Give us our bread – Bedale’s Community Bakery

I’m looking forward to seeing BBC2’s Big Bread Experiment, which starts tonight, charting the trials and tribulations of setting up a community bakery.  Not just so I can spot my Mum shopping in Bedale, or tossing a pancake along the high street or where ever else she was caught on camera during the past two years of filming, but because I think this community bakery is such a fabulous idea.  Linking an old working mill in Crakehall, a re-opened railway line, and using locally grown wheat, ticks all the right boxes on the sustainability front.  And it involves volunteers,  benefiting from the satisfaction of working together for a common purpose and gain the therapeutic effect of making bread.  There’s nothing like a bit of vigorous kneading to beat away the blues or to calm the frustrations of daily life.   I hope it proves (n0t a breadmaking pun), interesting – I can see the appeal for the TV company in finding a Vicar of Dibley character in the (then) curate Cath Vickers, who started the whole process.  What’s more the bread is delicious as are the chocolate and beetroot brownies!