Rēwena baker George Jackson is making bread from a starter that’s been alive since the middle of the 19th century.
His bread flies off the shelves of his Whanganui shop which opens three days a week.
George Jackson Photo: supplied by George Jackson
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Rēwena is a sourdough form of bread, he explains.
"It’s a leavened bread. Its main ingredient is time. It takes quite a while to prove.”
The bread uses the starchy water left over after boiling potatoes, he says.
“We boil the potatoes and we strain the juice off, and we pour that into the bug. And that causes it to react, it uses the starches in the potatoes.”
Once the potato water has cooled, it is added along with flour and sugar to the exiting bug, he says.
“And it sits there for a couple of days to ferment and all the yeast starts multiplying by the trillions. And it's ready to make a bread.”
It's his grandmother's mother's starter and goes back quite a way.
“I'd say about the 1840s, 1850s. I think it was brought in on an Irish ship on the boats docked in Wellington.”
To keep the starter alive you have to feed it, but if you don’t, it goes into a kind of yeasty hibernation, he says.
He is a largely self-taught baker, he says. And he’s keen to get his popular bread to a wider market.
“I am wanting to expand into making the spread a bit more commercialised, but still traditional. So, into your local Four 4 Square supermarket, stuff like that, just to bring some money in to grow the business.”
As it is the bread flies out the door, he says
“It's surprising that this bread is quite well known, people give it to their friends as gifts, they take it to family members in other towns, because it's quite sought after.”