Neil and Pete had a great time at Stirchley Community Market on Saturday. It was rammed full of new and familiar faces and can safely be described as a success. It was great to have a bit more time to chat with people about what we do and why, and Neil did some in-depth sessions with struggling bakers.
The volunteers who manage the market are hoping to make it a quarterly event so we guess we’ll be back in the spring with trays of hot cross buns. See you then!
(Market pic by Kerry Leslie)
If you’re an aficionado of Loaf’s Instagram Stories, you’ll know Rachel’s advent treasure hunt is back for a third year!
Every day between now and Christmas she’s hiding a bread voucher somewhere in Stirchley and posting a clue at different times of the day. It’s then a race to get there first, and competition is often fierce.
Each voucher can be exchanged for a loaf of bread, and the final ‘golden ticket’ is for a big bag of goodies.
(The whys and wherefores of Instagram are a mystery to us greybeards on the email newsletter team but we think you can see an archive of the clues at this link.)
We passed on £250 worth of cash donations from those of you that were able to last month, alongside the many tins and packets of food left with us. We’ve been asked to pass on our thanks, so thanks!
We will continue to support our food bank as long as it is necessary, but it’s important to remember that it shouldn’t be necessary. A society where people are going hungry is a broken society and we should be working to eliminate the causes of this, not picking up the pieces again and again. Thankfully the Trussell Trust agrees.
But it seems we are a long way off this goal and people are suffering. This report of five months at a food bank is eye-opening and quite disturbing. It’s terrible that food banks are necessary, but they are.
You can make a cash donation with your Loaf purchases at the counter or online, or give directly here. And we continue to be a drop-off point for needed products.
We are delighted and relieved to finally be back to our pre-pandemic opening hours. From this week we are open Tuesday through Friday from 12 to 6pm, along with Saturday 8am to 1pm. These will be our hours going forward with no further changes planned or anticipated.
The Tuesday offer at Loaf is broadly the same as other days with a couple of differences.
We’re also shifting the Tarka daal curry back to Tuesday as it needs less prep than our other curries.
Loaf: once again serving you fresh bread on both of the days that start with a T!
You’ve been patient for 11 months and it’s time to be rewarded. Our legendary mince pies are on sale from this Thursday 1st December.
Packed with the finest ingredients, including local apples and stout from Attic Brew Co, they’re available as vegan or buttered.
Pre-orders for the rest of December will go live this weekend, including mince pies, so you won’t miss out.
Spread the word — mince pies are back!
Pip’s Hot Sauce is one of the indie food-makers who started at Stirchley Market and we’re honoured to call Pip a good friend of Loaf. So when she said she was looking for raffle prizes to raise money for a dear friend with brain cancer, we said yes, of course.
The range of prizes in this raffle is quite something, from meals to artworks to a one-off crystal skull hot sauce — a real testament to Pip’s importance in our community. We’ve put a £140 cookery school voucher in there too. She’s given so much over the years and it’s an honour to give something back.
Raffle tickets are £2.50 each, and you can of course buy more than one. Please help and spread the word.
Way back in 2010, before we had a shop on the high street, Loaf was a founding smallholder at Stirchley Community Market. The market had a pandemic hiatus but is returning on Saturday 3rd December from 10am-3pm, and we’ll be there!
We’ll have a selection of baked goods for sale and Neil, one of our baking tutors, will be on hand to answer any questions you have about your home bread-making. Whether you’ve done a class with us or not, we’ll be happy to help for no charge — though we will be taking donations for the food bank, hint hint!
As promoters of real bread we’re always happy to give help and advice, but a busy shop is not always the best place. So come along to our first ‘bread surgery’ where there’ll be plenty of time to get some tips.
If you’re not familiar with Stirchley Market, it’s a non-profit project completely run by volunteers and is one of the seeds of Stirchley’s current blossoming, with many independents finding their feet there. We’re delighted to see it back and hope you’ll go check it out.
Rach has been waxing lyrical about the new series of Chef’s Table: Pizza which came to Netflix last month. Take it away Rach!
Over recent years Netflix has done some pretty incredible food documentary shows. Chef’s Table is one of those series and if you haven’t watched any yet, you’re really missing out. Their new series on Pizza offers a great insight into the minds of those dedicated to making the very best pizza with the very best ingredients.
From Rome to Arizona, this series uncovers the stories behind the world’s best pizza chefs. Not only does the show focus on each chef’s rise to fame and recognition in the industry, but it also highlights the struggles with mental health issues, the long hours building a business and the ways in each chef they overcame them.
It’s truly inspiring to see how people so dedicated to their craft spread their messages and vision through their baking. Past series cover a broader range of famous chefs — a particular favourite being Pastry, which highlights some bakers who truly changed the game in their vision and creativity. We love it, and we’re sure you’ll love it too.
We’ve been taking donations online and at the counter for the B30 Food bank and during September and October you gave £257.62 in cash, plus loads of packaged food and toiletries that we didn’t get a chance to quantify.
We get regular thank you emails from the food bank but it’s all due to you, our customers, so, on behalf of the B30 Food Bank, thank you!
Last year you raised over £1,000 for Migrant Help who support newly arrived refugees and migrants who’ve been placed in temporary accommodation. “We holistically support the individuals and families, either as they await permanent accommodation or as they settle into their new communities. We help them access the necessary healthcare, language lessons, education, employment opportunities and community support.”
This week we received an update of where some of the money has gone: bikes!
“With your support we were able to get the clients bikes, helmets and locks. Clients were gifted the bikes for their personal use and was also given riding lessons — bike ability level 1, 2 and level 3. As you can see the clients went on a lovely ride and are really happy they were given such a valuable resource.”
Valuable resource is right! These bikes will give them the freedom and autonomy to properly settle into our city.
Left Feet Forward is an exhibition at Artefact about cooperatives. It brings together archival printed material of the cooperative history of South Birmingham, particularly the Ten Acres and Stirchley Cooperative Society, and places it among Chris Neophytou’s photographs of recent grass-roots cooperatives that have developed in the area, Gugan Gill’s film exploring this history and legacy, and a play by Susan Finlay taking a wry look at cooperative organisation and politics.
There will also be a number of events discussing the role of cooperatives and a chance for local residents to explore their local history.
We had our group photo taken for this last week (in the rain!) and are very excited to see how it comes together. The launch is this Friday at 7:30pm — see you there!
Most of the bees looked after by Rea Valley Apiary live, as the name implies, along the River Rea, which includes Stirchley so if you have a garden there’s a good chance there’s nectar from there in one of those jars. This produces a their polyfloral Local Honey — a mix of whatever flowers are in bloom when the bees are active — and its flavour is a reflection of our area.
But there are areas where one particular flower will dominate, and beekeepers will often take a colony to forage and produce a monofloral honey with a distinctive colour and flavour. Rea Valley took some of their bees out of the city for a change of scene and we’ve taken delivery of two of the subsequent monoflorals. Borage Honey from borage fields in Stratford and Heather Honey from moors in the Peak District. Enjoy!
We’re always looking to stock new local spreads and condiments so we were delighted when a new honey supplier got in touch. Quinton Meadows Honey is run by George and Sue Jackson whose hives are based in Quinton, on the edge of Birmingham. Their bees collect nectar from the Quinton Meadows Nature Reserve, Woodgate Valley Park, the local allotments and urban gardens — all of which provides a mix of rural and urban blossom.
George likes to think of their honey as ‘one year in a jar’, as the honey is harvested just once in August, creating a unique amalgam of all the flora in the area.
Sue gave us a sample jar to try and we loved it, so we’re delighted to add it to the shelves.
George with his hives
For the last month we’ve been trialling a heritage flour in all our brown loaves — that’s the wholemeal sourdough, the multigrain tins and the Stirchley loaf. The grain comes from Mill Farm, which you’ll remember we visited last year, and is stoneground by our regular supplier Matthews, keeping the chain short and simple.
Our normal wholemeal flour is blended from a variety of farms and while it’s always great quality, it does mean it’s impossible to trace to an origin. This has become important to us as we’ve become interested in sustainable farming practices that work with soil ecosystems to produce quality food without draining the land of nutrients.
Jonathan, the owner of Mill Farm, has seen first hand the effects of extractive farming, and has radically transformed his approach. We’re keen to support this while maintaining the quality of bread you expect from Loaf, and we’re delighted to say it’s working.
The new flour has a slightly stronger branny taste, but to our delight it doesn’t behave that differently in the bakery. This means we haven’t had to change our processes while the quality is also the same, if not slightly better.
We’re not selling it by the kilo yet as we want to ensure we can maintain a supply, but our long-term goal is to have a range of sustainably grown heritage grains and flours available in the shop.
Before he started at Loaf, Ian was documenting his baking on his Instagram feed and learning from the bakers there. Here’s his top seven recommended follows should you be looking for inspiration.
The man who got me into sourdough baking. Maurizio made the leap from a software engineer to a professional home baker. His website/blog is packed with recipes, guides, tips and tricks. A few of my favourite articles:
Top quality baker from Columbus, Ohio. His relaxed, long-form shaping videos are a pleasure to watch, and the clips of his incredibly active sourdough starter are wild.
Baker and pastry chef in Edinburgh based at The Palmerston restaurant. Everything she produces looks like a delicious work of art. I like those yum yums.
A chef and baking professor from Toronto, Canada. Bread, pizza, focaccia, panettone — he is all over it. I’m a big fan of this 50% whole wheat sourdough recipe .
An airline pilot that started slinging pizzas during the pandemic. Based in Newbury, the Neapolitan-style pizzas he cooks up in this Gozney pizza oven look unreal.
British-born couple running a vegan bakery in Whistler, Canada. Forever making me jealous of the skiing/baking lifestyle. Love his shaping videos and their passion to source ingredients locally.
Professional baker at MOR Bakery in Chipping Campden. Lots of insight into his shifts at the bakery and pictures of beautiful pastry lamination. He also finds time to bake for his neighbours, which is awesome.
Do you have a favourite baker online? Let us know!