The Street Bakeshop is an award-winning, artisan retail and wholesale bakery born in Old Basing, Basingstoke. With two parts to the bakery; the customer-facing side with welcoming staff and even more delicious treats, and the bakery with floor-to-ceiling windows where you can watch in on the action and see your bakes be made from scratch. We spoke to Tim Goodwin, Founder, to hear more.
Can you tell us a little bit about your bakery?
We've been at our site in Old Basing since August 2020 - middle of Covid days! We're a Sourdough, artisanal bakery and the entire team absolutely loves what we do. Old Basing is our main production unit, but we also have two more units; one in Reading and one in Lychpit.
What kind of bread and goodies do you make?
We consider ourselves a full scale bakery, so the kind of bread and bakes goods we do is a little bit of everything! We do everything from making our own sausage rolls with our own meat and puff pastry to sourdough bread - everything's got a sourdough base in our bakery - all the way to our patisserie and cakes which is all made with Matthews flour. We've used Matthews since the very beginning.
What do you like about Matthews Cotswold Flour?
We've used Matthews flour in the bakery since the onset, it's got great consistency and we know that when the bag goes into the mix we're going to get a consistent result. They're also very reliable and we know that they source the grain very carefully. We use a whole range from Matthews, maybe seven or eight different types, which allows us to blend flours into a single mix to give us the exact results we want. We can create softer flours for a more delicate product, and flour that is hard that have a higher gluten and protein content for when we're doing long, slow fermentation and want that very open texture high hydration doughs. But we've been partners with Matthews from the very beginning.
Why did you want to start a bakery?
I founded this bakery out of an absolute passion for great food, I've always been passionate about great food and bread. And really we're about producing bread the way it's always been produced for thousands of years using natural cultures. We put as few additives into our product as we can, we really want it to be clean and we want the bread and bakery products that you enjoy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to make you feel great. Ultimately, we want to make fantastic food that people love eating, at a place that they absolutely love coming to, getting their favourite bakes day in and day out that their bodies can tolerate and we're proud to produce.
What's one thing that's really special to you about The Street Bakeshop?
One thing that's really special to me is that we produce our bread onsite and sell it onsite, so we have those two sections of the bakery; the customer-facing side which includes seating and a really fresh feel to it, and the bakery side where you can actually come up to the window and see your bread and bakes good being made.
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