05/14/2026
🤌🤌
There’s a lot of new faces on here at the moment and a lot of people asking if I do Gluten free or why I don’t. To do GF safely I believe it needs to be baked in a completely seperate facility, that is the only way to completely prevent cross-contamination. My facility is simply too small.
While we are in the topic of gluten I thought I would recycle this earlier post of mine to help clear things up:
When did gluten become the enemy?
At some point, we stopped asking how our food is made and started blaming the ingredients themselves.
Gluten became the scapegoat.
Bread became the villain.
But for thousands of years, grains - including gluten-containing grains, have sustained entire civilisations.They’ve nourished communities, shaped cultures, and formed the backbone of traditional diets.
Sourdough, in particular, is one of the oldest forms of bread making we have. Slow, intentional, and deeply connected to how humans have always prepared grain.
So what changed?
Not gluten.
The system.
Modern grain production looks very different to what it once was.
Crops are often grown for yield and uniformity, not integrity. They can rely heavily on synthetic fertilisers and chemical inputs.
In some cases, grains are desiccated before harvest (ie. sprayed with herbicide to strip the foliage from the plant and speed up drying).
From there, the grain is refined, stripped back, and pushed through a system designed for scale not nourishment.
Then it reaches the bakery.
Fast fermentation.
Added yeast.
Dough conditioners.
Preservatives.
Production timelines measured in hours instead of days.
And even the structure of the bread has changed.
Where traditional sourdough relies on time and technique - stretch and folds to slowly develop strength in the dough. Modern production often replaces that process with added gluten and improvers to force structure quickly.
Faster. Cheaper. More consistent.
But it’s not the same.
And then we wonder why people feel better avoiding it.
Real sourdough works differently.
Through long, natural fermentation, the grain begins breaking down before it’s even baked.
The structure changes.
The flavour develops.
The way your body processes it shifts.
Strength is built through time, not additives.
Through handling, not shortcuts.
This isn’t marketing.
It’s method.
At Boat Ramp Bakehouse, this starts well before the dough is even mixed.
We choose organically grown flour because it aligns with everything we value:
Grain grown without synthetic chemicals.
Farming that prioritises soil health over yield.
Ingredients that haven’t already been pushed through unnecessary shortcuts before they reach our hands.
From there, we do as little as possible and as much as necessary.
Flour.
Water.
Salt.
Time.
And that last one matters more than most people realise.
Because this is also the answer to the question we get every single week:
“Why don’t you just bake more?”
Sourdough doesn’t run on a schedule you can speed up.
From mixing, to fermentation, to shaping, to proofing - you’re working with a living process.
It takes time for the dough to develop properly.
It takes time for fermentation to do its job.
It takes time to create the Sourdough bread that actually is what it claims to be.
You can’t compress that into a few extra hours because demand is high.
If you rush it, you don’t get more bread.
You get a completely different product.
There is a clear difference between real sourdough and what is often sold under the same name.
If it’s rushed, heavily processed, built on additives, or relies on shortcuts instead of skill it isn’t the same thing. If you’re ever in doubt, flip it over- the ingredients list never lies.
If you see yeast, preservatives or improvers… start asking questions.
Gluten is not the enemy.
But isolating it, concentrating it, and forcing it into dough instead of developing it naturally through time and fermentation, that changes the product entirely. What we’ve done to farming, to processing, and to time itself in food production that’s where the problem lies.
Real bread starts in the soil and it finishes with patience. 🖤
