Home Baking & Cooking
The Hodmedods brand are great for cooking with. This wonderful company based in Norfolk have a huge range of regeneratively grown British grains and this includes some grown more frequently in the middle ages such as Emmer. We also offer some interesting flours which are perfect for home baking such as Dunster Mill producing stoneground flour on an ancient water driven mill.
About Homebaking & Cooking
​Home baking is something enjoyed by many of our customers and millions of people within the UK. Whilst the requirement to bake bread has diminished in recent years due to the growth of supermarkets and preservatives found in commercial bread, there are still huge numbers of people who choose to bake bread. One of the reasons is the smell of fresh home baked bread wafting through the house in the morning cannot be beaten, it ensures the household members will be drawn to the kitchen and immediately will reach for the bread knife. The organic flour we sell from Shipton Mill is fantastic for this purpose, or our bread flour from Dunster Mill based in the grounds of Dunster Castle. Both Shipton Mill and Dunster Mill have illustrious history's and you can take pleasure in knowing that when you are doing some home baking that you are contributing to keeping a Watermill that was mentioned in the doomsday book continue to operate in the 21st century.
When looking for new products to sell at Ruxstons there is a criteria to hit, ethics, sustainability, how the people are to work with etc. Normally you get a good feeling early on with a supplier and things are smooth in the audit process and you check things, if a supplier doesn’t really fit the bill and you sense they are just trying to sell you something and have cut corners in the process you indistinctively know. One supplier that was almost a perfect fit instantly is Hodmedod’s.
Hodmedod’s were set up by three men, Nick Saltmarsh, Josiah Meldrum and William Hudson in 2012. Hodmedod’s sell a range of Grains that are crucially always grown in Britain. They also have specialised in grains that are no longer commonly produced such as the Fava bean, these are well suited to regenerative farming systems where these more traditional grains are less nutrient depleting and intensive on the soil, offering less crops per hectare yet are sustainable on the land. Growing crops is harder to do in a regenerative way than farming sheep or cattle, which only need to eat grass, however with using mixed farms and direct drilling there are ways to hugely reduce the environmental impact and Hodmedod’s are a brilliant advocate of this.
Want to create some homemade mushy peas? A great solution is Marrowfat peas. They are larger than normal peas because they have been left to grow longer, they have then been left to dry naturally rather than using an artificial process. The UK has a great climate to grow Marrowfat peas and they now represent one third of the UK pea market.