18/05/2026
After getting used to work with the blend of flours we are using for pastries, which is 50% of our local South West England flour and 50% of one of the best pastry flours out there, we braved it and went 100% True South West Flour.
Just in case you didn't know, that's the name of the flour, and it's part of a project by South West Grain network to create a sustainable and localized grain economy. With everything going on in the world this is especially important, to create more local jobs, keep our farmers going, reduce the foot print, and have a food system that can sustain itself if imports get disrupted. This flour is organic, stoneground, grown with low imputs (this is not using artificial fertilisers), free from fortifiers. in short, it doesn't get much better than this flour in purity, this project is driven by a lot of love and effort by its members, and it's also reflected in the flavour as stoneground flour keeps much more of the good stuff of wheat.
What you are seeing here is a croissant that just came out of the oven, I couldn't wait for it to cool down completely to cut it open. A moist and darker crumb showing the obvious higher bran and oils from the flour. The flavour is incredible. In comparison with a "Classic" croissant, this one is a bit denser as the flour used for pastries is usually extra fine rollermilled, hence it being whiter. This one is slightly underproofed, but in overall we are very happy with the result.
We want to go 100% this flour, if you were having our pastries the last few months you already tried it with the 50-50 blend. But this flour can change quite a bit batch by batch and it'll represent a challenge to keep it as consistent, becuase the same as the bread, we'll be needing to adapt every time we get a new pallet of flour.
This means a lot for our values, we really believe this is the way forward, and as far as we know, there aren't a huge amount of bakeries in UK using this type of flours for pastries because everyone looks for consistency, but a few of us are crazy enough.
What do you think?
