WHEN I arrive at G.Cotton Bakers in Bitterne Park, owner and artisan bread maker Graham Cotton is on the phone.

A member of the public has called him for advice on what to give a child who is coeliac.

He tells me later that he’s getting more and more calls like this – doctors from as far away as Portsmouth know his reputation for producing specialist breads and his expertise in the field of diet and have been recommending that their patients give him a call.

Not that Graham minds though. Quite the opposite.

He is passionate about what he does and loves to share it – and what he does is use local ingredients to bake bread using traditional methods that remove many of the toxins which, he says, most of our food is full of today.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, Graham worked in research and development for a large bakery group. Part of his job was to go to bakeries and encourage them to switch to time-saving mechanical baking methods.

“Now I’ve gone full circle,” says the 62-year-old, who opened his bakery in Bitterne Park some 36 years ago.

“I noticed all these health problems which people have today which seem to reflect the changes in the processing of a lot of food, particularly bread. I’ve gone back to traditional fermentation methods and a lot of people are finding benefits from it. Now I’m quite involved – I’m a technical adviser for the Sustain Real Bread Campaign.”

As well as making a range of specialist diabetic food, and even vegan mince pies, Graham produces a number of ‘health breads’ and says he has had lots of positive feedback from his customers about the benefits. As well as people with digestive problems finding the breads don’t cause them problems a large number of people have reported the unexpected benefit that their fingernails are stronger and growing much faster!

Graham makes a ‘wellbeing bread’ which a health expert helped him create. Its ingredients include pumpkin, hemp, sunflower, melon, sesame and poppy seeds. Whereas some supermarket breads are made in under two hours, Graham’s ‘wellbeing’ bread takes four days to be ready.

He also makes traditional long fermentation bread, which breaks down a lot of the gluten and toxins which can cause digestive problems.

As well as using more traditional baking methods an important aspect of this for him is using local ingredients wherever possible.

“We only have one provider which we all share – the planet we live on. We’re losing respect for it. We need to be eating local produce and living in harmony with nature.”

Graham is so passionate about using local produce that he arranged for a New Forest farm to grow wheat for bread making for him and has it specially collected and milled so that he can have local white flour.

He also uses wholemeal, stone-ground flour from Eling Tide Mill.

Other local ingredients include Lyburn cheese in cheese straws and cheese and onion pasties, goat’s milk in custard tarts and goat milk bread, vegetables and the apples in his mincemeat for his mince pies come from his own garden in Cadnam.

Indeed, even his mincemeat recipe itself is local – it was handed down by his great uncle George who lived in the area and made it for British troops during the Boer War.

A large range of his products carry the New Forest Marque, meaning that at least 25 per cent of the ingredients were produced in the New Forest.

“People like me may be seen as a fringe element or oddballs but it’s very important that we keep these skills going,” he says.

“People simply need to go back to cooking food the way their grandmother used to and getting it from the places she got it.”