About us

The Handmade Bakery is a not-for-profit community supported bakery in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire.

We make additive free, traditionally crafted and slowly fermented, delicious and nutritious bread made from organic and locally sourced ingredients*.

We want to offer a viable local alternative to industrially manufactured bread which helps address the concerns over food miles, bio-diversity, health and nutrition.

We aren’t a typical high street bakery. We have been very fortunate to develop beneficial relationships within the community and are working in conjunction with existing businesses to bring real bread to the Colne Valley and beyond.

This network of relationships is part of what will help keep the bakery thriving. The other part is you!

To make sure there is a stable ongoing bakery service available we’re adopting a radically new business model called community supported baking (see “community supported baking” page for full details) which means that the traditional producer/consumer relationship dissolves and all of us together begin to take control and have a say in the food that nourishes us.

As well as baking, we’re developing courses in home breadmaking. We believe in the power and joy of reconnecting with traditional skills and creating something from scratch.

*We try and make balanced choices between the ethics of organic and locally produced ingredients and a fair price for the consumer. We inform the customer openly about all the ingredients.

Co-operative hands, sustainable hands

Today The Handmade Bakery was featured on the BBC Radio 4 ‘You and Yours’ programme which discussed co-operative businesses as an appealing and sustainable model for post-recession entrepeneurs. Please click on the link to have a listen. Our piece starts at 27 mins 5 seconds into the programme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00ljn6j

Movin’ on

Phase 1 was our unofficial ‘bread club’

Baking for friends and family and then friends of friends.

Phase 2 was baking from Mozzarella’s in Mardsen.

Paul, Helen and Darren have been invaluable in helping us set up, see whether people liked the bread and to establish a growing group of subscribers and a great turn out every Saturday morning. Their generosity and their great pizza oven have helped the bakery turn from a dream into an exciting reality.

Welcome to Phase 3!

We are pleased to announce that we have found permanent premises for the bakery and will be opening on 15th August 2009. The mayor’s coming and we hope you will too!

The new bakery is on Carr Lane in Slaithwaite and is in the same premises as the new community owned local food shop (formerly The Artichoke).

We’re all very excited about the move but there’s lots to do so Saturday 11th July will be our last baking day from Mozzarella’s until we open again on 15th August.

Don’t worry Marsdeners we haven’t abandoned you and fresh bread will still be available on Saturdays from Mozzarella’s and during the week from Pennine Wholefoods.

Subscribers will still be able to pick up from The Riverhead in Marsden.

Bread Heroes

We just wanted to share with you a great piece of news. We were officially made ‘Bread Heroes’ by the Real Bread Campaign. Click here to read our write up and to find out more about the campaign.

Jam tomorrow

We are taking part in a bread revolution.

Recently we spent three incredibly inspirational days in Melmerby,
Cumbria with baker Andrew Whitley and six other people from all over the
country interested in finding a way to bring real bread back into their
community. Some ideas revolved around a wood fired community hearth
where anyone could bake, some thought of teaming up with schools, some
considered volunteering, others needed to earn a living.

The traditional model of a bakery shop is often not viable anymore and
that is why we have had such excited responses to our model of Community
Supported Baking. And it’s you, dear buyers and subscribers, who are
leading the revolution!

Andrew Whitley set up the Village Bakery in the 70’s during a similar
wave of environmental and financial anxiety. He studied Russian in
Moscow and consequently worked there for the BBC, a background which
doesn’t instantly make you think of baking, but he describes himself as
an idealist who felt compelled to take action. He brought rye bread to
the masses by supplying supermarkets and health food shops all over
Britain. The Village Bakery goes on, but Whitley has turned his energy
to The Real Bread Campaign, a venture that aims to support the return of
small bakeries and real bread to people’s immediate reach.

We, as two people from the community, decided to start baking and see
how people would receive it. We are interested to see what else will
develop around bread in the Colne Valley, how people will get involved,
where this takes us. Who will bring in their grandmother’s unbeatable
recipe, whose glut of apples we will be baking with, what can we do with
schools? With everything else that’s going on with Transition Towns and
Renaissance Market Towns, it looks like Marsden is onto a good one.

The Handmade Bakery on tour

It was -16 C when we set off from my mother’s house. It was still dark, although the snow gave the landscape an eerie glow. The sky had grown pink by the time we reached my brother’s house, where the fire in the masonry oven had been blazing for four hours. We carried in my late grandmother’s wooden barrel containing the rye sourdough started three days earlier. My father kneaded the dough and we tucked into the freshly fried catch of vendace, a treat made possible by the freezing over of the lakes. The dough was left to rise.

It is January and we are in Finland visiting my parents. We happened to hit a bread making weekend. When I was a child, Saturday was always a baking day, but sourdough rye bread was only made a few times a year. I remember crawling under the kitchen table to take a sneaky peek into the barrel of vinegary smelling mystery, a week-long build-up to a very early morning and an exciting day full of hustle and bustle at my great auntie’s old and dark house.

Baker Dan Lepard describes someone asking him why he bothered to make bread by hand. He had no answer for them because he couldn’t understand why they didn’t just know. We can buy anything, everything, but it leaves us feeling hollow. The making with our hands is what reconnects us with being human. Perhaps living a decade in a foreign country has hightened my appreciation of my family’s traditions. I want to know how they used to do things and I want to carry those traditions on, because it is my culture. As such it defines me, tells me who I am, where my roots lie. Starting The Handmade Bakery is an attempt at reconnecting with tradition, with meaning and with simplicity that hopefully leads to understanding life’s true complexity.

We all took a share of dough, shaped it into round flat breads with a hole cut in the middle. Years ago, when freezers (or preservatives) didn’t exist, the rye breads were threaded on a pole and suspended over the hearth to dry to be eaten as crispbreads when fresh bread had run out. The breads were proved on a long wooden board from which they were easy to slip onto the peel and the stone bottom of the slightly mellowed out oven. Just enough time now for a quick lunch of smoked moose, potatoes, wild mushroom gravy and gherkins. The breads came out dark brown with patterns like dried out river beds seen from the air. We couldn’t wait for one to cool down, but tore one open, smeared its steaming insides with butter and bit our teeth into its fragrant flesh. The day was crowned with a long soak in the darkness of the smoke sauna. We didn’t roll in the snow. It was too bloody cold.

a quote from the past

I’ve been thinking long and hard while we’ve been setting up the bakery about our motivations to do so and the possible effect it will have on the community.

Of course some of the motivations are selfish. I love making bread, so what a good way to earn a living! I want to work somewhere I can walk to instead of commuting for 3 hours a day. I want to do something that I can see the results of daily and that others will hopefully appreciate. It all makes sense.

But what about the community aspect of all this? What benefit will The Handmade Bakery have to everyone else? Well the obvious answer is good healthy bread locally produced! But if we talk about the bakery as part of something bigger, as part of what Transition Towns are trying to do. To make small communities like ours more resilient, more supportive of each other, then maybe we can play a very small part in the start of something really quite profound.

I was recently reading Bread, by renowned American artisan baker Jeffrey Hamelman, and came across a quote that seemed to sum up these loftier ambitions for the bakery and for Transition Towns beautifully. It seems like a manifesto for the important issues of our time even though it’s thousands of years old.

No booksellers, no books
No books, no learning
No learning, no knowledge
No knowledge, no wisdom
No wisdom, no ethics
No ethics, no conscience
No conscience, no community
No community, no bread.
-    The Talmud