The rise, fall and rise of the sourdough king
An interview with Syd Aston, organic sourdough baker who led the way, and why Sourdough September matters.
First of all, apologies if you’ve already received this. Substack has been super buggy and only sent it to a small percentage of you so I’m resending.
Hello dear reader and welcome to this weeks Queen of Markets piece on Substack. Today it’s all about Real Bread, a celebration for Sourdough September.
Before we meet Syd Aston, a quick introduction to Sourdough September with Chris Young, coordinator for The Real Bread Campaign. Created in September 2013, the idea was to help demystify bread, and to encourage people to have a go at making their own sourdough bread, or buy it from a local, indie bakery.
Real sourdough bread has no added baker’s yeast, chemical raising agents or other additives. Chris has continued to take on manufacturers with campaigns that include challenging current laws, and regulating bread labels that hide a multitude of sins.
As Chris told me;
‘‘Despite the ever-growing popularity of sourdough bread, there’s plenty of misinformation and misunderstanding about what it actually is. Many people think it’s a type or style of bread (hand-shaped, open-textured, crispy-crusted, only made by artisans and always tangy, for example) when in fact it’s a process that can be used to make any type of leavened bread. Even though it’s the oldest way of making dough rise, some people are wary of sourdough. Others sometimes get carried away with the claims they make for the benefits of eating sourdough bread.’’
I asked him to explain their campaign about Sourfaux;
‘‘Sourfaux is sourdough in name alone. Genuine sourdough bread is made without additives and leavened using only a live sourdough starter culture. When a company deploys the word sourdough in naming or marketing a product manufactured using any other raising agent or an additive, it’s what we call sourfaux.
‘‘The necessary changes can’t occur to the same extent if it’s sped up by baker’s yeast or other raising agents, or at all if no live culture is used.’’
If you want to buy real bread; Chris advises;
‘‘Always read the label! The only way to be sure that a product is what we call Real Bread is to check there are no additives on the ingredients list. If you’re after genuine sourdough, then the word yeast mustn’t appear either.’’
If you’re buying unpackaged bread, that might involve asking to see the ingredients; don’t assume that just because it’s a local bakery that they won’t be using additives.
I asked Chris for a comment about the price of real bread as opposed to a cheap supermarket loaf.
‘‘You can make Real Bread at home (by hand or in an adopted machine) for pence. But, yes, due to economy of scale and other factors, a small, indie bakery usually needs to charge more for a hand-crafted loaf than a supermarket does for an additive-laden, industrial dough product.
‘‘How to bridge the gap between what small bakeries need to charge, and what people in their communities on the tightest budgets can realistically afford, is a challenge we work to address through our Real Bread For All initiative.
‘‘If you don’t have to think much about paying for non-essentials - around £4 on a takeaway coffee, for example - you can afford to choose to buy delicious, nutritious Real Bread. It’s a true value loaf and buying local means that more of what you pay helps support skilled jobs in your neighbourhood, helps keep your high street alive. It also keeps money circulating in your local economy instead going into the pockets of company directors and shareholders.’’
Chris gave me his thoughts about Syd Aston, the baker you’re about to meet;
‘‘Syd’s a baking legend, or at least he should be. Syd’s not one for blowing his own trumpet, though, and his lack of desire for self-promotion means he’s barely known beyond people who have learned from him or bought his bread. Instead, he’s spent decades quietly getting on with the important job of making high-quality Real Bread and continually striving to make better-bred-bread.’’
To find out more and to support the charity’s work, please head to the Real Bread Campaign website.
I’ve known Syd Aston for many years. As mentioned by Chris above, he’s a modest man who never blows his own trumpet so I’m going to do it for him. Syd was the first official organic baker in the UK. One of the first to lead the way in the campaign for real bread made with few and natural ingredients.
His first London market was in Spitalfields in 1993, back when it was still a real market with real producers selling real food. He gets very excited telling me about it;
‘‘when we started, within six months we were taking £1700, on a Sunday in 1993 it was so incredible.’’
Nowadays Syd operates from a small unit in the countryside in Berkshire. His ethos hasn’t changed since the day he began, influenced by growing up with his parents who farmed organically in Pembrokeshire. His mother was Austrian and they were known as the ‘strange people who ate garlic’. He remembers her making bread;
‘‘The kitchen table was a dough trough, and the lid would fall back over. A cup sized lump would be kept in the corner. She'd only bake once a fortnight or something like that. The lump of dough was taken out, soaked in water overnight. And that was the starter, for making the bread. She used to make seven kilo loaves then. And one white loaf for a Sunday, because white flour was more expensive.
‘‘Up at five in the morning to fetch the cows for milking, cycling two miles to school.’’
Never buying meat ‘‘because the farmers were poor in the ‘50s and ‘60s; they had wealth in terms of the food they grew, the land and the stock, but never, ever any cash, so we never bought meat. It was important; expensive and in short supply. Chickens that went off the lay, they were killed, and you'd have to half-boil them and then roast them, you know, because they're tough.’’
In 1982 he bought a small holding near Cardiff with an acre of land. In the orchard of the garden, there was a shed, with an old faggot oven, ‘‘you know, a beehive oven’’. Coming out of civil engineering, Syd wanted to rebuild this collapsed stone oven.
‘‘And of course... I had to learn how to bake in it. I didn't have a clue. There was no internet then, so you tried to find books and you couldn't find anything about it, you know. I went to St Fagans Folk Museum. And I had some information from them. It takes hours to heat up, and all this sort of thing. Over a six-month period, I got it built and started baking. I had two friends who had food shops. I used to take bread to them on a Friday night.
‘‘And that's basically how it all started. And then about six months later, St Fagans asked me would I go there to work because they'd brought an old oven from Aberystwyth and rebuilt it there. So that was in ‘84 or ‘85. I couldn't afford to work on the salary that they offered me’’
St Fagans agreed to let him use the oven without charging him rent. ‘‘You come and work it and you sort of live off your own proceeds. And that was basically the start of it.’’
After two years, Syd started suffering from smoke inhalation, because the smoke wouldn't go out the flue properly. ‘‘They wouldn't allow us to put any fans in; everything had to be wood, no metal even, because it was reciprocating the oven built 150 years ago. Anything that I built had to be wooden, shelving, trays. You'd be mixing your dough in a wooden dough trowel, and so you'd be smoking, breathing in flour dust. You'd stand up for a breather, and then you've got the smoke in the room half way through the room.’’
In Cardiff he met an 89 year old retired baker who offered him his bakery. ‘‘He’d had a brilliant business with the local Jewish community... Look, he says, you can get that back. So we did. We got the Beth Din involved, and they sanctioned us. And it was great because there was no electric ovens. We never used to let the fire go out. So the rabbi would come after Christmas or the New Year, light the fire for me. We had a really good Jewish trade in Cardiff.’’
One elderly customer was used to buying challah bread from Manchester. Syd started making it, and today he still uses the same recipe.
In 1992 after a recession, with three people going bust and owing Syd about £60,000 he got a phone call from Elizabeth Taylor, ‘‘not the actress’’, in London. ‘‘We're starting up an organic market in Spitalfields. Would you like to attend? And I said, this is crazy. Is there nobody in London doing organic bread? No, nobody doing organic bread in London. Plenty of wholemeal, but nobody doing organic bread. And so I thought we'll give it a try. And I couldn't believe it. I was taking as much in one day as I was taking in Cardiff in five days.
‘‘I was baking on a Friday night, delivering on a Saturday morning. I had about two hours sleep, back into the bakery to bake for London on Sunday, with a little Renault extra van, and when I came back on Sunday night, I'd have to start baking again for the Monday morning, so it was a no-brainer when I moved to London in 1993.’’
‘‘Baking can’t be automated. Syd notes wryly; ‘‘Don't say, it's the end of my shift now, I'm going home, and there's still bread in the oven, or dough rising, ready to go in the oven, and things like this. it's almost a way of life, really, isn't it? And farming and baking and cooking goes hand-in-hand with that.
‘‘It does annoy me a little bit when you find in other industries that, my shift is finished, so somebody's going to replace me. What if there's nobody to replace you?
‘‘When we were in London, we had people knocking on the door all the time, can we come to learn to bake, or can you teach us to bake?
‘‘So many people have said, I should start a bakery school. Everybody's doing it. And my argument has always been, I'm not good enough to teach people, because I'm not really a baker. It's only something I've learned from old books. It's on the internet now. So a lot of it was trial and error.
‘‘We had quite a reputation in London at the time, with people coming from abroad, Australia and New Zealand, it was the first place they called; Celtic Bakers to ask, any jobs going? We never had to advertise with people.
‘‘Here, you can't get people. We've got a chap who came through an absolutely horrific accident, virtually brain dead for six months. He's doing things with our website and he wants to learn to bake now. That's his passion. Last week I said, please send me an invoice. I want to pay you some money. ‘No, no, no, no, no. I'm all right at the minute.’ He said, ‘what you and Olga have done for me is more than money can pay for. You help me get my brain back working again’ Because he still forgets words. And you have to help him a little bit with words. And he's so keen to see this business develop.’’
In 2007 Syd’s mother had a stroke and he and partner Olga were back and forth to Wales, sometimes in the same day. More family tragedy followed with Syd’s brother dying and his father in hospital with pneumonia. Back and forth London to Wales. When another bakery suggested to Syd to join forces with them it felt like the right decision to make.
Whilst we’re talking, Olga comes in to correct Syd if she thinks he’s said something incorrect. What is clear is that this was a difficult time. Syd’s father died and Syd himself was in hospital whilst paperwork was travelling between businesses. What comes across strongly is the feeling that Syd and Olga believed in trust, and that trust was lacking. As Olga says of Syd; ‘if he says he will do it, it's his word and the promise is a promise.’
Syd adds; ‘‘at the end we had to pay the leases on the premises, but also the leases for the equipment. We had to pay off the leases because we’d bought half a million worth of equipment the year before because we were doing the Stamp Collection, for Terence Stamp and Elizabeth Buxton.’’
In 2009, having lost their carefully built up business, Syd and Olga had to start again.
‘‘We restarted in London, but we couldn't use the name Celtic Bakers. We started as Nature's Bake House. In 2010, Elizabeth Buxton came to visit us and she said I hear you are retired in Wales. That's what everybody says. Nobody knows about Nature's Bake House. Doesn't sound right. So we changed it to Aston’s and she was right. Lots of shops came to us straight away. And we're ever so grateful. Stoke Newington changed in a week. And then I wrote to London Farmers’ Markets and got some markets almost immediately. I know they were only small ones and trial ones, but still, I've learnt enough about LFM that if you show a bit of loyalty, it's already reciprocated.’’
With everything that’s happened to them, the vision at the bakery hasn’t changed. Syd still believes fundamentally in keeping everything organic, from the heritage wheat they use to the oil that greases the bread tins.
Ask Syd about the flour and grains he uses and his eyes light up.
The bakery moved out of London to Sheepdrove Farm in order to have the ability to grow their own grains and moved to their current unit in 2019.
‘‘I don't really have any forward vision except for working with Andy Forbes. Do you know Andy?1
‘‘He's very well known for collecting grains from different universities, you know, gene banks, propagating and developing and then trying to grow them. He's so enthusiastic about wheat growing. I've never known anybody like him.
‘‘He prefers to be organic, a lot of farmers don't want to do it organically but they're prepared to try to grow these grains. We had eight tons delivered the other day of his new blend, which is called IQ. We tried it and it's working quite well. These are all long straw varieties, as is the spelt we're having grown for us, and the rye. All old heritage varieties.
‘‘99% of the spelt grown in this country now has been hybridized. Well, more than hybridized, it's been developed in the lab and they cross-spread it with wheat. So it's really ordinary modern wheat you grow because if you see the fields, they only stand two foot high, whereas these older ones are taller varieties and they don't grow so well in non-organic systems because you have to apply nitrogen or they apply nitrogen and that weakens the stem and the taller varieties fall over.
‘‘Because you've got low inputs with organic growing, they're stronger plants. Stronger roots. We've had so many comments over the years that when we do the heritage wheat, people who are coeliacs have said, I don't understand why this is working for me. I don't have a problem. So it's something more than just gluten intolerance.
We've also found from customers that when they buy gluten-free bread, it's full of xanthan gum and different things. Years ago a nutritionist said, with modern gluten-free breads, it’s actually going to do the same thing to our bodies as gluten is doing because it's the same thing, it's elastic bands basically. That's why I'd like to move forward more on that. We've found a huge difference. We still buy Dove's farm flour, which is fortified, because people expect challah bread to be white and the rolls to be white.
I mention that I have seen spelt challah in some Jewish shops.
‘‘That's white spelt, not brown spelt. Our spelt grain costs us £1,000 a ton, then we still have to mill it. If we made white flour out of that, we'd lose at least 30% of the weight. So out of one ton, we'd end up with 700 kilos of wheat which is going to make our grain £1500-1600 a ton. You add the cost of milling into it as well, so you're talking not far off £2000 a ton. When you equate that into a product, I'm afraid I don't think we'd be able to sell it.
‘‘Commercial mills like Shipton Mills and Heygates, their approach to making white flour and whole wheat flour is totally different than ours. We just have two stones running together and then the flour goes through sieves, and the coarser particles are taken out and you end up with white flour. Believe it or not, the mills make white flour first.
They have so many rollers going around different speeds and different rotations It sheers off the bran first and wheat germ, etc, and to make a wholemeal put them all back in together again. How they're allowed to do that, I really don't understand, but there we have it.
You're making proper stone ground flour?
‘‘Yes. We could put a finer sieve on ours. We're getting something like about 78% extraction on ours now. So semolina and bran is about 22%. We could make it whiter, but then that would increase the cost.
Most people are happy with the slightly off-white colour. And it's got a better flavour. The concentration now is on getting more heritage grains.
I see the beautiful wooden mills in action, and smell the grains and the fresh flour, a million miles away from most of the flour we see in supermarkets. Syd is proud to be one of the few bakers in the UK still milling their own flour.
Syd makes test batches of bread each time.
‘‘Fortunately, we're in the position that we know where the grain was grown, what field it was grown in, and the farmers will tell us, like Henry was here this morning, he'd say, look, that was grown in the lower field. And that's the thing. I do a test with it. So we'll make a few loafs off of it. Because it does differ. But I know when I first started, every time we had a delivery from the flour mill, we always had to do a test bake with it first to make sure that was normal. But people don't do that these days so much. Ben probably does because he mills his own flour.
We’d been talking about Ben McKinnon founder of E5 Bakehouse who’d brought a team to visit Syd. Ben later told me;
‘‘I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him several times. He's an incredibly passionate and knowledgeable baker, he loves getting out there and giving his customers fantastic loaves of bread and has a deep commitment to producing bread in an ecologically sound manner.’’
From the cost of wheat, to the price of bread. I want to know if Syd could break down the elements of making a loaf of bread.
‘‘That's quite easy, really. Normal high street bakers, very few of them bake from scratch. Because we're organic, we have to bake from scratch. You don't have premixes. Iulian downstairs, for a couple of months he went to work for a bakery in Reading, who's got about five or six shops. And nearly everything come out of a bag. You just added water, all the wet stuff, from doughnuts through to the bread.
‘‘I think most artisan bakers, whether organic or non-organic, do. Although they employ a lot of methods that I don't agree with.
‘‘So, really it's a high labour content. We're not mechanical. We have a mixer, but everything else is done by hand. Bakers who are highly mechanised have dividers to divide the dough. One man could easily do a few thousand loaves a day. Here, one person could do maybe 200 or 300 loaves a day, or two people 300 or 400 loaves. So, it's obviously a huge cost. To do, say, 200 rolls, takes two people an hour to do. In a slightly bigger bakery than ours, they would need to buy a divider and roll-making plant for, I'd say, £20,000. And they would produce 2,000 an hour with just one person.
‘‘Another simple way of explaining it is, when we were doing the Stamp Collection, the wheat-free bread for Terence Stamp and Elizabeth Buxton, we had to move to a more automated system. We worked on between three and four times material cost. That was the measure that I used in a fag-packet measurement, you know. And it's not far out, because I always believe we all work in percentages. So, if you can't work it out in a fag-packet, then it's not worth doing, like, you know.
‘‘So, like I say, we always worked between three and, say, four and a half times material cost. Depends on how much work was involved. When we did the Stamp Collection, to be able to sell in Waitrose and Sainsbury's, we had to work on twice our materials. So, if something cost us £1, we could sell it for around about £2.
‘‘And we could make £20,000 a month profit on that. We were breaking even. We'd probably make between 5% and 10% profit on craft stuff, because we're only craft here. I know we're not the most efficient people in the world, and we're not so businesslike, but on an £800,000 turnover, we made £15,000 profit last year. So, it's totally different.
‘‘It's easy to see why people become mechanised, because labour is very expensive these days. A baker is costing around £700 per week. The minimum wage is, what, £25,000 a year now, isn't it? You could buy a machine for £10,000 and you'd save yourself a person. So, you've regained that cost back in four months.
Energy and electricity, our electric bill is over £2,000 a month for a small little bakery.
The only additional cost that we got that's more than most other people is transport. But that's the price you pay for doing what we're doing, really. So, it's really down to labour and the food that's already prepped for you, you know. I mean, we've still got to prep our onions, peel, chop and cook them. People buy them ready cooked these days. So, everything is prepared for them commercially.
So, what would you say to someone who says I'm not going to pay that?
‘‘I've had this instance a couple of times. The last time was at Newbury Market. I sold a walnut loaf and it was £6.50 or something like that. And I wrapped it up, give it to her. £6.50, please. And, she said, I’m never going to buy that. I asked, oh, where do you buy your bread from now at the moment then? Because I thought we wouldn't be too far out, you know, perhaps within 50 pence or something like that. She says, I've got perfectly good artisan bread from Tesco's. Really, I said, I'll have a look next time I go. And before you leave, do you mind telling me what your profession is? Oh, I'm a solicitor, she said.
‘‘Well excuse me, madam. I said, do you know my bakers get paid £12 or £13 an hour or whatever. Last time I used her sister, it cost me £175 an hour. And I said, we're not a business of making a lot of money. I'll probably never see her again. She'd never buy her bread from us again. But it's so annoyed me that these professional people, to not understand why our bread is more expensive.
‘‘My heart goes out to people that believe in proper food, shall I say. Not necessarily organic, but proper food. And they may be unemployed, they may be students, there's quite a lot of people who go back to open university or something like that. They're spending their time at home looking after their children. And still, because of the children, they will buy good food, you know. And this is why we developed the People's Loaf.
Tell me about the People's Loaf.
‘‘We wanted to produce an affordable loaf and we experimented incorporating semolina. We use it for dusting the bread on the bottom of the oven, and it goes to a pig farmer. He's a good farmer, not organic, but he does good stuff. The bakery waste all goes to him. And we thought, look, we're throwing this away. Can we try it? And we tried with various percentages. So for every kilo of flour we put 600 grams of semolina in it. So it's costing us nothing. I know one would say you should charge a bit extra for it, but we wanted to produce this loaf to be under £3. It's had to go up a little bit now because we've been doing it for 12 months, 18 months.
‘‘We still sell it on the market for about £4.50 Whereas now a loaf is between £6 and £7 and it's very nutritious. We're making similar margins on it as our other bread. We cut a little bit to make it. But some shops are very greedy. They still want to put a huge markup. They don't take our recommended retail price. Earth Natural do, for instance. They only add 30% on the cost of their bread, anyway. Planet Organics, they want the full 40% margin. But it's proven quite popular. People are used to having white bread, even organic, Up until 1996, the market was predominantly wholemeal.
‘‘Between 1996-2000 we saw the tables turn completely from wholemeal to white. We were selling 10% of wholemeal compared to before it was 90% wholemeal.
Is this because of the rise in the popularity of sourdough?
‘‘No, not so much. Because we were about the only people making sourdoughs from an early age. It is more to do with French and Italian cuisine. In the ‘90’s, everybody wanted French bread. Everybody wanted Italian bread. So we saw wholemeal die a death almost. But now we've noticed a trend that it is coming back. People are a bit more conscious about eating, not so much pure wholemeal, but a bit more wholemeal in the loaf.
‘‘We're finding the sales of the people’s loaf growing steadily.
‘‘Our wholemeal has always been quite a heavy loaf, not like a wholemeal from a normal baker. We use British wheat. It's has a naturally lower protein content. When you go to Mills, they will do everything to get protein level up.
‘‘In Cardiff, John from Shipton Mills would say to me, ‘we've got good protein. We've got 11.8% protein in our wheat this week.’ I've always tried to work with British wheat. So, it didn't matter if it was 10% one year or it was 12% another year. And that's what I believed in, that if we could use British wheat, it is better for you anyway. You don't have to transport grains from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.’’
Syd talks about protein levels in white flour increasing so as it’s got stronger ‘‘you can get more air in. You can make bigger, lighter very strong protein, high-gluten loaves. The other thing; a lot add gluten to bread, to make it stronger. You can actually buy bags of gluten. And I think that hasn't helped people's intolerances.’’
I tell Syd about buying loaves of Cranks honey and sunflower bread and naturally he’s got his own story about it.
When he was baking in Cardiff, Cranks invited him to make their bread for them. Their wholemeal bread was being made by Goswells who also baked for Doves’s Farm. Cranks had been sold to Guinness, and then Guinness was sold. And although Syd had said yes, when they came to him with the recipe, he refused to do it for them.
‘‘They came down with the recipe, and there was 1% sunflower in the loaf, or 1.5%, something silly like that, plus the topping. A maximum of 3% of seeds. Whenever we make a loaf with any added ingredients, we're always working between 10% and 12%. Like you do a sunflower loaf, you put about 10%. They were cutting costs because the original Cranks, I've got some of the old books, they're all falling apart. They had a proper amount of seeds in it.
What’s Syd’s message re Sourdough September and trying real bread?
‘‘The stock thing that I have to say is really we should consider our wastage. Many people will cook food today and throw it in the bin tomorrow. Why? Food usually tastes better the second day. We all like a slice of bread when it comes out of the oven. But I think the best flavour comes from bread when it's two or three days old. It might be a little bit drier, but it's got more flavour to it.
‘‘Good food might appear to be expensive. But if you break it down, it's not really expensive if you don’t waste it. And if it tastes good, that's another bonus.
‘‘The big thing is about wastage and learning what to do with what you've got left over. Even if it's going hard and dry, you can always use it.
‘‘We make breadcrumbs. We crumb it up and we add like 5% or 6% back in or 10% if we can get away with it. So we're trying to reuse ingredients.
‘‘We’re going to start putting tips on our website on what to do with old bread.
‘‘And there's so many things you can do. Croutons, roast them in garlic, a bit of rosemary with it, and simple bread and butter pudding.
The bread that Syd is most excited about at the moment is the pumpernickel he’s been developing.
‘‘It's a four-day process. People make pumpernickel with coffee, caramel or malt extract, and they put sweeteners in it. Ours is rye grain, kibbled cracked rye, water and salt that's all, baked for 20 hours in the oven and you create this Maillard reaction.
‘‘It's very slightly sweet, very malty without adding all these things. We put it in at about 180 degrees and then after an hour reduce to 120 and because ovens aren't so accurate, especially the older ones, we keep watching it every few hours so it bakes between 110 and 120 degrees centigrade.
‘‘I’m still learning, I’ve been trying this for two years. If it didn't work out right, then you leave it and I'll do it another day and because you have to make sure you're consistent with things like for instance, today we'll do the soakers; you soak the grains and soak the flour and tomorrow you combine all your three ingredients, three separate soakers and the sourdough so that's day two. You leave that to proof for about five hours, put it in tins and about three hours later you'll put that in the oven then it bakes for the day, then you need to leave it to cool down for at least 24 hours before you can slice it up. I want to sell it sliced because I’m not 100% sure of it yet.
Syd show me some of the loaves. ‘‘I sliced this loaf fresh because it came out the oven at four or five o'clock yesterday afternoon so it would probably be cool enough to slice.
‘‘From day one, from 1983, we've been more customer-led than idea-led’’ Syd says proudly.
‘‘Perhaps for that reason, development hasn't been so great. When I started the rye bread, Reiner in Pulse Whole Foods, Cardiff kept saying, why don't you make a German bread? And I said, I don't know how to do it, you know. And so anyway, I asked mum. It took about six months to get the rye bread off the ground because I didn't know.
‘‘We've always wanted to bake like people did 150 years ago basically before the advent of steel mills, so that's another main thing about our bakery; we don't use refrigeration. All artisan bakers use refrigeration. They store dough in the fridge overnight then they bake it off early in the morning. We didn't have refrigeration 100-150 years ago. You worked on ambient temperatures and that's what we're trying to do here. We did try it once for about a month. We had so many complaints on the markets people asking, what have you done to your bread, so we went back.’’
Stefan has been selling bread for Syd for more years than I remember
Syd smiles; ‘‘Every year he says ‘I'm not going to do this anymore.’ He says; ‘you ought to sell the business you could do this and that, time you give up’ and I said; I don't want to you know, main reason is the people that we got working here because we have tried to sell it but I don't want to do what happened to us (with Celtic Bakers). They want to come in take the name, move it somewhere else, or get in the super duper manager in but they wouldn't guarantee the staff and to us it's important. I mean Iulian’s been with us 12, 13 years, you can't just dispose of them, they're part of the business.’’
What questions should customers ask at a bakery?
‘‘What does it taste like? Ours is not the most beautiful-looking bread. It’s very rustic-looking. But its flavour. People tell us that there's flavours in it. And we get disappointed because we're always trying other people's breads.
‘‘Bread should not be just something which is a side to your dish. Bread on itself should be something which will fulfill you. Just a bit of butter and I don't know, lettuce and a slice of tomato, and that should be your lunch.’’
A little bit of cheese?
‘‘Well, now you will want a glass of wine. I'm with you. It should be at the centre of the meal.’’
He tells Olga; ‘‘I offered Cheryl some brandy, but she refused’’
(It was 11am after all).
Then we’re off, talking about caraway, and colouring, and how they’ve experimented using vegetable that would have gone to waste to add moisture and natural colour to breads. And Syd is telling me about people he admires including some of the loyal wholefood shops he’s been dealing with since the 1980’s, sending them bread from Cardiff.
‘‘Some people will change on a sixpence, depending upon what’s trending out there. They’ll change their ideas, philosophy as long as they’re making money. I know we’ve got to have a roof over our heads, but there’s more to this game than money isn’t there.’’
And we’re reminiscing about malt loaf, Syd remembering Bermaline malt loaf, whilst I have memories of school day tea time with slices of buttered Soreen malt loaf.
I imagine a proper dark malt loaf with caraway, properly squidgy and heavy with sultanas. We agree that Soreen2 isn’t the same as it used to be.
‘‘It's squatty, you know, not cooked properly’’
Have you thought about making a malt loaf? Could you do that?
‘‘I have, yes, we'll have to try that. Yes, with a long process. You're giving us ideas now.
Before I leave, Syd gives me a half dozen eggs from their own flock of hens, telling me all about the breed, the French Poule de Bresse. How he and Olga have time to raise hens is a question for another day.
‘‘No-one leaves here empty handed’’.
Ben MacKinnon commented; ‘‘I hope that he gets to his cottage in Wales that he dreams of soon’’. I do too, but not until that malt loaf is made.
Find Aston’s Bakehouse at various farmers’ markets in London and Newbury, and at selected independent shops. Stockists here, but do check with Aston’s first as their list is slightly out of date.
Where to buy real bread, mostly in the UK and not a totally inclusive list. A few US bakers listed too.
If you enjoyed reading this post PLEASE do share, restack and like it, it really helps it find the large audience Syd and his team deserves.
Brockwell Bakes founder. Bringing "long straw" landrace milling wheats back into cultivation across the British Isles.
I don’t know about you, but I won’t eat anything containing palm oil, let alone Partially Inverted Sugar Syrup.
This is such an interesting piece, Cheryl. So much really important stuff about bread!
Wonderful article- so full of interest and insights and Syd’s wonderful stories and values. Syd was once my son Isaac’s boss!