Hedie Howells, Granola Baker
HUSK & HONEY
Bermondsey, south-east London
Baked under a railway arch in the heart of the capital, Husk & Honey have been bagging granola since 2015. Provenance, fair farming and community spirit sit at the heart of Hedie’s business, from glazing puffed rice with the sticky stuff from neighbouring The London Honey Company to showing off fruits from Natoora next door, and championing British-grown grains. A far cry from her early career in psychology, Hedie started selling her granola more by chance than design, after a friend pulled in a favour and asked her to take a stall at a market. Starting with two blends (oat and nut, and quinoa and buckwheat), Husk & Honey’s range now includes the likes of chai spiced mulberry, chocolate and bay leaf, and oolong tea and orange, plus a bespoke granola for Selfridges as part of their sustainability initiative, Project Earth.
”I love the community at Spa Terminus, where our bakery is, and how inspiring all the neighbours are. We’re constantly using their produce to experiment, and they use ours too. We moved into our arch two years ago – it’s probably one of the smallest but it happily fits at least ten people inside. Every company here – Natoora, Neal’s Yard Dairy, Monmouth Coffee – has the same ethos and are working towards the same goal. It’s all really interesting, careful food.
At the heart of the business is the idea that I wanted people to be able to see the process, see the ingredients, meet the people behind it and have an honest view of what we were doing and who we were. You can, of course, go to the supermarket, pick something off the shelf and eat it, but you won’t get the full experience of what that thing is, who made it, how it was created, where it was made and so forth. Provenance is incredibly interesting.
My previous job in psychology was quite different; an amalgamation of things led to Husk & Honey forming. Around that time, I came back from Brazil, which influenced my interest in fresh, nutritious granola, but also a friend was starting one of the food markets in Covent Garden. She was looking for traders to come and join and, as a favour, asked if I would do a stall. She knew I was always making granola for other people, but it certainly wasn’t a business at that stage. Anyway, I did it and the reception from customers was really good, so I kept doing it. I realised there was a gap in the market and this was a viable business and thought, why don’t I go into it properly?
When I started doing markets, there were two blends: The classic oat and nut, and quinoa and buckwheat. I then had seasonal blends but it was small-scale and more along the lines of, ‘I’ll do a new blend because it will be exciting’. That’s where the chai spiced mulberry granola came in.
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I wanted people to be able to see the process, see the ingredients and meet the people behind it.
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Hedie Howells
The recipes haven’t changed since we’ve been in the bakery – although, for example, the pumpkin seeds might be a darker green and larger. The signature, core range have remained and then I’ve created bespoke blends for clients and, more recently, a range of limited-edition blends.
If we find really nice ingredients then I will always try and incorporate them into granola. There are, of course, things that just don’t work; our neighbours gave us a big box of mangoes and, because I love them, I tried to create a granola out of them but it really didn’t work. Things like fresh cardamom, fresh banana, peanut and almond butter, all sorts of dried fruits and grains all work well. I love researching different kinds of base grains and seeing how we can work with them.
We get a lot of our ingredients from farms in the UK. They are producing and championing so many new and exciting crops now. Even from my first ever blend, knowing what was in there and that it was good quality has been key. This has only developed and I’ve now got much more opportunity to be able to rigorously research all of the ingredients, making sure that nutritionally and taste-wise they have the best possible profile. We do a cacao and bay leaf blend, which is really intense and more of a snacking granola. The inspiration came from our neighbours here who makes bean-to-bar chocolate, sourcing cacao directly from farms all over the world, so we trust the process. We felt it needed a herbal taste, so we added thin shards of fresh bay leaf. We do some savoury blends too, which people love on salads and hummus toast – wild Greek fennel and British-grown roasted fava beans, sun-dried tomato with loads of herbs, chilli and cashew.
I love working with new ingredients and pushing the limits on how each one can work. We recently started using Duchess Oil from Duchess Farm and have included it in the recipe we developed for Selfridges [as part of their Project Earth]. We use British grown quinoa from East Anglia and dehydrate a lot of the fruits we use in the limited-edition blends – it can be a lot of hard work, but how can you resist adding blood nectarine or Greta [white] peaches to a blend?
Our customers who come to the bakery on Saturdays love trying the new blends, and I love getting their feedback – it really helps us. Some blends fly off the shelves before we’ve even had a chance to pack them up… A popular one is oolong tea with orange – it’s a bitter, marmaladey flavour with poppyseed and the black tea – and our jasmine green tea. Whenever we find interesting ingredients, such as jujube fruit, we try and find the best way to show them off.
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If we find really nice ingredients, I will always try and incorporate them into granola
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Granola has to be freshly baked. Our oats come in from Scotland and we will premix 10 batches at a time with nuts, seeds, various grains and honey. We buy all of our nuts in hull and then crush them by hand just before they go in to bake. We then pour it all onto trays and bake in a big, rotating oven for about 40 minutes. We bake at a low temperature for a long time – if you slow-roast, you get a much nicer flavour. It comes out of the oven and air cools, then we crush it down and pack it. It doesn’t stay here for very long, as we like it to be fresh. The bakes can go off to their respective bowls from as little as the same day as the bake.
Previously [before COVID-19] we had some really great contracts, like The Ivy restaurants, and were mainly wholesale, but since March we’ve done a lot more retail. The actual quantities we are now producing has probably gone down, but the number of different blends we do has gone up.
One of the bakers who recently joined us is a fantastic bread maker. I’ve always wanted to have some breadsticks, so now he’s really excited to do that. We also make Anzac biscuits, and then with other products it just depends on what we have access to. For example, the London Honey Company are just around the corner from us. They have these incredible honeys so we made some puffed rice using their honey as a glaze. We have put them online recently, but it’s more a direct-from-the-bakery thing.
The story of how products are made is so interesting. When I was selling at markets and using a communal kitchen space, customers would often ask if they could come to the kitchen and see how it’s made. I would always have to say no because it was a closed, shared space. It was really important to me [at the bakery] to be able to say, ‘yes, come and see how the granola is made and the ingredients, and meet us.’”
For more, visit huskandhoney.co.uk
Photography: Husk & Honey
@huskandhoneygranola
