Good afternoon one and all, And just like that, with no itch, seven years of Hamblin has passed. Miraculously the oven is still intact, albeit battle-worn from the ravages of Oxford hard water, though we've been through more Sharpies, temperature probes and razor blades than we care to count. The sourdough starter is still the very same, from a nugget taken from that most bacterially vibrant of places, Coombeshead Farm. Seven years of working with John Letts and David Howell, and Aneta too of course. Seven harvests of wheat, from the driest of summers to the wettest of winters. Seven years of you all putting up with our strange opening hours, uncompromising bread crusts and Hugo's jokes, not to mention wines....
Good afternoon one and all, Another week and another stint for Kate at a London bakery, this time Quince in Islington with superstar baker, published author and dear friend Anna Higham, and her fab-u-lous team. It’s the only other bakery we know of to have Strictly Come Dancing magnets adorning the prover-retarder. The menu changes weekly and has a steadfast focus on seasonal fruit and vegetables. Highlights this week were the flakiest plum and vanilla custard pie (one to pay homage to on the Hamblin counter we think), almond layer cake with damson buttercream and roast squash and ricotta quiche. Anna is also making beautiful, characterful bread using flour from our mutual friends at Landrace, including an outrageously good batch...
Good afternoon one and all, A quiet Thursday this week was enlivened by a visit from archaeo-botanist, farmer and advocate of heritage grain, John Letts. John is possessed of irrepressible enthusiasm and a restless energy. Conversations can take wild turns and there is never a dull moment. This time around, as well as dropping off a dizzying array of pumpkins and squash from his kitchen garden in Buckinghamshire, he also brought a case of beer, the result of one of his many grain-related ventures. Did we know that before beer contained hops it was called gruit? That gruit referred to a mixture of botanical aromatics to flavour the beer and that often these would include psychoactive plants? Did we realise...
Good afternoon one and all, We have written many times about staging, the wonderful concept, commonplace in our industry, of spending time at establishments you admire to gain knowledge, practical skills, and meet new people. For obvious reasons, I haven’t been able to partake in any of this sort of thing for the last 18 months, until this week when I had the pleasure of spending 2 days with Helen Evans at Eric’s in Dulwich. A compact bakery on a residential street, Eric’s has been offering up exquisite viennoisserie and stoneground sourdough bread for the last two and a half years, and justifiably has queues snaking around the block every Friday and Saturday. With a small team, Helen has created...
Good afternoon everyone, When putting together our weekly pastry menus, there's a few principles we live by. Of course, the cinnamon bun, cardamom bun and chocolate chip cookie are going nowhere, as the earliest sweet items we ever presented to the fine folks of East Oxford. Since then we have expanded the offering somewhat, with a dedicated pastry team putting in even more hours than the bread team, headed up by Valentina, she of the Tiramisu Cake. So now we always like to have one or two guest buns on the list, rotating every two or three weeks so everyone gets a chance to try them. This coming week it's the whole vanilla bun and the Chelsea with a marmalade, brown...
