loaf but the results have always been tasty. It’s given me a newfound respect for Cultivate’s bread supplier Modern Baker. They use organic stone-ground ancient grains and the same fermentation method that has been used in bread making for centuries. The long fermentation breaks down a lot of the gluten making it more tolerable for people sensitive to gluten and it also causes lactic acids to be produced which make it easier for the body to absorb the vitamins and minerals in the flour.

It's definitely a lot closer to a Lammas day loaf than anything I could get at the supermarket.

As my personal favourite is their seeded Sourdough loaf I think I’ll take the Lammas day as a good excuse as any to enjoy plenty of it.