Real Bread Week at Loaf

Hello friends of Loaf!

This is our short weekly bulletin letting you know what's on offer over the next seven days.

This week we're doing Pistachio and Blood Orange Financiers which look quite something. But, some of you have asked, what is a financier? Wikipedia to the rescue!

A financier is a small French almond cake, flavoured with beurre noisette, usually baked in a small mold. Light and moist with a crisp, eggshell-like exterior, the traditional financier also contains egg whites, flour, and powdered sugar. The molds are usually small rectangular loaves similar in size to petits fours.

Originally made by the Visitandine order of nuns in the Middle Ages, the financier was popularized in the nineteenth century. The name financier is said to derive from the traditional rectangular mold, which resembles a bar of gold.

We've also increased the number of Spelt Sourdough and Baguettes due to seemingly insatiable demand.

What is Real Bread Week?

Loaf is proud to be a member of the Real Bread Campaign which mirrors many of our aims and objectives as a community bakery. This week is Real Bread Week where bakeries and bakers of all scales celebrate and promote the benefits of good bread.

The campaign is broadly split into two areas. The first is that a healthy society needs healthy bread. The legacy of post-war industrial baking processes, when grain quality was low and needs were high, means most commercial bread is made with additives to shorten production times. It is then supplemented with artificial nutrients to compensate for those lost in the process. What should have been an emergency stop-gap measure has become an unnecessary and less healthy industry standard.

Real bread should not be a luxury, artisanal product (though there's nothing wrong with a fancy loaf). It should be affordable and everywhere. At Loaf we're proud of our Stirchley loaf, a healthy, tasty and simple bread that we keep affordable.

The other side to the campaign is to create a sustainable ecosystem comprising bakers and bread-eaters working towards the campaign's aims. When Tom started Loaf a decade ago, one of his aims was to encourage more bakeries on more high streets. Since then we've seen much more competition emerge around Birmingham, which is great! We want to see a Loaf-style bakery on every high street and, pandemic aside, we're always happy to offer help and advice.

Over the last year we haven't been able to be as proactive in the Real Bread Campaign as we'd like, for obvious reasons. But being aligned with its ethos, and that of the co-operative movement, has certainly helped us to survive the pandemic thus far.

Real bread is nice and tasty, but it's also important, and we should never forget that.

Thanks for all your continued support. See you next week!

Team Loaf: Nancy, Martha, Neil, Sarah, Molly, Phil, Rach, Pete & Val.