Festive Food Fair, Chapter, Cardiff

Today’s Festive Food Fair at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff was a great success. There was a sizeable crowd and most of the stallholders were generally doing very good business.

I Want to Bake Free was selling, among other things, Victorian sponge cakes, gingerbread houses, loose tea and peppermint creams. The stall raised around £100 for the LATCH charity. The traditional tearoom will be opening, somewhere in Cardiff, next year. If David's stall at Chapter is anything to go by, it will be an interesting prospect.

Mark’s Bread had an eye-catching display. Although Bristol-based, Mark Newman sets up a stall every Wednesday afternoon at Chapter. Today we came home with Pan au Chocolate and a Malthouse loaf. Artisan slow-fermented sourdough bread was also available from Cardiff’s Hungry Planet and Bridgend-based Tortoise Bakery.

I always enjoy looking at The Parsnipship for their creative Vegetarian dishes, which today included a seasonal Roast Chestnut and Jerusalem Artichoke Dauphinoise. We went for the Lapsang-Souchong Smoked Butternut Lasagne, the Glamorgan Crumble, and a Stilton and Spinach Cake, which we heated up and had for dinner tonight.

Box vegetable schemes were being promoted by Riverside Market Garden (Cardiff) and Riverford Organic Veg (Devon). The other stallholders included Gwatkin Cider and Gwynt y Draig Cider, Llanfaes Dairy Ice Cream, The Nut Hut, Welsh Brew Tea, and Hipo Hyfryd.

There was also a range of workshops (gingerbread decoration, pottery, mosaics and more) and a raffle (I won a bottle of perry). Carols were performed under the Christmas tree by jazz singer Brigida Melly. The jazz arrangements fooled my daughter for a while, until she heard the words.

Outside the arts centre, there was a demonstration of a rocket jet-stove. This sealed unit can be used to cook potatoes (or chestnuts, as it did today). It is a very efficient way of burning wood, as it burns to a combustible gas that does the cooking. Biochar is producing as a by-product, which can be mixed with manure to make a great fertilizer.

A key part of proceedings was a meeting of Siop y Pobl (The People’s Supermarket), with the Core Group of this initiative updating us on progress, followed by a cooking competition. Siop y Pobl will be the subject of a longer blog post next week.

The Festive Fair was one of those events that exceeded expectations. Well done Chapter, Green City and Hedfan Arts for making it happen.

http://iwanttobakefree.blogspot.com/

http://www.marksbread.co.uk/

http://www.theparsnipship.co.uk/

Two Loaves

I bought a couple of sourdough loaves recently deserving of comment: one made in Bristol and one made in Dinas Powys.

Mark’s Bread is Bristol’s smallest independent bakery. They deliver around south Bristol by bike, but every Wednesday Mark drives a van across the Severn Bridge, and along to Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff (4-6pm). They sell a selection of their wild yeast breads (sourdoughs), bakers’ yeast breads, and spelt and rye loaves. Last week's Special at Chapter was a Fig and Black Pepper loaf.

The first picture is a small South Bristol Sourdough, a sort of signature bread for them. They make their loaves using sourdough cultures, without commercial yeast, and prove them slowly in linen-lined wicker baskets. They mainly use organic flour from Shipton Mill, Gloucestershire, and don’t use improvers or additives (this is definitely Real Bread, as defined by the Real Bread campaign). The ambient yeast and bacteria in sourdough cultures naturally differ from one area to another, bringing subtle differences to the finished bread. So ‘South Bristol Sourdough’ is distinct from sourdoughs made elsewhere.

Geraint Roberts, another Real Bread advocate, bakes all his bread using sourdough cultures, at the Hungry Planet (Hupla) Workers' Co-op in Adamsdown, Cardiff, and at his home in Dinas Powys.

Geraint sees Bread Subscription Schemes as a way forward for micro-bakeries. He is planning to start a subscription scheme for Hungry Planet, with people paying a month in advance for their bread. From his home in Dinas Powys, he teaches bread courses and does a smaller weekly bake to order. Bread subscription schemes give more security of market and reduce waste, because you only bake exactly what is required. More money also goes directly to the baker than if the bread was being sold wholesale through shop outlets.

Last week’s home-made sourdough loaf (second picture) was a Multigrain Wholemeal, made with Bacheldre organic stoneground flour (87% wholemeal, 13% white), polenta, buckwheat groats, wheat flakes, millet flakes, oatmeal, organic natural salt and water. This was moist, tangy and flavoursome.



Mark’s Bread, North Street, south Bristol:
http://www.marksbread.co.uk/

Geraint Robert’s website:
http://geraintbakesbread.webs.com/

The Real Bread Campaign:
http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/

A previous post on sourdough:
http://sfnottingham.blogspot.com/search/label/Geraint%20Roberts