OUR STORY
Established in 2016, ORIGIN Breads is a small bakery in Madison, WI. Owner and baker, Kirk Smock, has slowly built the business on the experience of 11 years of ardent home baking and a variety of other professional pursuits.
Kirk’s baking obsession began in 2005 while living in Guyana, he discovered long fermented sourdough breads in Brooklyn, NY and he fine tuned his fermentation and baking skills while living in Mozambique. What began as a one-man show has grown to include a team of talented bakers who are essential to daily operations.
Since its inception, ORIGIN BREADS has been dedicated to baking small batches of handcrafted and long-fermented sourdough breads using 100% organic grains grown and stone milled in the Driftless Area.
LOCAL GRAINS | STONE MILLED
ORIGIN Breads is proud to source all of our organic grains from farmers in the upper midwest. We are lucky to get almost all of our grains from Meadowlark Community Mill, a family farm and mill located in Ridgeway, Wisconsin. We also sometimes source from Janie’s Mill and Heirloom Organic Grains & Flours, both located in Illinois.
We are proud to partner with regional farmers and mills who, as Meadowlark Community Mill so eloquently says, “WE ARE FARMERS COMMITTED TO CULTIVATING A REGENERATIVE ECOSYSTEM BY GROWING REAL FOOD, IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND RESILIENCE OF OUR SOILS, PROTECTING THE SAFETY OF OUR WATER, AND INVESTING IN THE VITALITY OF OUR RURAL COMMUNITY.”
After growing, harvesting and cleaning the grains, the team at Meadowlark grinds our flour to order using an old-world method of stone milling. As opposed to industrial roller mills, which process wheat kernels to separate the starchy endosperm from the wheat bran and wheat germ, stone milling keeps the wheat kernels intact, grinding the bran, germ and endosperm together. Why is this important? Because the wheat bran and wheat germ contain the healthy nutrients, fibers and oils, and keeping them together allows us to bake bread that is both nutritious and delicious.
NATURALLY LEAVENED |
LONG FERMENTED
All of our breads are naturally leavened with wild yeast. We mix our organic grains with water, salt and a healthy sourdough culture that is naturally populated by yeasts, bacteria and enzymes. After a long process of mixing, stretching and folding our dough, we retard them at cool temperatures for at least 18 hours. This long fermentation is not only important in leavening and flavoring our dough, but it also provides time for the sourdough's lactic acid bacteria to neutralize the phytic acid that is found in the bran. Phytic acid locks in important antioxidants, folic acid, B vitamins and minerals, including iron, zinc, calcium and magnesium. A long fermentation results in bread that is more easily digestible and provides the lactic acid bacteria time to unlock these nutrients for our bodies to absorb.
REAL BREAD
What do we mean by "real" bread? We borrow the term from the UK Charity, Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming, which supports the Real Bread Campaign. Their definition says real bread is made without the use of processing aids or any other artificial additives. For thousands of years bread has been a simple and fundamental part of our diet, but most modern loaves are now made using methods that are not concerned with nutritional qualities or any environmental impacts of how or where the grains are grown and milled. With a focus on locally-grown and milled grains, our core loaf is made with nothing more than flour, water and salt. Our natural levain (sourdough culture) and long fermentation times then work together to make our breads more digestible and nutritious.
