SOURDOUGH BREAD
OUR DAILY
BREAD
Lincoln-based Sourdough bread baker Emma Vines and her ilk maintain an almost messianic devotion to real bread. Little wonder, as her products prove that the best things in life really do come to those who wait... Words: Rob Davis.
“IT’S THE BAKERS’ TATTOO,” says Emma. She’s referring is a series of deck oven burn marks up and down her arm which she and her tribe of self-confessed bread nerds have come to regard as somewhat of an occupational hazard for an artisan baker.
Dr Emma Vine is the most fascination person in the world. Her doctorate is in psychology, although it might as well be in the field of artisan baking, for her knowledge is encyclopaedic. Emma arrived in Lincolnshire with her family when her father was commissioned to oversee the civil engineering of John Adams Way in Boston from 1977 to 1981. Emma left her teaching career with various universities – Hallam, Loughborough et al – to open her own bakery on Lincoln’s Steep Hill in October 2018.
to retailing to consumers from her shop just opposite The Jew’s House restaurant, she supplies a number of restaurants and coffee shops around the city. “Sourdough breads - the products in which we specialise - are distinct from mass-market bread and are even distinct from bread baked by producers you’d probably class as artisan bakeries,” says Emma. “But supermarket loaves and all industrially processed bread is made from scratch in a dizzying two and a half to three hours.”
Thank goodness she did, say all of her customers. Emma and her team can barely keep up with demand, such is the popularity of her range of artisan bread.
“In-store bakeries spend perhaps an hour longer producing their bread and even craft bakeries – whatever they are, for the term is a bit woolly – spend just five hours or so baking each batch of bread.”
In total, Emma has around 35 lines in production at any time, and in addition
“By contrast, we spend a minimum of 24 hours - but up to 72 hours - producing
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conventional bakers use to make their production more consistent, more reliable. We use a bespoke in-house blend of flours to achieve the intended texture and flavour of our bread, alongside our all-important sourdough cultures.” “Sourdough cultures are an alternative to commercial natural yeasts. Made of flour and water, they contain lactic acid bacteria and they ferment to make bread rise in lieu of commercial yeast. And unlike yeast, which is simply used once, sourdough cultures are ‘grown’ and fed daily to increase in volume and are used successively. They’re nurtured, like children.” Sourdough cultures can be created with different profiles, from younger, gentler and more lactic cultures to those which are more acetic - for bread with stronger flavours - depending on the product to be created.
Emma is also wearing a t-shirt which reads ‘Sourdough Slinger’ meaning she self-identifies with Wayne Caddy, the baker to whom sourdough disciples pledge an almost messianic devotion. If you’re from the North, like Emma, your baking alma mater is Worksop’s School of Artisan Food. Southerners, meanwhile, tend to graduate from The National Bakery School at London’s South Bank University.
our sourdough loaves. The sourdough process is slower and much less industrialised by its nature. Sourdough aficionados eschew flour improvers and dough conditioners that
At Vine’s Bakery Emma and the team curate two different cultures, and they even have names: Riley and Frenchy - her house Levain. Her House Sourdough is a workhorse bread using wheat and rye flour with levain culture for a gentle flavour (more lactic and less acidic) the bakery also produces a Deli Rye, Dark Rye and a London Loaf. The latter is long-fermented and firm, “Like bread used to be,” says Emma. It holds hot or wet sandwich fillers well and it neatly proves one of the main principles of baking bread using sourdough; time equals flavour. Sourdough bread’s longer production time also ensures it is highly digestible, as well as more flavoursome. Gluten is the protein which gives bakery products their structure and it is replaced by other sugar and fat in gluten-free products. True gluten intolerance does exist, but it is a rarer occurrence than its notoriety – and those who wish to sell gluten-free products - suggests. “It’s analogous to a friend who says they have the flu when actually they have a bad cold. If you’re truly suffering from flu – or from gluten intolerance - you really know
