Ben Mackinnon, Baker
E5 BAKEHOUSE
London Fields, Hackney
Hackney Wild, seeded rye, the Stockholm… With their 72-hour fermentation process, E5 Bakehouse makes some of the best bread in London. The railway-arch bakery and café, which Ben started in 2011, is driven by a sustainable approach and a love of ancient wheat. They have their own stone mill and use only organic grains, while produce grown on their farm is turned into brunches, lunches and seasonal pastries.
”I love the immediacy of bread and the way you catalyse the dough into being. You then have to nurture it to get this great product at the end – I love handing it over to people and seeing their enjoyment of it. It’s the simplicity and accessibility of bread; you don’t need a lot of things to get cracking: a big bowl, a tap, an oven and you’re off.
I moved to Hackney in my late 20s. At the end of 2009 I decided I wanted to work for myself, so I began baking two to three days a week, doing the odd market and supplying local people with a home delivery service, and working part-time to pay my bills. In the summer of 2010, I built a wood-fired oven in a railway arch; I found some blueprints and cobbled it together from things I found on the side of the road and freecyle – a bit of a beg, borrow and steal. It was two-and-a-half metres long by two metres tall, and it could only fit 25 breads at a time, but it was enough to get me going. I fuelled it with offcuts of wood from carpenters, and very quickly began baking every day. A small crew assembled and E5 became an entity.
A year later, we moved into our own railway arch and the team began to take sourdough incredibly seriously. I’m not much of a nerd, I’m more of a generalist; I have a lot of enthusiasm and don’t really think about things terribly much, but fortunately there are these people with great attention to detail. I’m quite addicted to a bit of chaos. However, these good souls who joined the company thought this was a bit stressful – dough bubbling over, the bread burning – so we began to hone and the next six or seven years were all about refining systems and everybody geeking out.
“Everybody thinks you want to ferment dough in a warm airing cupboard but keeping it cold can have benefits
”
The Hackney Wild was our first loaf. It’s made with a sourdough starter and leaven. The starter is initially fed with rye flour, which creates a lot of activity, and then we make quite a stiff leaven in the second refreshment. When the leaven is less wet and sticky, we keep it in the fridge for 24 to 48 hours, and what happens is that you get a lot of acetic bacterial fermentation, and that gives this really good flavour. So we’re having quite a dense leaven and we’re keeping it cold for a really long time. Then that dough is mixed with stoneground white flour and we mix, stretch and fold it every hour for about three to four hours, then shape it and rest at room temperature for another hour, so it has about five to six hours at room temperature. We then put it in the fridge overnight, which allows us all to go to bed and only one person needs to get up early, which is important, but it also develops lots of tasty flavours.
Everybody thinks you want to ferment your dough in a nice, warm airing cupboard, but actually storing it and keeping it cold for a period can have really good benefits. My favourite breads switch around, but I’m a big fan at the moment of rye breads, seeded ryes, the rugbrød, which is Danish and has the rye berries, which we make a sort of porridge with and then introduce that into the dough. I really like sprouted-grain breads, where you sprout some of the grains and seeds and then incorporate them into a dough.
We started milling flour about five years ago. All the grain we use is organic and that’s our number one sustainable criteria. In 2015, there was only one mill in the country that could supply organic, British flour. We were buying their flour, but it didn’t work for all of the breads we wanted it to work for, so I brought a mill from Austria and just got in touch with some farmers who were growing organic or even grain wholesalers, and we began milling, and amazingly it made good bread. It was actually really consistent; we could get the same grain for quite a long time from one farm, so we knew exactly where it was coming from and we got used to its characteristics. We’ve now replaced it with a French mill and we’ve invested in a top-notch cleaning system to make sure there’s absolutely no dust in the environment.
“There’s a real renaissance amongst bakers to take an interest in the grain and flour that’s being used”
Ben Mackinnon
We’re growing a population of wheat which came as a result of a trip we made as a group of bakers from E5 to Denmark, where we met a really inspiring farmer who grows a lot of wheat for bakers in Denmark and grows some of these old varieties. He kindly sent us half a tonne and we’ve been growing it on our farm for a few years. We’ve got another variety from him called Orland Auckland, which is a Swedish wheat, and we’re growing that on a neighbouring farm.
From last year’s harvest we’re having a load of wheat which was a heritage variety developed by Andy Forbes. He begins the process by going to seed banks where they store and maintain this genetic diversity, and he selects grains that he thinks are interesting and grows them on his allotment in Brockwell, then takes them off to farmers to grow them into bigger populations. There’s a real renaissance amongst bakers to take an interest in the grain and flour that’s being used, and it’s just about respect for ingredients and not considering them as genetic commodities at the lowest value, despite customers obviously wanting good value. There has to be a balance between value and doing things in these considered ways. We really work on direct trade, going as closely as we can to the producers.
Rather than growing exponentially with bread, we limited the scale we could grow by only delivering by bike but also having a cap on how much bread we really wanted to make, how big our shift wanted to be and our space. So rather than making just bread we started to add in things that interested us. We began with cakes, pastries and lunches quite quickly, but it evolved into making all of the ferments and jams, having the shop and roasting coffee, chocolate, and now I’m growing vegetables and fruit for the café. There’s stacks of different talent in the bakery, and it’s keeping them interested without adding on more levels of management: if you like chocolate, then let’s try it and away we go.
E5 was never really conceived, it just kind of happened. As a result, a lot of people feel they’re stakeholders in it as the community. As the owner, I feel my responsibility is to the customers and the staff, and I know especially during the refugee crisis in Syria, we were all very moved to see what we could do to help. We happened to be contacted by the refugee council to see if we could host a bread class and I thought we can go one better and teach it as well. At the end of teaching, we were trying to get these people employment and thought there were a few jobs here but what else can we do? We decided to open a whole new bakery in Tower Hamlets to employ the refugees, and that’s where we roast our coffee, too. We’re looking to reopen as a bakery in the late summer, and that business is intended to deliver profit; 30 per cent of the roast house’s profits go to the refugee organisations and we have a policy to employ trained refugees. I think the staff and customers are glad about that, but we don’t tend to go on about it.”
For more, visit e5bakehouse.com
Photography: Helen Cathcart
@e5bakehouse