ORIGIN breads
Owners
Kirk Smock
Location
Madison, WI
About Us
Origin Breads is a small bakery in Madison, WI that is dedicated to baking small batches of handcrafted and long-fermented sourdough breads and pastries using organic grains grown and stone milled in the Driftless Area. For us, making bread and pastries is art. Flour, water and salt are our media. Fermented dough is our canvas. But to find the real beauty in our loaves you must tear through the rustic shell to see, smell and taste what lies within. With every loaf, we try to honor the hard work of our farmers and millers by using time honored baking techniques that coax maximum flavor and nutrition out of the organic grains. We also make damn good granola using local and organic maple syrup and oats.
About Our Products
At the market we sell a variety of naturally leavened sourdough breads, bagels, focaccia, pastries and cookies. We also sell our popular varieties of granola. With our focaccia and croissants and danishes, we offer a rotating menu of seasonal specials that feature fresh produce from our fellow vendors.
ORIGIN Breads is proud to source our organic wheat, rye, spelt, corn and oats locally from Meadowlark Organics, a family farm and stone mill located in Ridgeway, Wisconsin. After growing, harvesting and cleaning the grains, Meadowlark mills our flour to order using an old-world method of stone milling. As opposed to industrial roller mills, which process wheat kernels to separate the starchy endosperm from the wheat bran and wheat germ, stone milling keeps the wheat kernels intact, grinding the bran, germ and endosperm together. Why is this important? Because the wheat bran and wheat germ contain the healthy nutrients, fibers and oils, and keeping them together allows us to bake bread and pastries that are both nutritious and delicious.
All of our breads are naturally leavened with wild yeast. We mix our organic grains with water, salt and a healthy sourdough culture that is naturally populated by yeasts, bacteria and enzymes. After a long process of mixing, stretching and folding our dough by hand, we retard them at cool temperatures for at least 18 hours. This long fermentation is not only important in leavening and flavoring our dough, but it also provides time for the sourdough's lactic acid bacteria to neutralize the phytic acid that is found in the bran. Phytic acid locks in important antioxidants, folic acid, B vitamins and minerals, including iron, zinc, calcium and magnesium. A long fermentation results in bread that is more easily digestible and provides the lactic acid bacteria time to unlock these nutrients for our bodies to absorb.
We follow these methods to make real bread. What do we mean by "real" bread? We borrow the term from the UK Charity, Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming, which supports the Real Bread Campaign. Their definition says real bread is made without the use of processing aids or any other artificial additives. For thousands of years bread has been a simple and fundamental part of our diet, but most modern loaves are now made using methods that are not concerned with nutritional qualities or any environmental impacts of how or where the grains are grown and milled. With a focus on locally-grown and milled grains, our core loaf is made with nothing more than flour, water and salt. Our natural levain (sourdough culture) and long fermentation times then work together to make our breads more digestible and nutritious.
What We Offer
- Bakery
- Bread, sourdough
- Bread, whole grain
- Cookies
- Fermented products
- Muffins
- Pastries
- Specialty breads