Grain Trip

Grain Trip turns 8 years old this week, yay. 🫶We want to mark it by launching our Substack page with our first post, the story of our croissant (link in comms).

When we opened, the commitment was simple: 100% sourdough. No commercial yeast, not anywhere. What we didn’t fully anticipate was how brutally unforgiving sourdough croissants would be.

There was no course to take, no book that covered this at production scale, no baker we could call who’d figured it out before us. We were on our own, building the plane while flying it.

So we trialed and tested. Hundreds of iteratioms. All of this was happening while running a full daily production of 50+ products, developing new things, keeping everything else at the level it needed to be. The croissant was being figured out in stolen hours, between production runs, across hundreds of failed batches and small adjustments that each felt insignificant at the time.

The breakthrough came when we stopped asking one starter to do everything and built three different starters which go into the croissant dough — each with a distinct microbial community and a specific job.

One is high-acid and mature, rich in lactic acid bacteria. It builds structure, tightens the gluten so layers hold, and creates the fermented depth that sits underneath the butter.
One is young and sweet, caught at peak wild yeast activity. Wild yeasts produce aromatic compounds commercial yeast simply doesn’t — the floral, faintly fruity note you notice when you tear one open.
The third lives in butter. Its microbes break butterfat down into the same aromatic compounds found in cultured butter and crème fraîche — from inside the dough itself.
In the dough, these three cultures interact.

The result is a fermentation complexity that a packet of instant yeast cannot come close to.

Three days.

Three living cultures. A crust that shatters. A honeycomb crumb. A smell that tells you something before you’ve taken a bite.

Eight years. Hundreds of failed batches.

To everyone who’s been here from the start or joined us down the line — thank you. Thank you for giving us the space to make this obsession come to life.

A very grateful Grain Trip team

The bread you can finish baking at home comes at you this Sunday.

If you ever wanted hot, freshly baked bread in your own home without the hassle of caring for a sourdough starter like it’s a puppy 🐩
or
If you can only make it to our side of town every once in a while but would like warm fresh bread more often than that

This is for you, crew.

How does it work?
👉We give you a loaf which has been through all the phases of kneading, fermenting for 48h, and partially bake it for you - pausing it at the right time so the interior is baked through, but the crust remains pale. This bread is 99% a done job.
👉You also get baking intructions to go with it
👉You get home, either bake it the same day or freeze it and bake it whenever you want
👉We’d absolutely love it if you want to post the bread you baked at home, we’d love to see your results

The instructions are simple and easy to follow.

Many thanks to our team and friends who have been testing this in their homes for the past few months during which we adjusted the partial baking and the home-baking instructions.

Freshly baked bread in your own home. Still 100% sourdough, just made convenient.