Artisan Bread Organic (ABO), London

ABO also produces an unusual range of breads made with gluten free ingredients like rice, quinoa, buckwheat and even peas and beans those avoiding gluten and those with allergies and intolerance. Ingrid’s passion has been to create traditional long fermentation great tasting gourmet breads and if you have ever tasted her breads you will know that she has exceeded her aim. No gums, potato flour, yeast or additives are used here – it is all fresh and pure.

Ingrid started her bakery 17 years ago with a vision inspired by a German baker. She saw a beautiful huge round sour dough loaf decorated with the Demeter flower symbol in his window and the energy of this loaf literally sprang out at her and she set her mind to making her bakery happen in the UK. She was already researching the inner alchemy of bread baking and had realized that the fundamental ingredient required was the highest quality water along with organic and biodynamic grains freshly milled on site. On further discussion with the baker she found that he was bringing in spring water from a local spring to bake his bread. These were high standards to follow and sadly the cost of bringing Kentish Hills spring water to her bakery in Whitstable soon became prohibitive and an alternative source of quality water had to be found.

Baking bread requires expensive proving chambers and ovens with steam that are ideally fed with soft water to keep them working efficiently. Steam is needed to moisten the bread while proving and steaming prior to baking to help the bread expand in the heat of the oven without tearing the crust. It quickly became apparent that using tap water was not good enough even with a carbon filter as stipulated by local public health officials.

“Our bakery is situated in a very hard water area (around 350 ppm dissolved solids). We installed a GRANDER® Water Revitalization unit to our mains water in May 2004. Within a few months we were surprised by an unexpected GRANDER® effect.

In the past every 2 months we had to descale our water boiler for the proving cabinet with descaling acid with all the associated health and safety risks associated with such dangerous chemicals. As we only use ecological cleaners for all other cleaning needs – this was a bit of an issue! When we came to open the tank to descale we found that the lime scale had formed into the most beautiful crystalline formation, which we could just lift out! The remaining lime scale came away easily just by brushing it off.

We are saving around £ 1400 per year on servicing costs.

Our service engineer Nick recently came to carry out a service – he should have come much sooner but somehow it got forgotten to arrange a service in 12 months! He spent very little time in the bakery and when he finished he said ‘Don’t call me for a routine service for at least another two years – your prover is squeaky clean! My London bakers need to know about your system here – I have to call on them every 3-4 months to descale the prover’.

Ingrid’s special care in both the correct selection of grains and fresh milling and the specialist system of water treatment has now paid off; there were headaches with getting the plumbing right and a very large water bill when the system was leaking undetected for a few months – but now all is quiet! She uses a basic carbon filter and a flow through 1” GRANDER® Unit after the filter on the mains water. She then incubates the water with a GRANDER® Water Revitalisation large double pond rod in a dedicated holding tank and then lastly introduces trace minerals from an organic source of seaweed to make sure every loaf has the appropriate measure of trace minerals. The water for the oven and the steam chamber are further treated with a reverse osmosis system. The commercial reverse osmosis systems are very expensive so she fitted a domestic RO unit which is not very efficient. But that is a good thing in this case, as totally de-mineralised water which shows no dissolved solids, will corrode pipes. 20-50 ppm dissolved solid is inefficient as far as RO is concerned but just right to stop corrosion. It could ruin your expensive oven in a few years if you fed it totally pure water. Our oven engineer told me of a bakery where this happened!

There is more to report: Lime scale in the kettle just brushes off and the horrid lime scale in the shower just wipes off! All our staff and visitors are amazed at how lovely our coffee and teas tastes. Water tastes wonderful straight from the tap! Although it has taken a while to get it right. The ABO bakery is now fully optimised and requires minimal maintenance.