What goes into our bread isn’t rocket science. Good quality flour, water and salt are the basic ingredients needed for a great loaf. However, it’s the time and the passion that goes into making it that sets us apart. Our oven is powered up at our main Flour Pot Bakery in the early hours of the morning to get those freshly baked loaves onto our shelves and into your home in time for breakfast. All of our bread is crafted entirely by hand by a small team of just 2-6 people who use traditional techniques to produce anything from 1000 to 2000 kilos of bread a day.
As you can probably imagine, baking such a high volume of bread can rack up a pretty big power bill, plus it’s not that great for the planet either. Therefore, sustainability was at the forefront of our minds when we decided to install a new Steam Tube Polin Oven, in place of our previous electric ones.
One of only three in the UK, our zero-emission oven has taken our bread to a whole new level. Rather than using electricity, our oven is wood-pellet powered and is green certified.
The pellets are a by-product of wood cutting so trees aren’t cut down to produce them. Burning these releases the same amount of Carbon Dioxide absorbed by wood into the atmosphere that would be released during the normal decomposition cycle. Therefore, our oven is classed as carbon neutral and it has already cut our energy consumption by over 30%.
Likewise, we’re conscious of where we source all of our products from due to the carbon footprint of importing from overseas. That’s why we buy all of our wood pellets from Scotland so we can be sure of their traceability and grade for quality.
What’s more, our new oven has elevated our bread to a whole new level thanks to the placement of tubes around the interior of the oven, which helps to regulate temperature. This results in better aeration in our bread, helping it bake to its full size, with a chewier interior and better crust. Since the Polin Tube oven is also two and a half times bigger than our previous oven and has loading bays to help relieve the physical strain on our baker, we’ve been able to increase the volume of bread that we make, while still being able to do this by hand
With 10 stores and a growing wholesale list, we’ve worked hard to maintain our artisanal value while keeping up with increased demand. Rather than automate our baking process, as we’ve expanded, we simply adapted our shifts to retain the man power and hands on dough ability to produce the best bread around. Don’t believe us? Well, come and try some for yourself.