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Tag: pastry

  • The autumn menu is here

    The autumn menu is here

    The first cold morning of the year arrived last week, and with it the moment Priya has been waiting for since July: the autumn pastry case. From this Tuesday, the counter changes over.

    What is new

    • Apple and brown butter danish, made with apples from the orchard stall at the Saturday market.
    • Pear and ginger galette, sold by the slice after 11:00.
    • Cardamom cinnamon knots, which are the old cinnamon knots with a lot more cardamom, because the team voted.
    • Pumpkin seed rye joins the bread shelf on Thursdays and Saturdays.

    What is leaving

    The peach and almond croissant is gone until next summer. We know. We tried to keep it going with tinned fruit for one week in 2022 and nobody, including us, wanted to talk about it afterwards.

    As always, the danish sells out first. If you want one on a Saturday, come before nine or ask us to put one aside when you pass on Friday.

  • Meet Priya, our new head of pastry

    If the croissants have seemed flakier lately, you are not imagining it. Priya Nair joined us this spring to lead the pastry side, and she has spent three months quietly taking the whole section apart and putting it back together.

    Priya trained in a hotel kitchen, then spent six years at a bakery she describes only as “much bigger than this, with a much worse oven”. She arrived with a notebook of recipes, a rolling pin she will not let anyone else touch, and strong opinions about butter temperature.

    Lamination is mostly patience and a cold room. The rest is not being afraid to throw away a batch that is not right.

    Priya Nair

    The changes so far: a slower proof for the croissants, a switch to a cultured butter from a dairy an hour away, and a new pain au chocolat with two batons of dark chocolate instead of one. The cinnamon knot is also hers, and she would like it on the record that it is a knot, not a bun.

    Say hello if you see her at the counter on Saturdays. Do not ask to borrow the rolling pin.

  • Why the lights are on at 4 a.m.

    People ask us two questions more than any other. The first is whether the country loaf is sourdough (it is). The second is why the lights in the back are on at four in the morning. The honest answer is that bread keeps its own hours, and ours are the ones it keeps.

    Golden croissants piled on a tray
    Photo: ViajeroExtraviado, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

    A sourdough loaf that comes out of the oven at seven was started almost two days earlier. The starter is fed on the first afternoon, the dough is mixed the next morning, it rises slowly through the day and then spends the night in the cold room. By four the next morning it is ready, and it will not wait politely until a more civilised hour.

    Pastry is similar. Croissant dough is laminated the afternoon before and shaped at the end of the day, so that it proves overnight. At four, the first job is turning on the oven, which takes almost an hour to come up to temperature. The second job is coffee.

    A typical morning

    1. 4:00: oven on, dough out of the cold room.
    2. 4:45: first loaves scored and loaded.
    3. 5:30: pastry goes in as the bread comes out.
    4. 6:15: wholesale orders packed for the bicycle.
    5. 7:00: doors open, and the queue is already there.

    We have tried starting later. The bread was fine; the queue was not. So four o’clock it is.