Hodmedod

24/10/2026

🌾 Savouring the last of the summer berries! 🍓🫐

As the autumn chill rolls in and the days grow shorter, there’s something deeply comforting about the natural rhythm of our food changing with the seasons. You can enjoy the very last taste of summer’s vibrant harvest with the final batch of our summer recipe Barley and Fruit Crumble Squares, brimming with luscious blueberries, strawberries, redcurrants, raspberries and blackcurrants!

There’s a wonderful mindfulness in shifting our plates as the weather turns, letting the changing landscape guide our cravings. Next we’ll be welcoming a new chapter with a completely different exciting, wholesome filling: Peruvian organic dried bananas! 🍌

A quick note: our bakers are taking a well-deserved break, so there will be no bread orders dispatched next week. However, you can still stock up on your pantry favourites: Barley & Fruit Crumble Squares, Five-Grain Fruit & Seed Squares, Five Grain, Seed & Pea Granola, and Four Grain Granola are all available to order now. Follow the link in the bio to place your orders! ✨

https://hodmedods.co.uk/products/barley-fruit-crumble-squares

Bread will be available to order again from next week for dispatch on Thursday 5th November and next-day delivery.

23/10/2026

Among the 80 recipes in our book Whole Food are 10 fabulous recipes from brilliant guest contributors. Swipe through for a taste of each and their own books…

It means the world to us to have this brilliant group of cooks, writers, and food champions as part of our book. They’ve all inspired us for years in our mission to bring more whole grains, pulses and seeds from agroecological production into kitchens everywhere.

Find all these recipes and more in our book Whole Food. Order your signed copy via the link in our bio and we’ll throw in a free £5 voucher towards ingredients.

🌾✨

Spiced coconut carlin peas from Jenny Chandler - inspired by Southern Indian sundal but swapping in our British-grown carlin peas for the usual desi chickpeas. We first got to know Jenny sooner after we founded Hodmedod in 2012 and she was working on her seminal cookbook Pulse - find it and her new book The Capsule Kitchen (including a whole chapter dedicated to carlins peas) on our website.

Naked oat stuffed peppers from Joe Woodhouse, also the brilliant photographer of all the recipes in our book! We love the homely but inspired approach to veg-centric cooking in his books Your Daily Veg, More Daily Veg and Weeknight Vegetarian.

Masala khichdi by 𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐚 𝐁𝐚𝐬𝐮, a variation on the traditional rice and lentil dish using our “pilau” mix of lentils and emmer, an ancient grain known as khapli in India but little grown and eaten since the Green Revolution. Mallika has written two Indian cookbooks but her most recent book In Good Taste is a challenging investigation into “what shapes what we eat and drink - and why it matters”.

Quince, fig & custard galette with wholemeal diversity pastry from Henrietta Inman. We’ve admired Suffolk born and bred Henrietta since her time cooking and baking in London, through her time at the Wakelyns Organic Agroforestry bakery, and are delighted that she’s now our in-house baker at the Hodmedod Bakehouse. With the skill of a trained pastry chef, Henrietta always balances the flavour and texture of classic patisserie and baking with the natural goodness of simple but well produced wholefoods, an approach the runs through her brilliant book The Natural B

21/10/2026

🥣 More please! Cook our delicious gruel recipe from

Forget thin, watery rations, gruel is long overdue a revival. Straight from the pages of our new book, Whole Food, this recipe for Barley & Oat Gruel with Brown Butter Leeks is here to set the record straight and get everyone asking for more.

Unjustly maligned as miserable sustenance, gruel is really just the simplest, earliest and most elemental of soups. Being so economical, easy to throw together and also tempting to water down, it earned a poor reputation as mean institutional food. But this version shows just how comforting, rich, and flavoursome it really can be.

This bowl is velvety and silky, built around the beautiful texture of our British-grown pearled naked barley and hearty jumbo oats, then elevated with nutty browned butter and sweet, caramelised leeks.

https://hodmedods.co.uk/blogs/recipes/barley-oat-gruel-with-brown-butter-leeks

If you love simple, nourishing recipes like this that celebrate British grains and pulses, you’ll find endless inspiration throughout Whole Food. Order your copy directly from our online shop today and join us in bringing wholesome cookery of good wholefood ingredients back to the table!

20/10/2026

Nutritious, delicious, affordable AND good for the soil… so why aren't we eating more beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas? 🫘

For centuries, pulses have been staples of our kitchens, yet they’re still too often misunderstood as being uninspiring, worthy or hard to digest 💨. This coming Green Libraries Week, we’re setting the record straight!

Our co-founder Josiah Meldrum will be heading to the British Library to talk about Beans in Britain: Fact and Fiction.

Together with Bettina Campolucci Bordi, Sareta Puri, Anna Taylor and Beth Latham, they’ll be busting myths, celebrating British pulses, and exploring how putting more beans on our plates can transform our soil, climate, and health.

Turns out the event has sold out😬 - maybe we have less work to do spreading the beany good news than expected! But if you’ve got a ticket, we’ll see you there!

(And, given that it’s a library, Josiah will be bringing a few copies of our new book along for signing and selling too.)

19/10/2026

📻🫘 Whole Food on ! Plus the full playlist…

Such a joy to talk to about our new book on her Sunday morning show. She's always got her finger on the pulse when it comes to music and food. If you missed it, fear not, you can listen back on BBC Sounds via the link in our bio - the interview starts 1 hour in.

Cerys’s enthusiasm for our book means such a lot to us, especially as we love her own book Where the Wild Cooks Go, which shares our joy in the exploration of food cultures around the world.

We talked about so much on the show, from the cost of the Green Revolution and the solutions agroecology can offer, through crops from beans to camelina, to great wholefood dishes including gruel, flummery and Noah's pudding. The quickfire questions felt a bit like Brain of Britain, but I do love a quiz show and it was at least my specialist subject. And there was plenty more that ended up off-air, from the naming of pulses to the music of sprouting mung beans.

We and Cerys loved all the suggestions for the show’s playlist on our post last week. Thank you for all the music!

Some of our team's favourites made the cut, including 🎶 Be Healthy by Dead Prez, suggested by , our supremo at moving pulses and grains around close to the earth’s surface, and Hodmedod co-founder .meldrum’s favourite 🎶 Look at Them Beans by Johnny Cash. Other tracks featured on the show included:

🎶 Call any vegetable by Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention - suggested by and (Joe’s mum! Good musical taste clearly runs in the family)

🎶 Red Beans and Rice by Booker T and the MGs-

🎶 Soil by Cosmo Sheldrake & NATURE -

🎶 Cornbread and Butterbeans by Carolina Chocolate Drops - and

🎶 How the Green Blade Riseth by Caedmon -

🎶 eans by Kurt Cobain -

Thank you to everyone else for all your brilliant suggestions. Time didn’t allow all of the 60 tracks proposed to be played on air but we’ve compiled them all into a delicious playlist… a musical pottage. Find it via the link in our bio 👆

19/10/2026

18/10/2026

Thank you to everyone who came to our warehouse party last week to celebrate the launch of our new book, Whole Food!

It was so wonderful to get together to share stories, delicious (whole) food and plenty of good cheer. 🥳

An especially massive thank you is due to our brilliant baker and cook, Henrietta Inman, who created an incredible menu inspired by good seasonal produce from local suppliers and one of the recipes in our book. We tucked in to fresh Hodmedod Bakehouse bread with Fen Farm Dairy butter; comforting Maccu Siciliano bean soup-purée; roasted tromboncino, uchiki kuri and butternut squash; seasonal pickles; fresh herb, apple and celeriac salad; carlin pea brownies; and berry, naked barley and oat crumbles!

We couldn't have put on such a feast without our amazing local growers and suppliers: Maple Farm Kelsale, Grange Farm Hasketon, Greengrow Cooperative, and Foskett Farms Bromeswell.

🍺 To toast the occasion, we enjoyed fantastic drinks provided by Flint Vineyards in Earsham, b**r from the Green Dragon in Bungay, c***r and apple juice from Crone's, and low-alcohol b**r from Adnams.

Thank you all for celebrating with us and for supporting our local food web.

Haven't got a copy of our book yet? Pick up a signed copy (plus free £5 voucher for ingredients) bhttps://hodmedods.co.uk/products/whole-food

17/10/2026

It’s medlar season! 🍂

We’re delighted to share this year again Jane Steward’s harvest of fresh, unbletted medlars straight from her Norfolk orchard, home to the Plant Heritage National Collection for medlars. The new crop of unbletted Nottingham medlars will be available for dispatch from Wednesday 21st October and availability is limited, so get your order in now!

Fresh medlars are a rare seasonal delicacy, harvested every October and aptly described by Xanthe Clay as the "English date."

These freshly picked, unbletted medlars are a remarkable dual-purpose fruit:

✨ Unbletted (Firm & Tannic): Rich in pectin, making them ideal for jellies, pickles, vinegars, and preserves. Pro tip: use around 25% unbletted fruit in your medlar jelly for a perfect set (just like Jane’s own wonderful Medlar Jelly)!

✨ Bletted (Soft & Sweet): Bletting is the natural ripening process that turns the firm, astringent flesh into a soft, dark, and aromatic treat, tasting like a cross between dates, apples, and citrus. Enjoy them fresh with cheese and w**e, or fold them into cakes, curds, puddings, and ice cream.

How to blet at home:

Simply spread the fruit in a single layer in a cool, unheated place like a shed, garage, or porch. Wait a week or two until the skins darken and the medlars yield gently to the touch. You can watch Jane’s explanation of bletting in a video on our website or check out her printable guide to bletting, which comes included with every order.

https://hodmedods.co.uk/products/medlars-fresh-unbletted

16/10/2026

We’ve given our Five-Grain Fruit & Seed Squares a delicious upgrade with locally grown dried Norfolk blueberries! Combined with apricots and prunes dried right here in the Bakehouse, our recipe now delivers 17 plant varieties in every square. 🌾🫐🍑🍏🌱…

Made by baker Henrietta Inman in our Bakehouse, these sumptuous squares of diverse grains, fruits & seeds are full of plant fibre for superb flavour, texture and slow-release energy. They’re soft and mellow to the bite, with a pleasing crunch from the seeds. The subtle sharpness and chew of the prunes, apricots and blueberries is rounded off by the complex malty and creamy grains.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
”Best flapjacks ever - These flapjacks are packed full of goodness and flavour. I love how nourishing they are and I don’t get the usual sugar crash like from other flapjacks. They are so good. So full of different ingredients that they tick the diversity boxes for your diet! Will be ordering again.”

https://hodmedods.co.uk/products/five-grain-fruit-seed-squares
Order a box of squares for yourself. While you’re there, you can also order wholemeal sourdough bread from our bakery! Orders for Thursday dispatch must be placed by 12 noon on the Monday.

15/10/2026

What kind of recipes can you find in our new book Whole Food? 📖🍴

Whole Food is a deep dive into rich, sustaining cooking using British-grown grains, pulses, and seeds. The recipes are flexitarian, mostly vegetarian with plenty of vegan options, showing just how versatile pulses, grains and seeds from British arable crops can be.

The book is divided into nine delicious chapters that explore soups, broths & gruels; stews, ragus & pottages; porridges & dals; going beyond rice; fritters & fries; salads, dips and snacks; bread, pastas & noodles; and cakes, biscuits & sweets.

Among the many tempting dishes inspired by our culinary history and food cultures around the world, you’ll find:

🥣 Soups, broths & gruels explores one of humanity's oldest culinary inventions: soaking and simmering hard grains and pulses to unlock their nutrients without needing complex mills or ovens. This chapter spans time-tested global traditions, featuring nourishing bowls like Barley & Oat Gruel with Brown Butter Leeks, hearty Scotch Broth & Bannocks, and a classic Mexican Sopa de Habas.

🌾Beyond Rice swaps standard white rice for British-grown grains with serious character. You will see these crops shine in dishes like Orzotto Primavera and a hearty Pea, Pancetta & Pecorino Speltotto, bringing incredible chew, nuttiness, and texture to your plate.

🍞 Bread, Pastas & Noodles showcases how diverse grain, seed and pulse flours elevate simple doughs. This section includes delicious bakes like Rustic Rye Sourdough, Flaky Emmer Parathas, and super speedy 10-Minute Pea Flatbreads that require no resting or proving.

https://hodmedods.co.uk/products/whole-food