Food Obsession: Searching for the Perfect Bread

Food Obsession: Searching for the Perfect Bread

This morning I found this article in ‘The Guardian’ (link above) and thought it is an interesting follow-up to my bread post from yesterday. Don’t worry, though, I am just hording books in my apartment, not sacks of flour:

“Take the case of Andy Forbes, a former typesetter and computer programmer. Over the years bread has pushed everything else out. His Camberwell flat is a shrine: industrial-sized sacks of flour in every room, a homemade mill in his bedroom. Next to his computer sit a pair of bubbling starters that have been around since Margaret Thatcher was in No 10. In the kitchen is an antique 1940s Artofex dough mixer that he won’t sell “for any sum”.

Then there are the wheats: kernels of 70 heritage strains with names such as Golden Drop, Rouge d’Ecosse, Lambeth Latin, stored in hundreds of Tupperware containers. Forbes, 57, is a “wheat chaser”, focused on saving ancient varieties from extinction and, where possible, bringing them back into circulation. “Orange Devon Blue Rough Chaff,” he says, pointing to one of the boxes. “We got to that one just in time.” Three neat rows of long grass in his garden are purple free-threshing spelt, grown from the “one handful of the seed in the world”.”

Andy Forbes … grows his own wheat. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian