Grandma Bowan.

The first year

The starter that runs every loaf in the bakehouse rotation was built in the first month of 2014, in a glass jar on a windowsill above a small electric oven. The original recipe came from a friend's grandmother who had kept her own starter through the seventies and eighties in Wollongong. Her grand-daughter brought us a small jar of it the week before we opened the doors. We refreshed it through that first month, blended in our own Tasmanian flour, and named the working culture for her grandmother. She was Eleanor Bowan. Most people called her Nellie. Nobody ever called her grandma Bowan to her face. That came afterwards.

How the starter works

The starter is fed twice a day during bake weeks and once a day in the rest weeks. On Sundays it goes in the cool room and rests until Monday morning. The starter ratio is one part starter, two parts flour, two parts water, by weight. We use a Tasmanian white wheat for the main feed and a small percentage of rye for the Wednesday refresh that runs into the weekend bake.

The starter has travelled in a glass jar in the back of a small car, been couriered to a friend's house during a kitchen fit-out, and once spent a week at the inner-west farmers market organiser's house when our cool room went down. It has been frozen once, briefly, by accident, and survived. It has been split twice and gifted to two other small bakers who still feed their lines from it.

Why we keep the name

Eleanor Bowan died in late 2014, six months after the bakehouse opened. We kept the starter name. The annual long-table dinner we run with a wholesale partner is on the closest Saturday to her birthday each year. The Canadian-tradition pieces we run through the cooler months are the closest thing to what her own grandmother used to bake, by the family account.

If you have a piece from the bakehouse and want to know what batch it came from, write in. The our story page has the longer version, and the locations page has the counter hours.