Blind Corner Vineyard.
Tim Hall has an evangelist’s zeal,the penetrating look of the deeply passionate and the endlessly knowledgeable. “You have to keep trying,” he says.
“You have to keep practising.”
I’m ready to give up on sourdough,but Tim has other ideas. This is the foodstuff we all experimented with creating during COVID-19 lockdowns,the seemingly simple baked good that is actually fiendishly difficult to perfect – and Tim Hall has perfected it.
He’s slicing into multiple loaves of his own fine sourdough bread right now,slathering big hunks with butter,sliding them across the marri-wood table towards me,where I’m already enjoying his sourdough crumpets,dripping with local Cowaramup honey. This table is spread with good things,simple things,tasty things:mashed kabocha pumpkin with kale;fried sticks of sweet potato;more of that honey.
It was all sourced right here on One Table Farm. You might have heard of the 100-mile diet,but this is the 100-metre diet. Pretty much everything except the bread flour is grown and tended to lovingly by Tim and his partner Cree Monaghan on 1600 square metres of Margaret River splendour.
Want to live better? Want to be better? Then you need to spend some time at One Tree Farm,a cooking school and sustainable farming workshop in beautiful southern Western Australia. Cree,a qualified vet who has also studied cookery at Cordon Bleu in Paris,and Tim,a former corporate coach turned sourdough sorcerer,share wisdom and passion here,and show that the supermarket-to-microwave eating pattern so many of us have fallen into can be broken.
Stormflower Cellar Door
Just stroll the farm grounds,with views of rolling countryside and towering marri trees,and you learn so much. How to grow fruit and nuts and vegetables in a way that’s regenerative and sustainable. How to recycle and compost. How to raise chickens. How much space you need for pigs.
Of course,most of us don’t have the room back home to do all of this. But we might have at least some room. And probably an oven for sourdough.