Ooma, Pandemic Flour, and Why I Started a Micro Bakery

It started with flour I couldn't find anywhere

Spring 2020. The supermarket shelves were stripped of flour, yeast, and — inexplicably — pasta. I managed to find a bag of plain flour at the back of a corner shop and decided, like what felt like half the country, that I was going to make sourdough.

What I didn't know then was that this would become the most important thing I'd ever made.

Creating Ooma

I followed Nancy Silverton's starter method — a fifteen-day process that begins with flour, water, and a handful of organic grapes, and ends with a living culture of wild yeast and bacteria that, if you feed it well, will last indefinitely. It's one of the more extraordinary things about bread: the thing that makes it rise is alive.

I named my starter Ooma, combining the names of my grandmother and my father. It felt right. There's something in sourdough baking that connects to the past — to the idea that bread has always been made this way, and that there's a thread running through it that transcends any single loaf or baker. Ooma felt like a name that carried that.

What my health coaching background changed

I'd spent the decade before lockdown working as a women's health coach. Hormones, gut health, energy, the complicated relationship between food and how women feel in their bodies. And as I baked more seriously and researched more deeply — eventually enrolling in Dr Vanessa Kimbell's BALM Diploma at The Sourdough School — I kept finding the same thing: the bread most of us eat is doing us no favours, and the bread made the way bread used to be made is genuinely, measurably different.

That felt like something worth doing. Not just as a hobby. Properly.

Why Wraysbury, why small-batch, why considered

The Considered Loaf launched as a small-batch micro bakery in Wraysbury because this is where I live and this is where my community is. Every loaf is made to order. Every loaf uses stoneground heritage flour from Bruern Farms — regeneratively grown grain, milled slowly, with nothing added and nothing taken away. Every loaf is fermented with Ooma for a minimum of 24 hours.

The name came from a simple observation: most people never consider their bread. It's bought on autopilot, eaten without thought, and assumed to be a neutral backdrop to the rest of the meal. But bread is made somewhere, from something, by someone. The choices made at each of those stages have consequences.

The Considered Loaf is the answer I keep giving. A loaf made by someone who has thought about every stage of it — the grain, the fermentation, the time, the process. Made slowly. Made honestly. Made for the people who eat it.

Ooma is still going. She's fed every couple of days, she travels with me if I'm away, and she's in every single loaf I bake. Some things are worth taking care of.