Hobbs House G-Stone

To be frank, G-Stone sounds more like a sex toy than a loaf but it's my favourite new bread.

Tom Herbert of Hobbs House Bakery brought it along to Cheese School the other night. It's a small but perfectly formed stoneground loaf, moist and malty that's apparently made from - and I quote the website - coarsely ground wholemeal wheat flour, organic cut wheat, sea salt, yeast, planet-friendly organic palm fat (love that!), organic molasses and water. You can see its lovely crumbly texture below and on the slideshow-style pix on their website. It's great with cheese - especially cheddar but I'm enjoying it with honey at breakfast too.


I topped up my supplies in the Better Food Company's new Whiteladies Road store (below) yesterday but you can also buy it on-line as part of a bread selection along with the Hobbs House Shepherds Loaf which Trethowans Dairy uses for its legendary cheese toasties (which I've now worked out how to make at home). Last orders for Christmas are on Wednesday 22nd (I would have thought weather permitting) but you could always buy someone an online gift voucher.


It underlines what a brilliant place Bristol is for bread - the best city outside London I'd have said.

Oh, and apparently the reason it's called G stone is that it was named after a Hobbs House baker, Graham, who helped create it. And the fact that it's shaped like a stone. Quite prosaic really . . .

Bread by post

Now you can buy almost every other kind of food - and drink - online there seems no reason why you shouldn't buy bread but it feels slightly counter-intuitive. Bread costs so little that it seems a bit mad to spend half its worth in post and packaging charges. But I'm lucky enough to live in a city (Bristol) which has some excellent bakers. If I lived out in the country and didn't have the time or inclination to bake I'd probably regard it as a boon.

Anyway I discovered that one of our local bakers Hobbs House Bakery is now offering a home delivery service from their website. You can buy a selection of their breads as a sample box (for £35) or a 2kg spelt sourdough called The Shepherds Loaf for £21 - the one that was featured on the BBC4 programme In Search of the Perfect Loaf the other day (which at the time of writing you can probably still catch up with on iplayer)

Baker Tom Herbert claims that the service is an 'industry first' but in fact another local baker, Richard Bertinet, pipped him to the post by offering his bread online prior to Christmas. You can buy it on its own for a rather more reasonable £6.50 (for a 1.2kg loaf + £4.95 p & p) or as part of a Breadlovers' Gift Box (£40.25) which includes the wonderful Opinel bread knife I wrote about last year

Obviously these loaves aren't as expensive as they seem on the face of it: they're dense and they keep so you can use them for days but it does seem a fair amount of money to spend nonetheless.

What about you? Do you - would you - buy bread by post? If not where do you buy it or do you make your own?

The perfect breadknife

I can't say I've ever given a great deal of thought to bread knives. Occasionally I get frustrated because they're not sharp enough to cut through a bigger than average loaf but we've soldiered on with our rather pretty antique knives for years.

Not any more. This week I was sent an Opinel Couteau à Pain no. 116 by Richard and Jo Bertinet of Bertinet Kitchen as a thankyou for doing a cheese and wine tasting for them last week. (To promote my cheese book so I hadn't expected to be paid). It arrived with a large homebaked sourdough loaf so I could immediately try it out and it was just perfect. Wooden-handled, satisfyingly chunky to hold, beautifully balanced and razor sharp it was the most perfect tool for the job you could imagine

Of course it was great business. I was smitten by both the bread and the knife and being a writer they must have known there was a fair chance I'd blog about them. But it was such an imaginative and perfect present that I really wanted to share it with you.

You can buy both from their cookery school and also online. The knife costs £25 and the loaf (which is 1.2kg) £5 (£6.50 by mail order) The bread is also available from several Bath restaurants including Marlborough Tavern, King William and Beaujolais.

That might sound a lot for a loaf - it is - but with this demon knife you can cut it thinly and it has so much taste you don't need to eat a lot (though I undoubtedly will).

Is this the greatest bread roll in New York?

As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know I've been in New York for the past six days with little time to breathe let alone blog but here's the first of my top New York food finds - the guanciale pecorino rolls at Danny Meyer's new restaurant Maialino in the Gramercy Hotel.

They arrived warm and flaky with something of the consistency of a Bath bun though obviously savoury - dusted with herbs, dotted with bacon and oozing with cheese. (Guanciale is a pancetta-like product made with pigs cheek. You can find a good description on Maialino's rival Babbo's website here)

As former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl tweeted the other day: "Woke up thinking about Maialino rolls: rich little puffs of guanciale and pecorino. Utterly irresistible. Why didn't I bring some home?" Wish I could have done too . . .

Any other rolls you'd like to champion - in New York, London or anywhere else for that matter?