The Hundredth Monkey Bakery started from my tenament kitchen in Glasgow. I had tried my hand at this sourdough thing once or twice, having borrowed the book Tartine Bread from a friend, and failed miserably. My initial attempts were completely hopeless. Barely getting dough out of my bannetons, much less a baked loaf at the end of it all.

I completely gave up and had no belief that I could ever do this silly thing to any degree, even for the odd loaf at home, in fact that’s all I really aspired for. After a year or more I was somehow lured back in and this time I bought the book and just told myself I was going to crack it. I recall now how bad some of my misintreprations were of Chad Robertson’s words and how laughably wrong things would go if I was to try therm today. After many mishaps and late night vulgarities echoing through the flat, I would eventually begin to make some kind of sense of it and shortly thereafter I was producing actual bread. It was still hit and miss, but it was good when it worked and I had absolutely gotten the bug.

I started to form an understanding in parralell with the words in Tartine and began to get a sense of the myriad of processes and complexities at play. Actually all we are dealing with is flour, water and salt, but there is so much more behind the scenes.

Somewhere around the end of 2019 and beginning fo 2020 I was selling the odd loaf (literally) to a couple of cafes in Glasgow. One would hit me up occasionally for a loaf (that I would usually bake in work . . . the AGA shop, where i mostly taught myself to cook & bake) and the other opened just around the corner from my new home in Mount Florida. I was miffed by this. Like, why would they want my bread? But that was the start of it. Soon after another cafe would open in my neighbourhood and they would get all their breads from wee me.

So yea, late 2019, early 2020 . . . . what came next? Well being furloughed and having this bug for baking (and of course no one to sell to, as all these little cafes were closed) I wasn’t sure what to do, but i wanted to try and use the time to create something for myself, prove that I could to ‘this’, whatever this was. Weeks turned into months and months into over a year and all the while I was baking breads. In the early days you could whstsapp me and I’d deliver a loaf within a day or two, popped in a bag and hung on your door handle. Eventually when enough people were interested in the bread I realised I had to do something about delivering further afield than MoFlo as I don’t drive (i know, I know, but I just do not care about cars . . . . as soon as someone deisgns one you can drive around a kitchen I’ll teach myself, ok?) so I invested in an electric cargo bike. By now I was supplying reopened cafes and a few little delis and even a restaurant or two, I was baking from 4 or 5 in the morning and getting to bed at 1 or 2am. I was mixing dough in a kitchenaid and I was doing mix after mix after mix after mix to get the batches made.

I also had to beg, borrow and steal flour around this time. There was a shortage of flour and yeast due to covid and only folks with existing contracts/accounts could get a supply. I was buying 1.5KG bags from waitrose until covid came along so I had nothing like an account. Another baker, not too far away from me, and right where a lot of my breads got delivered, would order me in some sacks of flour. I’d be shuttling up and down victoria road in glasgow with one sack at a time on my cargo bike every friday. Then hauling all the flour up to my top floor flat.

I would end up renting a commercial kitchen space, mostly because my then partner was driven absolutely demented by the flour being everywhere in our lovely home. It was this big warehouse space under the railway tracks in the Gorbals in Glasgow. I would slowly add more clients, supplying breads to more and more Glasgow businesses from this space, and still zooming around on my cargo bike delivering most of it.