One Aussie blogger and decorator has created a beautiful side table using two wooden bread bins costing £15 each from Kmart, some superglue, nails, and scrap timber. Painted with cool grey heritage paint, the result is really lovely.  Take a look here. 

Aside from that, the world’s wheat crisis rumbles onwards, with India banning wheat exports in the face of coming shortages and the dramatic heatwave that’s affecting wheat production. Once again we thank our lucky stars we focus on British wheat. Here’s the latest bread news from our fragrant, yeasty, artisan world to yours.

A multitude of ways to keep bread fresh

As the cost of living crisis spirals, the interwebs is filling up with innovative tips to keep bread fresh. The world is facing difficult times but there might be an unexpected silver lining in the form of less waste. When belts tighten, people tend to throw away less food. The simplest dead bread tip comes from Down Under, for some reason the source of a wealth of bread-led news items.

Simply run your stale loaf under the tap then bake it in the oven at 160 degrees for six minutes and voila… the dry bread is revived, as good as new.  Just don’t do it when your bread has gone mouldy. That’s taking waste reduction a bit too far.  

Bread tray parking space scandal in Brum

The good folk of Birmingham, the nation’s second city, are livid, and it’s all down to the naughty placement of bread trays. If you’ve ever been involved in city parking wars, when someone parks in ‘your’ space outside your house, leaving you to circle fruitlessly for hours searching for an alternative, you’ll know the score.

People have been using bread trays to ‘reserve’ their on-street parking spaces, and it’s causing consternation. Worse still, others have branched out into police cones, wheelie bins, bricks, sand bags, chairs, and shopping trollies filled with slabs of concrete in an attempt to prevent others nabbing their precious parking spaces.

Bread price riots in Iran

Soaring bread prices have led to widespread protests in Iran. Shops have been set on fire and scores of people have been arrested. The protests kicked off thanks to a cut in government subsidies for imported wheat, causing flour-based staple food prices to shoot up by as much as 300%. So far four people have died. The country’s official inflation rate has hit 40% and is heading for 50%, leaving almost half of the 82 million people in Iran below the poverty line.

At the same time, in Lebanonn the price of a loaf has soared to £7, taking their daily bread far out of reach for most people.

Free bread from a wonderfully generous shop owners

One Newcastle shop is giving away thousands of free loaves of bread to people in need. Convenience store owner Sheraz Awan has been helping Newcastle’s Westerhope community after customers told him they didn’t know how they’d be able to feed their children.

The store owner has handed out countless thousands of loaves to his local community since the start of the Covid crisis, after witnessing the difficulties his customers were going through. His generosity continues as the cost of living crisis deepens.

Can you bear it?

We don’t see many of them in Kent. None, in fact. But a ‘small black bear’ recently became the talk of Wyckoff, a small town in New Jersey’s Bergen County, when it scampered up a utility pole outside a popular bakery. Apparently US animal control officers don’t respond to bear sightings unless the bear is either a nuisance or aggressive. This bear was neither. It stayed up the pole for quarter of an hour then came down and wandered off for a drink at a nearby pond before “continuing west on Franklin Avenue.” 

Wishing you the best of spring

Spring has sprung, we’re sending out multitudes of orders to our foodservice clients, and everything is A-OK in our little corner of the UK. We hope the same goes for you. If you haven’t sampled our goods yet give us a call and we’ll send you  a free box of artisan goodies for you to test.