Sourdough September: The best local places to buy your daily bread

To mark Sourdough September - the Real Bread Campaign’s month-long celebration of sourdough bread and the people who bake it - Velvet’s Alice Ryan visits two local bakeries loved for their loaves

The Loaf Tin Bakery
Inspired by childhood holidays in rural France, incomplete without a daily trip to the boulangerie for an oven-warm baguette, The Loaf Tin Bakery in Saffron Walden is the brainchild of Minnie and Barney Palmer. Sourdough is their speciality, as they explain

Home baking
We started from our home kitchen in the first Covid lockdown. We baked for the village and left the loaves in the phonebox. Soon orders began to arrive, and our kitchen window became a shop. By the end of last year, we’d outgrown our home kitchen - we couldn’t fit any more fridges or ovens in our house! - and were lucky enough to move to our now HQ in Compass Courtyard, Clanver End.

Special offers
We specialise in sourdough bread, baguettes, focaccia and a range of viennoiseries. Everything we sell is handcrafted and baked fresh each morning. If you’re a first-time shopper, you’ve got to try the seeded sourdough, our own-made granola and the almond croissant - it’s delicious, if we do say so ourselves. . .

Natural wonder
Sourdough amazes us every day. No two loaves will be the same and no day produces the same dough as the one before. It is completely natural and only has three ingredients - flour, water, salt - yet it creates the most delicious bread EVER!

People pleasing
We absolutely love our little bakery. We love the smiles on people’s faces as they walk in the door to the smell of fresh bread and pastries, or watching little ones bite the end off their baguette as they walk out of the door. We feel that it connects us to our community.

Past meets present
The bakery shows us that in this crazy day and age - where life moves at a million miles an hour and happens largely online - there is still merit and space for handcrafted natural products and processes that have been celebrated for hundreds of years.

Based at Unit 8, Compass Courtyard, Clanver End, Saffron Walden, The Loaf Tin team bake daily and welcome both walk-in customers and pre-orders for collection. Follow @theloaftinbakery and visit theloaftinbakery.co.uk for opening hours, menus and to place an order.

Sourdough Hub
Within weeks of opening her Newmarket bakery, Sourdough Hub’s Jennifer Marshall was shortlisted for Producer of the Year in the 2024 Velvet Food & Drink Awards. Sharing her baking skills has created both connections and a local community, as she tells Velvet

How it started
Sourdough Hub was set up in Valletta, Malta, where I used to live until we moved to the UK in September 2022. I set up the company here in March 2023 and moved into my bakery at Unit 9, Craven Way, Newmarket in March 2024.

Signature bakes
If you’ve not tried my bakes before, I’d say bag a classic sourdough loaf made with organic stone-ground flours. The loaves with inclusions are always a big seller too - the organic roasted beetroot, feta cheese and freshly milled pepper loaf I made this summer was really popular. I will be making a miso and black sesame loaf for autumn, which I also highly recommend! You should definitely try the freshly baked Sicilian brioche too, filled with mascarpone and cream cheese and topped with my own passionfruit and white chocolate or with homemade lemon curd.

Slow food movement
Since the loaves are simply made with flour, salt and water - and plenty of time! - baking sourdough teaches you how to be patient and let nature take its course. The final result is a healthy, wholesome loaf of bread. Sourdough bacteria is very healthy for our gut; unfortunately, nowadays we eat too many items that are processed and have additives and this has totally messed up our metabolism. Sourdough makes us realise that we can eat bread without the stomach issues that people normally experience after having eaten off-the-shelf loaves.

Labour of love
The bakery certainly keeps me busy and therefore very focused - this is something I treasure as I feel that the more I focus on the business, the more I can see a rewarding path with plenty of opportunities. It has connected me to people I would have never otherwise met and I now have customers that come to shop regularly. Ultimately, it has shown me that through hard work, perseverance, resilience and determination one can succeed against all the odds.

Sourdough Hub HQ at Unit 9, Craven Way, Newmarket is open to shoppers from 9am to noon on Saturdays September 7 and 21 and every Saturday from October onwards. The Hub will also be selling breads, cakes and pastries at Cheveley Farmers Market on Sunday, September 22. Orders are welcome. For menu updates, including seasonal monthly specials, follow @sourdough.hub. Find out more and place orders at sourdoughhub.co.uk