The Bakehouse
The Bakehouse makes exceptional handmade small batch organic sourdough products. With fabulous provenance of ingredients and built on the ethos of integrity, transparency and sustainability. The aim of the Bakehouse is to become a focal point in the community for customers interested in healthy and sustainable food. In the longer term, we will extend our product range by bringing together other local food producers reflecting that same passion and ethos.
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The key words that summarise the aims and philosophy of the Bakehouse:
Handmade – beautiful handcrafted small batch bread and viennoiserie using only traditional sourdough and artisan techniques.
Provenance – only the best ingredients. Away from modern intensively farmed monoculture, using low input heritage wheats suited to the local environment and using no chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We aim, with time, to source all our flour from local farms and mills. All other products from traceable and ethically verified suppliers.
Sustainable – integrity in our approach. A local food community, low food mileage, locally grown and milled flour using only organic or ecologically sustainable farming methods. Other sold goods selected from local farmers and artisan producers following the same principles. And wherever possible, all within a 25-mile radius of the Bakehouse.
City Boy Turned Baker
Hi, I am Matthew. I've come to baking rather late in life having spent the last 30 years (No, it can't be that long surely!) working in finance in and around the city of London. I'm a local boy at heart, growing up in Hertingfordbury before leaving to explore the wider world.
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I have been very fortunate to have some phenomenally interesting and challenging roles in my career. Working across corporate mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy, private equity, running large corporate events programmes, representing business in government. Even building an idea into a £45m turnover business, sadly losing it (and everything I owned) to the banks in the 2009 financial crisis.
More Bakers less Bankers!!!
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That said, I have always loved cooking and entertaining, and, whilst taking a career break to manage the Alzheimer’s care for my mother, had been toying with the idea of a food related business. A business aimed at bringing likeminded people together within the local community. The idea came largely from seeing how transformational it was for the village and its residents when the community took over running the village shop.
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After my mother passed away, I was tempted back into another great job in the city and those plans got put on hold.
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Three years and two jobs later, and absolutely stunned at the complete lack of morals and ethics prevalent in the City, I decided it was somewhere I couldn’t work anymore. I quit my job and my journey into baking began.
The Baking Journey
Having moved back into London and seeing what was around me there, my dream of a business in food began to solidify into building and running bakery café. Like love, I just knew it was the thing for me, but having never baked a loaf of bread in my life I had some serious learning to do.
My lovely girlfriend gave me a present of a sourdough course at the E5 Bakehouse in London Fields and I was hooked. My aim was to work for E5 or somewhere similar for 9 months to learn the baking, café and the commercial aspects of the business before going off to start my own. Sadly, Covid put pay to that idea.
With the world going into lockdown what was I going to do, sit tight and wait for the world to start up again? Hell no, I needed to learn how to bake!
Despite all the shortages, I managed to get 100KG of flour delivered to my flat and started baking for the NHS (and my original @OldStreetBaker pseudonym was born). Limited in quantities by a domestic oven, I baked everyday for the Intensive Care Unit at Barts Hospital, the Trauma and Renal Teams at The Royal London Hospital and for Doctors and Nurses living around me in Old Street. A really heart-warming experience, despite everything being thrown at them, every doctor, nurse and auxiliary without exception was overjoyed to be remembered and, I am very happy to say, loved my bread.
It became obvious that Covid was not something that would end quickly and I looked around for another way to further my progress. I discovered a 6-month diploma in artisan baking at The School of Artisan Food, managed to get one of the last places and in September 2020 started the course. An amazing journey into artisan baking, viennoiserie and patisserie, along with the business of running a bakery. Wonderful camaraderie among the students and fantastic tutors and facilities.
Not forgetting stints in some amazing bakeries along the way with Today Bread, Wellbeck Bakehouse and Spence Bakery and huge inspiration and worldly advice from the Small Food Bakery, Tuxford Windmill, Turners of Bytham and Mini Miss Bread to name a few.
And now here I am, back in Hertford and living the dream of setting up and growing my own bakery. Deliveries direct to customers to start
with, now extending into Farmers Markets and wholesale with the hope of a bakery café in 2023.
Watch this space!