Jonny King - Garthenor Organics
Tell us about your work.
Our workshop sits just off Kingsland Road in Dalston, tucked away but still right in the middle of it all. The walls are packed with kitchen knives, and there’s colourful plastic waste everywhere. It’s chaotic and busy with new stuff being made everyday.
I set up Bara Menyn – our little sourdough bakehouse – a decade ago. Prior to that I’d just finished a degree in philosophy, and after years of getting caught up in the abstract mind games of theoretical thinking, I was ready to use my hands again; to grapple with the messy, material world, and craft something with meaning. At least this is how I look at the transition retrospectively, as I reflect on how I fell in love with the aesthetics, and the physical work, of baking. It’s been a long journey up to this point, and I still believe deeply in the importance of bread. After all, it lies at the intersection of so many quintessentially human threads: community, ecology, politics, health, craft, culture; as well as being at the heart of our domestic lives.
These days my focus is to go back to the very beginning of the baking process, and learn each step from scratch. So this year we have grown our own wheat on our friends’ organic farm. We are now milling it here in the bakehouse on our state-of-the-art New American Stone Mill, which we imported from Vermont last year. To learn first-hand about the subtleties and the risks of producing a raw ingredient has been immensely humbling, and massively satisfying.
I set up Bara Menyn – our little sourdough bakehouse – a decade ago. Prior to that I’d just finished a degree in philosophy, and after years of getting caught up in the abstract mind games of theoretical thinking, I was ready to use my hands again; to grapple with the messy, material world, and craft something with meaning. At least this is how I look at the transition retrospectively, as I reflect on how I fell in love with the aesthetics, and the physical work, of baking. It’s been a long journey up to this point, and I still believe deeply in the importance of bread. After all, it lies at the intersection of so many quintessentially human threads: community, ecology, politics, health, craft, culture; as well as being at the heart of our domestic lives.
These days my focus is to go back to the very beginning of the baking process, and learn each step from scratch. So this year we have grown our own wheat on our friends’ organic farm. We are now milling it here in the bakehouse on our state-of-the-art New American Stone Mill, which we imported from Vermont last year. To learn first-hand about the subtleties and the risks of producing a raw ingredient has been immensely humbling, and massively satisfying.
These days my focus is to go back to the very beginning of the baking process, and learn each step from scratch. So this year we have grown our own wheat on our friends’ organic farm. We are now milling it here in the bakehouse on our state-of-the-art New American Stone Mill, which we imported from Vermont last year. To learn first-hand about the subtleties and the risks of producing a raw ingredient has been immensely humbling, and massively satisfying.
