Boring® Mornings with Maya Handley

Good morning. Who are you?

M: Hi, I'm Maya Handley. I own Florets bakery in Grey Lynn and I live in Titirangi, Auckland. I'm a baker, and I live with my son Finn, who is 10, and my husband Derek, who I've known for over half my life.

M: We lived in America for 13 years, and I studied photography part time. I worked on some freelance projects and one book project. I like to be creative, but within a very constrained set of parameters.

Tell us about Florets.

M: Bread making is the purest expression in cooking, especially when you're dealing with sourdough, because you're dealing with just salt, water, flour and grain. At Florets, we make the most nutritious bread we can - it’s wholegrain and there's no sugar added.

How do you make a Florets loaf?

M: We use small batch, stone milled flour from a farm in Amberley, north of Christchurch. There are two things that essentially need to be at play to have highly nutritious bread like we make at Florets: The first one is slow fermentation, which happens with sourdough culture. That long sourdough fermentation process enables all the yeast to eat up a lot of the sugar in the grain, so you're left with an end bread product that's much lower in sugar, and will give you less of a quick sugar spike and provide more sustained energy.

M: The second thing that you need to have is whole grains. Most bread is made with refined white flour, but if you're eating whole grains then you're eating a food that has high vitamin mineral content and high fiber content. So, whole grains and slow fermentation are two things that you need to have to create a healthy bread.

Florets have a zero waste model, can you tell us about that?

M: We source as many ingredients as possible locally, and we limit our offering quite significantly. For example, with regards to milk, we offer two types with our coffee and tea. We have Durham Farms organic A2 Jersey cow milk from up north, and we have Boring oat milk. We chose those two types of milk because they're made in New Zealand.

M: I think bakers are very generous in spirit. Even if you're baking on your own, you’re baking for others, it's always being made to share.

It's such a personal expression.

Thank you, Maya.