Subscription sourdough service in central Henley Greetings from Boston Road Enterprises, in historic former beer-brewing town, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Here we make sourdough bread, sourdough pizza, and other stuff. Properly. And sustainably. For the town’s thriving local community 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 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. Food processing agents were not yet invented. 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 health benefits.
BRB Bread and Pizza
All the baked products we sell are produced sustainably and locally in Boston Road. We use a dedicated artisan kitchen using the traditional sourdough method.
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.
Full circle – from baked goods, to broking, then back to baking
Timeline:
- Late 1980’s -beach seller of doughnuts in South of France
- Early 1990’s -self-employed – Colonel Crusty’s Sandwiches, Edinburgh
- 1993- 2013 – City of London – funds analyst in various investment banks / stock-broking boutiques
- 2014-2016 – Henley on Thames – investment marketing, Invesco Perpetual
- 2016-2019 – Freelance investment writing, Investec. In 2018 I completed a bread-making course with Richard Bertinet in Bath. My enthusiasm for bread-making, and for sourdough in particular, was ignited – since that time, I have been an advocate of sourdough’s gut-health benefits. And see no reason to make any other kind of bread.
- 2020-present: Boston Road Enterprises – sourdough bread, sourdough pizzas, frangipane tarts, seasonal quiches. Studio hire. Car rental.
Mission
To produce top-quality sourdough bread and pizza here in Henley-on-Thames, in a sustainable way. Help spread the word about the health benefits of the ancient sourdough manufacturing process.
The sourdough story
Putting things in their long-term perspective, my hope is that the “conventional“,”yeasted” under-baked 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?
As well as baking for individuals I supply a number of commercial customers, including D-Two Cafe and the Shiplake Corner Shop.
We are a local Henley business and pride ourselves on a quality product made with locally-sourced, all-natural ingredients. The only well-travelled ingredient we use is rock salt which admittedly has come all the way from the Himalayas. That said, it comes in 25kg sacks, travels by container ship and requires no refrigeration.
Meanwhile the flour we use is local – most of it stone-ground regeneratively farmed flour from Matthews Cotswold Flour Mill, while we source our cereal and seeds mix and some of our organic flour from Shipton Mill in Gloucestershire. . Delivery of the end product is by bike, e-bike or eV. So locally-sourced ingredients, paper packaging, and sustainable delivery are key themes that hopefully add to the feel-good factor, and make us stand out from the crowd.
Clearly, much has changed since I founded the business back in 2020. Our key differentiator when compared to the mass-produced “artisan” sourdough, trucked in from out-of-town , is our use of local flour, most of it regeneratively-farmed, and the fact that the bread we sell is fresh from the oven. Obviously there is an environmental advantage too, in buying locally-produced bread. We also believe our bread tastes better than mass-produced.
Other developments over the last 18 months comprise the acquisition of a Tesla Y rental vehicle – which is available for local rental via the app Turo.com. We have also completed the Boston Road Luxury Garden Studio which is now available from short-term stays via Airbnb or directly through leaving a message here.