19.4.12

In Praise of Slowness (3) Malin Elmlid's Bread Exchange












Photographies by Freunde von Freunden


© 2012 by miss Elmlid


Today I would like to share with you my newest finding. Maybe you already know about it ... Malin Elmlid is a Swedish girl living in Berlin. After much traveling and bad eating, she decided to cut white bread out of her diet. She simply did not want to eat boosted bread with yeast and additives. She just wanted good  simple bread made out of long-time traditional three indredients, flour water and salt. She turned back to basics and started testing baking white sourdough bread herself. It seems to have been quite a long and mysterious process to make it. She had always something bubbling in every corner of her home. "My sourdough takes at least 24 hour to make and I am folding it every 20 min the first hours – sometimes I put my alarm at night." Sriving for quality she even took an internship at a bakery in Sweden. Back in Berlin she baked more and more and discovered that when she started to give her bread, people naturally started to give her things in return. So she started to trade and it is how the little project of the Bread Exchange came to life. "The idea is very simple. I bake white yeast-free sourdough bread (since it is pretty much impossible to buy in Berlin), and trade it with people for things that they can do better than I can. It can be anything, really. It does not have to be food related." What she calls "Mister sourdough" was born five years ago in London and has travelled the world now as she never goes on the road without taking "him" in her suitcases and bake her bread wherever she happens to be. She has been trading with over 1000 people now. "Every trader has a story to tell about its choice of trade so every bread is full of stories." I thoroughly browsed her blog but my curiosity has not been yet fulfilled. I hope to find more about these stories since I asked to join the Bread Exchange group. What do you think about it? If you bake good simple bread yourself please let me know and share your skills. 





Mister sourdough
Malin's website

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