Doughies – baking Small and writing Big

Just unwinding after a full on weekend including showing at the Lochaber Agricultural Show, where doughies shared some sourdough love.

That’s me at our table in the food tend alongside other local small, micro producers.

Yes doughies is small. But small can be beautiful.

Doughies has been telling it’s small story for the last 5 years, one crumb of a post at a time, sharing how we do sourdough, what we’ve learned along the way, and what we’re currently doing.

We have 60 odd subscribers of our small blog; we think of these as our tribe of bread heads, people interested in sourdough and local food, some local and some not; learning about sourdough and sharing in our story.

So here’s the interesting thing – despite doughies being a small blog, some posts are not small. They are big. If our normal posts are crumbs, these big posts are like 10kg monster bloomers – take this one – people come from all over the world to read this post; hundreds if not thousands a month; at last check “when is a sourdough starter ready” is no 2 on Google when searching sourdough starter readiness.

Which got us thinking. Why does a post like this resonate so? Why so popular? Well we think it’s two things – 1) sourdough is getting popular (sourdough being in vogue enough to have big industry creating mimic pseoudough); and this popularity is encouraging a tribe of people around the word to learn how to bake their own sourdough. But why come to our small blog? Well that’s reason 2) those same people encouraged to learn how to bake sourdough then get stuck. Sourdough is not hard, but it’s surrounded by conflicting information – and fermented home made food stuffs are no longer the norm. So poeple turn to the digital neighbourhood (the web) to talk to doers – people who have done and/or are doing sourdough. Which leads to them to our small bake house; our small blog.

It’s hugely rewarding to bake and share sourdough on a small scale; and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And we want to grow and do some other fun things (a local bread club for individuals, restaurants doing doughies sourdough covers, one off sourdough events – to name but a few…). But Doughies doesn’t aspire to bake big -we don’t want to bake 1000’s of sourdoughs 7 days a week; but we do want to share big words. We want to bake small and write big.  Big words that will inspire people to think about the origins of their food (bread or otherwise), and perhaps feel confident to try, retry or improve the simple act of making their own sourdough.

As Seth Goodwin would say, we want to make a sourdough ruckus.

So know of somewhere in need of some big words from a small bake house?  We’ve currently  got out ears to the ground for some writing gigs. Contact us if something springs to mind, and come see us in two weeks at the West Highland Food Festival or grab a sourdough at Delicraft any Saturday.