Hildegard's Bakery - Winnipeg

Some neat things about our bread and the other lovely things we bake:

• Nearly all our breads (and some sweet things) are baked in a giant masonry oven. You can watch us make fires and bake and so on from our cafe seating area. The intense radiant heat of the WFO produces tasty brown crusts that can’t be produced quite the same any other way.
• Our recipes aim for maximum flour contact time with water. This means long fermentations, up to two days, with either sourdough starter (all our hearth breads) or a small amount of yeast (sandwich/pan breads). As dough sits and rises slowly, enzymes in the flour break down big starches into smaller starches and sugars, so slow-fermented breads are easier to digest, taste pleasantly sweet without added sugar, and brown beautifully in the oven.
• We mill our own whole-grain flours right here at the bakery on a 12″ vertical stone mill. Fresh stone-milled whole grain flour goes rancid if it sits for too long, which is why commercial “whole wheat” flour has much of its germ removed (including all the happy fats in the wheat). We bake with nutritionally intact fresh-milled whole grain flours.
• Our white flour is certified organic from Prairie Mills, Elie, MB.
• Nearly all our baking ingredients are certified organic, or else from local spray-free farmers, or both at the same time.
• Many of our sweet recipes include a large proportion (up to 100%) of ancient grain flours like spelt, Kamut, or rye. These grains work much better with sweet recipes than supermarket “whole wheat” flour, and we like them more than the all-white version in most cases.