Award winning 4 Eyes bakery in Staveley
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Tom Martin, I'm the bakery manager and head baker at Four Eyes. So I've worked for the company for
00:06three years now, started in September 21. So yeah, this is up, so we're nearly three years, so yeah
00:13that's as long as I've been with them so far. It's coming up to 19 years now, so it's 18 years in a
00:19little bit. I'd have to check that figures, but it's yeah, it's getting 19 years experience now.
00:25Yeah, that's quite, quite a long journey.
00:27It's a long time, yeah, it's a long time for a 35-year-old, because normally a lot of people,
00:31you know, you'd say 19 years and you'd sort of be thinking they'd be in their 50s, but
00:35because I've been doing it since I was 16 years old, it's, you know, gained quite a lot of years
00:41under my belt now, so yeah. So I worked in retail, wholesale and hospitality. I worked across all
00:46three sectors and started in supermarkets and I was just a shop floor worker, literally the
00:54first job I'd come out of university. So I'd dropped out of university and sort of went to
01:00find a job as quickly as possible, as you do, and was just asked to go into the bakery one
01:06day because they were short, which was just a non-scratch bakery, sort of baking off things
01:11like part-baked breads and pies and pastries and stuff, really quite simple stuff. But
01:20went into cover one day and the guys were, we really liked it in there, there was short staff,
01:24so I just went in and helped and never went onto the shop floor again, I just stayed in the bakery
01:28because I just loved it so much. And then from that, that's when there was a local Tesco's near
01:36my, where I lived with my mum and dad at the time, it was open six months after, that was at
01:41Tesco Clay Cross and that was a scratch bakery, so that was like a step up from there, really
01:47enjoyed it and thought I'd get into it and they weren't asking for much experience because
01:50training were going to be given. And then it went from there, so just steady little career
01:56progressions over a period of time and then about 10 years ago, really started to hone my skills
02:04from there, started to do more long fermentation stuff, so sourdoughs and focaccias, real breads
02:12and pastries and cakes, the more artisan scene from there and that sort of passion grew and grew
02:22over a period of time. Now yeah, so the focaccia, we took it down to the NEC at Birmingham,
02:28we knew it was a great product, we took sourdough down there as well, entered that into the sourdough
02:31category, focaccia went into the international category and very very long day, we were up
02:38against 220 other bakers and bakeries from all over the UK and yeah, we won the international
02:47category for the focaccia, which then pulled us into the Britain's Best Loaf competition
02:52and we won that as well, which was a huge surprise. Both myself and my wife were there,
02:59we attended and we were just in complete and utter shock, could not get my words out at all after
03:04they were interviewing me, I just was in complete and utter gobsmacked shock and then
03:11yeah, last week we went down to London to the Craft Bakers Association, entered their
03:18competition, was in quite an elite small pool, so we were up against people like Harrods
03:22and Fortman and Mason and the Artisan School of Food were all there and we won, we entered
03:29the tin loaf into the tin bread category, sourdough into the sourdough category and won those as well,
03:35so it was a huge success over the last three or four months. And the focaccia, it's quite unusual
03:41isn't it, it's not like a typical flat focaccia. Yeah, so it's a deep pan focaccia, so a lot of the
03:47time traditionally focaccia is a very thin loaf, a very thin Italian, it's essentially a pizza bread
03:52what's high risen. Ours is a sourdough, it was a mistake what was made over
04:00about four years ago, a soggy sourdough that turned into a lovely sourdough focaccia.
04:08And yeah, so it's a deep pan one, so it's a really quite high risen one, so you get really
04:11big open air pockets and not too open and so it's nice and light
04:17and fluffy in the middle and then you get all the nice little crust on top with all the different
04:21flavours. So it is completely different because it's made from a sourdough starter and it's really
04:26thick, so versatile. You can use it for anything as well because you get that versatility, you can
04:32use it for a sandwich, you can use it for a soup, you could use it for just a dipping bread,
04:37so there's lots of things you can do with it, so it's quite unique in that aspect as well.
04:42I think my favourite thing is the sourdough, I think that's probably my,
04:49because it's such a story behind it, like you have to look after the sourdough starter in order to
04:56get good sourdough, so maintaining a sourdough starter over a period of time is a skill in itself,
05:01so then baking with that, because it's a microorganism, it's a living thing,
05:07not just a conventional baker's yeast that's been used, it's a starter that you're
05:14looking after on a daily basis, so that decides when you bake really, we don't decide when we
05:20bake with it, it decides when we're baking with it, and that's probably that story around that,
05:25that artisan way of baking appeals to me over anything now, so I'm that passionate about it.
05:33It's a long fermentation bread, so it's an unyeasted bread, it's made with a natural
05:39levain, which is just water and flour, which is fermented over a period of time,
05:45and inside the loaf, there's no additives or anything like that, it's just flour, water and
05:50salt, so it's like an original mixture, what they used 10,000 years ago, when they were in
05:57ancient Egypt taking it out of ovens over there, it's still exactly the same, we just use a good
06:04combination of really high quality flours to achieve a natural result. So it's cranuts are
06:10very popular, it's croissants and it's penne chocolates as well, they're the most popular ones.
06:16The cranuts, so it's laminated pastry, we deep fry it, and then we fill it,
06:21it's most popular one is the lemon cronut, filled with lemon curd and meringue on top.
06:26So this is a lemon cronut here, it's filled with lemon curd, rolled in sugar and it's got meringue
06:32on top. Yeah, so we've got a bagel tart, we've got a vegan fruit crumble, a gluten-free banoffee bar,
06:39a gluten-free cookie, lemon, counter cake and a lemon meringue tart.
06:45Yeah, so that's the sourdough that won the award? Yeah, that won the Craft Bakers Association best sourdough,
06:54same mix, we said a slightly smaller loaf, this is quite a bigger one, but as you can see it's got a
06:58beautiful, lovely, open textured crumb, which is what you want to achieve in a sourdough,
07:04and like I say, the digestive system can adjust to this a lot better than what it can if you
07:13were to buy like a normal loaf from say a supermarket or anything like that, so it's good
07:18for your digestive system, it's good for diabetes, it's good for people with gluten intolerance,
07:23because it's quite low gluten, and it's, yeah, that's about as good as you're going to get.
07:30Yeah, and it's really nice, it's really crispy as well on the outside. So that's what you want
07:34on a sourdough, you want a soft, light, airy texture in the middle and a nice crust on top.