Milled & baked in Ludlow
We mill our own flour the evening before and bake three mornings a week — until the shelf is empty, which is usually by one. There is no bread here on Mondays. That's not a flaw; it's the recipe.
The mill
Most bakeries buy flour that was milled months ago, hundreds of miles away. Ours is ground on a granite stone in the back room the evening before it's baked — you can hear it from the shop, a low hum like weather.
Stone milling keeps the wheat germ in, which is where the flavour lives and why supermarket bread needs a list of other things. Our list is flour, water, salt. The rest is time.
Bake days
The oven lights at half past four. What comes out depends on the day — and it's gone when it's gone.
The house sourdough, the seeded tin, and the rye that takes two days and tastes like it. Twenty of each, no more — Tuesday is the quiet bake, the one the regulars plan their week around.
Everything goes in a little longer on Thursdays. Burnt-honey crusts, the black treacle rye, and the fruit loaf with the soaked raisins. If you like your bread polite, come Tuesday.
The whole repertoire plus whatever the week's milling suggested — a spelt round, sometimes brioche, once (memorably) a fig and fennel braid. Queue starts before we open. Bring patience or come at seven.
The loaves
Every loaf is flour we milled ourselves, a thirty-six hour ferment, and nothing else.
The arithmetic
Good bread is slow. Everything else is just fast.
The work
The dough is mixed the day before, so the early shift is shaping — an hour of quiet, floured work while the town is still dark. By the time the first customers arrive the whole street smells like the answer to a question nobody asked out loud.
We're two bakers and a millstone. That's the whole company, and it's the right size.
The regulars
I've reorganised my actual job around the Thursday dark bake. My manager knows. She wants the treacle rye too.
My kids call it the humming shop because of the millstone. They eat the crusts now. That's the whole review.
Moved away for two years. The bread is the thing I checked was still here before I signed the lease back.
The bread list
The shop
The blue shopfront on Corve Street with the flour dust on the window. When the shelf is empty we put the SOLD OUT sign up and start tomorrow's milling.