7 June 2022

This is the weekly newsletter from Loaf in Stirchley, keeping you abreast of our bakery and cookery school and other things we think you’ll be interested in.

This week we’ve moved to a new delivery company for our newsletter, which is why it looks a bit different!

🍞 Pre-order your bread 🥐

We have plenty of bread and pastries on the shelves all day, with lunches served from noon on weekdays. Scroll to the bottom for this week’s lunch menu.

Our opening hours are:
Wednesday: 12-4
Thursday: 12-6
Friday: 12-6
Saturday: 8-1

The Breadlines

🥖 Happy 10th birthday to Leeds Bread Co-op! Their development as a co-op over the years has been quite inspiring to us and we look forward to visiting again soon.

🥖 Check out what’s on at Artefact this week: Sludge, dystopian books, singing group, board games, and open mic poetry, all at your local artist-run cafe/bar.

🥖 Stéphane Ravacley, the “humanist baker” caught our eye in reports from the French parliamentary elections. Nice to see a fellow dough-slinger making a difference.

If you’ve got some Stirchley news to share, or have seen something interesting online about bread or co-ops, let us know!

Goodbye Mailchimp, hello Buttondown

You’ll have noticed the newsletter looks a little different this week. We’ve long wanted to move away from Mailchimp, partly because of the cost but also because of the privacy implications.

Mailchimp are probably the biggest service for business newsletters and offer a host of tracking tools to see what your customers do. With some caveats, we can see when you open the email, which links you click on and on what device. We’re not interested in any of this so it seems silly to allow a giant company to gather this kind of granular information about your behaviour.

So we’ve moved everything over to Buttondown, a small independent company that exists purely to send emails to people. No tracking, no data gathering, just getting emails into your inboxes, and at about half the cost.

We’re still feeling our way around and it’ll take a while to get the look and feel right, but it’s good to be off at least one tech behemoth.

The CoCoMad programme is out

It’s only a month until CoCoMad, the big community festival in Cotteridge Park, and the programme is back from the printers. This year it’s a tabloid newspaper chock full of articles and activities, beautifully illustrated by Edie Woolf and designed with care by Kerry Leslie.

We’ll have copies on the bakery counter this week (while stocks last) and you can read it on your computer here. Kerry says she’d like to make it a regular thing with more articles next year so if you’re interested, get in touch!

Lunches this week

This week’s sourdough pizza is artichoke, olive, caper, tomato, basil and buffalo mozzarella (V) on sale Wed to Fri.

The soup pot will be serving the following:
Wed: Tarka daal curry (Ve) + sourdough bread.
Fri: New potato, spinach and coconut curry (Ve) + sourdough bread.

Thursday’s focaccia sandwich is spiced hummus, grilled asparagus, lemon zest, toasted pine nuts, cherry tomatoes and spinach (Ve) with optional feta (V).

Salt beef on challah is on sale on Friday.

Topped focaccia with cheese and surprise toppings is available on Saturday (V).

Savoury snacks include our famous sausage rolls and vegetable rolls, available all week, plus ham & cheese and pesto & cheese croissants Wednesday through Friday.

Lunches are made fresh every day for 12 noon.

Our menu for the week – with ingredients and allergens – is on the website.

Upcoming classes

All our classes are fully booked through the summer. Thanks for all your interest!

Dates for classes in the autumn will be released in July. You can sign up to alert lists for specific classes here.

Thanks for all your continued support. See you next week!

Team Loaf: Nancy, Martha, Dorit, Rach, Sarah, Neil, Molly & Pete

Website: loaf.coop
Socials: Instagram / Twitter / Facebook