To listen to Clare Mooney, becoming a baker is as easy as ABC.
"I had always baked at home, all the years when I was working with Organic Foods, and you know how it is: you bake two loaves, and when I did that someone always wanted to take the second one, so I thought; there's something in this!"
Her friends' fondness for her breads has led to the creation of Baking House, a purpose-built bakery in Harlockstown, just outside Ashbourne in County Meath. But Baking House is not merely rare in being an artisan bakery, a small-scale specialist whose methods echo those of the old-style bakers decimated all those years ago when Ben Dunne began a bread price war. No, Baking House takes the artisan bakery a step further, for Clare Mooney and Barry Hill, her fellow baker, produce only organic breads.
"Everything is organic, save for the yeast, the salt and the water," says Mooney. This won't surprise anyone who knows her, because for many years she has been one of the most articulate and committed voices on behalf of organic agriculture. No flour improvers or flour conditioners are used - "We rely on time rather than chemicals to rise the bread," says Mooney - and all the flours, seeds and oils are grown to EU organic standards. What makes the breads different is the incredibly lengthy development of the dough, which is done in two stages. Even the fastest breads made by Baking House are allowed to prove for almost two hours, whilst the rye and spelt breads need almost five hours to develop, and are knocked back and kneaded twice. The planned sourdough bread will need almost 24 hours to patiently acquire the characteristics which she wants.
And the bakery itself operates in an environmentally sensitive way, a purpose-built timber-framed structure with a solar panel for water heating and a reed bed system for waste. The breads, then, are packed in cellophane, which is renewable and biodegradeable, whilst distribution boxes are reuseable crates.
Best of all, opening Baking House allows Clare Mooney to put her passionate advocacy of organics into delicious action, for the range of breads which they have begun to produce are splendid.
Mooney stresses their "suitability for everyday use", and in this context they are perfect. For children, especially, they offer something with a familiar appearance, but with vastly superior quality, taste and keeping - these breads really will keep for the best part of a week, though of course they won't, for they will be scoffed long before then.
The smooth white loaf, for example, which Barry Hill suggested the Baking House produce, makes cracking toast as well as being a great sandwich bread. But it is light years away from conventional white sandwich bread, with a firm texture and a good yeasty fullness of flavour.
I thought the pain de campagne had an even better flavour, with a long, involving taste with a nice chewiness. The regular brown loaf is the bread which Mooney's friends always wanted to find a good home for, and the light malt is again a very agreeable, accessible and enjoyable loaf.
A rye bread has just been launched, but again it is a more accessible style than the dense German-style rye breads we are familiar with. A two-hour initial rising means the bread has an open texture, and the use of caraway seeds to bring forth the taste of the rye flour is very clever. A loaf made with spelt will also soon appear, designed for those intolerant of wheat products. Mooney and Hill then plan to introduce a sourdough loaf.
The fact that the Baking House breads are conventional rather than arcane is another positive move towards establishing organics in the mainstream food culture. Just as importantly, the quality of the breads is a riposte to the shockingly banal and adulterated breads which the large-scale bakeries produce.
Nothing is more important to our daily lives than our daily bread, yet for many people getting access to bread which is not drugged with chemicals is well-nigh impossible.
And the Baking House breads have character, and the passion of the people who make them. "I learn so much every day when I'm baking," says Mooney. "To bake needs skill and dedication, and it's something you just have to be passionate about."
Baking House, Harlockstown, Ashbourne, Co. Meath, tel: (01) 835 9010. Baking House breads are available through Tesco, Superquinn, Roches Stores and Dunnes Stores.
Super Sandwiches
Here is one of the classic way to use rye caraway bread in a sandwich, the New York Reuben. According to Alan Davidson's forthcoming Oxford Companion to Food, this sandwich originally mixed corned beef with Emmental cheese and sauerkraut on sourdough pumpernickel bread, and owes its name to a grocer called Reuben Kay who ate it whilst taking part in a weekly card game in Omaha, as recently as 1955.
Others argue that it goes back as far as 1914, when an actress in a Charlie Chaplin movie ate the Reuben special, though she had baked ham on her sandwich rather than corned beef.
What you can't argue about is just how delicious it is, and this version by Richard Whittington and Alastair Little, from the Modern British Cookbook, is a perfect showcase for Baking House rye bread with caraway seeds.
Serves 2
4 slices of caraway seed rye bread
Dijon mustard
2 slices of Gruyere cheese
225g (8oz) corned beef, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons well-drained sauerkraut
60g (2oz) melted butter
potato crisps and dill pickles, to serve
For the Russian dressing:
1 teaspoon Tabasco
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons tomato ketchup
3 teaspoons grated horseradish
5 tablespoons mayonnaise
First make the Russian dressing: whisk the Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, tomato ketchup and grated horseradish into the mayonnaise.
Pre-heat a heavy frying pan dry over a low heat. Lay out your four pieces of bread and spread two of them with Russian dressing and the other two with mustard. Put a slice of cheese on the bread spread with dressing, trimming it to fit neatly.
Arrange half the corned beef on top of each mustard-spread slice. Top with the sauerkraut and invert the cheese bread slice on top to complete the sandwiches.
Brush one side of each sandwich with half the melted butter and place in the pan, butter side down. Increase the heat slightly and cook for three minutes. Brush the top with the remaining melted butter, turn and give it another three minutes.
Remove the sandwiches from the pan and cut in half diagonally, before serving with potato chips and dill pickles on the side.