Greetings from Boston Road, in historic beer-brewing town, Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire, England, now most famous for its annual rowing regatta and Pimm’s consumption. Here we make sourdough bread and sourdough pizza. Properly. And sustainably. For the town’s thriving local market and its many visitors.
The guiding principle of the business is “Bien ou rien” – which broadly translates as – “Do things properly, or don’t bother doing them at all.”
To make bread truly properly means going back some 200 years to before the Industrial Revolution Back then, all bread was sourdough bread – bread made with natural wild yeast (in the starter or ferment) and proved/ fermented slowly (around 12-18 hours in my case) allowing flavours to develop and digestibility to improve. Not too dissimilar in fact from making beer, wine, or cheese. In all cases, if you attempt to speed up the process you don’t just sacrifice taste, you also remove many of the health benefits.
BRB Bread and Pizza
This website comprises – a bread section and a pizza section. All the baked products we sell are produced sustainably in Boston Road in a dedicated artisan kitchen.
History
I founded the sourdough business in January 2020. Prior to that my focus had been on providing bread as breakfast for our Airbnb guests, and on sharing my passion for making bread with others by offering sourdough experience days. These experience days can now either be booked via airbnb or direct with me.
Full circle – from baked-goods to broking to baking: From selling doughnuts on the sun-drenched beaches of the Cote d’Azur as a student in the late 1980’s; then to Colonel Crusty’s Sandwiches in Edinburgh as a graduate in the early nineties, followed by twenty years as a funds analyst in the City of London (1993-2013); followed by a brief spell as an investment writer, I then discovered bread:
In 2018 I completed a bread-making course with Richard Bertinet in Bath. My enthusiasm for bread-making, the ‘Bertinet’ method, and for sourdough in particular, was ignited – since that time, I have been a true sourdough addict.
Mission
To produce top-quality sourdough bread and pizza here in Henley-on-Thames in a sustainable way. And to maintain and satisfy a small, select and happy customer base.
The sourdough story:
Putting things in their long-term perspective, my hope is that the “conventional“,”yeasted” bread we find in supermarkets, and bakeries, the world over, will eventually become to be seen as a passing (albeit 200-year) fad. True, it has lasted a long time but then so has the petrol-powered car. Rising levels of gluten intolerance in the last few decades point the finger at fast-proved, under-baked, supermarket bread.
Like intensively farmed chickens, basic supermarket bread is cheap for a reason: bread with added “bakers’ yeast” as it was originally known, is a relatively new phenomenon, introduced during the Industrial Revolution to speed up production and increase profits. There was never any suggestion it was introduced to improve the bread’s flavour or provide additional health benefits. It was a pure cost-cutting excercise. Nothing more. Nothing less. Meanwhile sourdough bread has been around for thousands of years (so how can it be a fad?!), using the same tried-and-tested, simple ingredients: water, flour, and salt. It takes longer to make, so costs more, but made properly, it will look, smell and taste amazing, be easy to digest and will outlast a supermarket loaf in terms of shelf life in spite of having no added preservatives. So what’s not to like?