Q&A with SIDING
I first met Polly in our first year of university back in 2010. She was already an excellent cook – whilst the rest of us were still living the student dream eating pesto pasta every night, Polly was sprouting seeds and making pasta from scratch. No surprise, then, that shortly after graduating she pivoted into food, honing her bread and pastry skills at work placements in the UK and France. Fast forward to 2019, and she opened SIDING, a bakery and café serving all manner of delicious bread and pastries to the good people of Norfolk. She kindly answered our questions on all things bread, touching on food provenance, sustainability and ‘sourfaux’ along the way.
Why bread?
I really like it. I like eating it at any time of the day, and I like making it. I like that all you really need is some great flour and good salt and you can make a loaf that can be eaten as part of any meal.
What’s the journey been, from studying Psychology at uni, to opening SIDING? And what prompted the change?
Nothing dramatic really. I wasn’t particularly motivated about launching into a psychology career after uni and found myself doing lots more cooking which led me to jobs in restaurants and cafés. It was in a hotel in France where I was doing work experience that I helped with making the bread and became interested in the process. With the fussiness of everything going on in a professional kitchen, the bread seemed simple. Of course, I soon learned that it is one of the most complex foods to make, but in a way that only fuelled a more long-term fixation on learning about it.
Walk us through the bread you make at SIDING.
All the flour we are using is grown in the UK and stone-ground in traditional flour mills. The SIDING sourdough loaf is mostly made with wheat that is grown at a farm just 12 miles away. This is our ‘white loaf’ but only because it is less brown than the alternative wholemeal sourdough we also sell. We also make a seeded sourdough, a raisin sourdough and recently an oat porridge sourdough with British oats supplied by the super Hodmedods. We bake most of the bread on the stone base of the oven but also have sourdough tin loaves for those who prefer a softer crust. Our baguettes and ciabatta are made from an overnight dough which ferments from both sourdough starter and fresh yeast, which gives light airy bread that still has great flavour.
This is a really interesting sentence from your website – “There is great value to food when we consider how it got to our plate”. Why is food provenance important?
Everyone eats, and when we buy food, we’re supporting whoever produced it and the values they stand for. Many of us will discuss problems like global warming, intensive agriculture and poor animal welfare but then fall on convenience food shopping, which indirectly supports poor practice in these industries. Provenance is important because it can save jobs, protect our environment and give hope for the future of agriculture which we rely on so heavily to feed us.
How important is it to you to work with local suppliers?
Local is important because of reduced food miles; that’s the obvious answer. But local doesn’t mean much in isolation. I think that the biggest advantage of local is that you can build relationships with your suppliers because you can see first-hand the work that they are doing. Also, if you can work with local producers, not just local suppliers, you can shorten the supply chain and better ensure that they are getting a fair price for the work they do. When local provides transparency, it is especially important.
What do you think is the biggest problem facing the food industry in the UK right now?
Marketing… it’s so confusing! You can’t blame people for misinformed shopping habits when we’re being thrown convincing but unsupported information about health benefits of this or provenance points for that. And then throw in a whole load of buy-one-get-one-free deals on 99p chicken breasts – where does that leave us? We need honest information about where food comes from and then we can decide its value for our health, purses and wider environment.
How do you think we can turn more people onto the benefits of the kind of bread you make?
Hopefully just by getting them to try it. If people think it is delicious then that’s a good starting point. I don’t want to give customers a prologue about its health benefits or tell them that this loaf will save the planet before they’ve taken a bite (that bit can come when they’re dropping in for their next weekend loaf). I think making it approachable is important. We sell our large sourdough loaf for £3.60 which I think is fair. And just reminding people that this is what bread always was before the sliced plastic packaged loaves became a shopping trolley essential. It doesn’t have to be expensive and trendy, it’s just bread.
Do you ever miss Warburton’s white sliced bread?!
I asked myself the same thing recently. My boyfriend Harry still likes a bit of junk food and when he recently bought a bacon butty, I asked if I could take a bite. I went at it with an open mind, casting aside all my opinions on food. The bread got stuck to the top of my mouth. It was gross.
Aside from delicious bread and pastries (they really are delicious), what do you like to eat/cook?
Cor, that’s a big question. Along with some of our customers, we subscribe to a local CSA veg box (Salle Moore Market Garden) which gets dropped off at the bakery every Thursday. We try and stretch the contents of this out over the week, supplemented by a weekend chicken from a farm around the corner and lots of bread and pasta, which we also make at the bakery. It can be anything from stews and pies in the winter to pizza and salad in the summer. We’re pretty lucky with food where we live, and you don’t have to worry too much about the cooking when the produce is good.
Is sourdough sustainable?
No, not really. ‘Sourdough’ became a bit of a buzz word in food trends at the same time that awareness of sustainability was gaining momentum and the two became conveniently associated. It’s a bit like the merging of ‘compostable’ and ‘recyclable’, because both are good… right?
The question of sustainability is more about where and how the grain is grown, whereas ‘sourdough’ refers to the method that is used to make the bread. Having said that, you will often find sustainable wheat being used in bakeries that make sourdough because this wheat is often lower in protein and therefore favours the sourdough bread-making process. But the two are certainly not mutually exclusive, demonstrated by many supermarket ‘sourfaux’ loaves.
What’s the best bit of advice you’d give to someone who wanted to get into baking?
Go and see if you like it. Making a loaf at home is very different to working in even a small-scale bakery. And then, after that, I guess be patient. I sometimes wonder why the perfectionist part of my personality let me do this job because despite all the attention we pay to managing the many variables in the bakery, there will likely never be a loaf or croissant that I think is ‘perfect’. It’s quite a repetitive job but things are also always changing. You make the dough, shape the bread then bake the bread… but every day it’s different!
What individuals or bakeries inspire you, and why?
I had a major turning point when I went to work for The Real Food Fight in France. This is where I learned that the bread is all about the grain it’s made from and the recipe and method are just a way of using the flour to make a great loaf. The farm and bakery are a working example of the positive impact of regenerative agriculture, and they’re spreading the word in the UK now too.
What was the first thing you ever baked?
Does JUS-ROL Bake It Fresh croissants count?
What’s next for SIDING?
Well it’s still early days so more of the same for the time being. We’re still getting new people in the bakery all the time so making sure they’re getting the best bread and pastries is our priority. We’re working on plans for the pasta which is made using the same local wheat and have some interesting wines available too.