New birth in Bakewell

Hartingtons gave birth to its own mother culture last week. This sourdough starter culture can be used in our future artisan sourdough bread making courses.

We made our culture under the instruction of one of our bread making tutors David Neville who incidentally is off to work with Morrisons, starting this week to help them upgrade their already impressive range of artisan breads. Apparently, Morrisons are the only one of the big supermarkets that have retained genuine bread baking facilities within their stores.

To make you own starter culture all you need is flour, water and some grapes. Leave the culture exposed to the atmosphere and it will pick up the natural wild yeast spores, which then work symbiotically with bacteria to produce the unique sour taste. Each starter has a completely original composition. This made the birth of Hartingtons 'junior' a very special moment in Hartingtons short life.

We are doing a sourdough bread making course in May with Andrew Auld of the Loaf. By then young Hartingtons may even be old enough to play his part.