Clare Marriage is a foodie, and always has been. What interests her about the grains that Doves Farm grows and the flour that they mill is what you can create with them.

So while her husband, Michael, is combing the world’s commodity markets for obscure grains which they can mill to add to their already prodigious list of flours, Clare is in her test kitchen experimenting with recipes that will show her flours off at their best. A selection of her recipes appears on the back of every pack of Doves Farm flour to guide new bakers.

Apart from their seven gluten-free flours (the six opposite plus buckwheat), Doves Farm also mills six traditional wheat flours and another nine speciality flours including spelt, kamut, rye, malthouse and barleycorn bread flour, a pasta flour and a Wessex brown flour. This is grown exclusively on farms in Wessex and stone ground on traditional stonemills.

Apart from recipes for the flours, Clare does all the early experimentation for their range of cookies and bars, which includes three gluten-free cookies and two gluten-free breakfast cereals.

The Farm

Doves Farm lies on the North Wessex Downs, which have recently been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The 350 acre farm belonged originally to Michael Marriage’s parents who, back in the early 1970s, were happy to allow Clare and Michael, both early organic enthusiasts, to convert first one field, and then the whole farm, to organic.

At that point, although consumers showed some interest in buying organic wheat and bread, the trade did not want to have to mill it. So, determined not to be baulked in their ambition to sell their organic grain, the Marriages bought a mill. Here the two of them ground their grain - then drove off to the local health food stores to deliver their flour.

Gluten free

At around the same time Clare’s mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and it was suggested that a gluten-free diet might help her
condition.
(Although some MS sufferers swear that diet does help MS - see The Best-Bet Diet for MS - www.ms-diet.org - the general consensus is now that a gluten-free diet does little for the condition.)
As long-term coeliacs will remember, in the 1970s there was very little available in terms of gluten-free produce in the UK - the only chance of eating pasta on a GF diet, for example, was to import food parcels from Italy!
So Clare and Michael added corn to their milling programme and Clare started to experiment with gluten-free baking.

The farm today

Doves Farm itself long since ceased to supply all of the grains needed for the mills. Although the Marriages pride themselves on maintaining local wheats and local traditions with their Wessex Brown Flour, many of the flours that they mill would not even grow in this country, while 350 acres could not hope to supply the quantity of grain that they now need to keep their mills busy.
Michael buys grain world-wide. Weather and growing conditions have a huge impact on each batch of grain (as they do on wines, olive oils and all crops) so blends need to be continually altered and adjusted to maintain quality and consistency of their flour.
Meanwhile the farm continues to operate as a fully organic, predominantly cereal farm growing wheat, spelt, rye, oats and beans rotated with wild grass mixes (to encourage the birds) and clover.
Two hundred and fifty sheep graze the downs and most of the fields at Doves Farm have permanent grass margin or
beetle bank providing homes for birds, bats and beetles.

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