A much-loved Danish bakery which has stores in both Penarth and Cardiff has won three awards at this year's World Bread Awards. The awards, which launched in 2013, celebrate the best in the bread world and are the UK's "leading national celebration of the art of bread-baking.
Regarded as the country's most prestigious bread awards, its judges this year are highly noted in the baking world and included an esteemed panel of the likes of Stephen Hallam - "The pork pie man from Melton Mowbray" - Victorian Bakers star John Foster - of Fosters Bakery - Great British Bake Off's Steven Carter-Bailey (2017) and James Hillery and more.
Brød - read the story behind it here - took home gold, silver and bronze for three of their lovingly baked breads, which owner Betina Skovbro, tells me her and her team began baking the night before and morning of the big day, to achieve maximum freshness. And it definitely paid off.
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Brød wroteon Instagram: "A few weeks ago we went to @breadawardsuk and came back with THREE awards: GOLD for our Kongebrød, in the authentic sourdough with inclusions; SILVER for the White Sourdough, in the authentic white sourdough category; BRONZE for the Chocolate and the Whole Orange Sourdough, in the speciality sweet category. More than 500 loaves were entered, so we are pretty chuffed that three of ours were winners."
Explaining what this win meant to her and the team, without whom she says she couldn't run the bakery, Betina says: "It's awesome. When you are a small bakery, like we are, we haven't got a big team of bakers. So everyone works really hard. And everyone in the team has been involved in the process of, first of all creating those loaves, and obviously, maintaining the quality and the standard. So the loaves we entered are our day-to-day loaves. So we're just really chuffed and proud that we managed to get these awards really."
She adds: "The competition is so high. This is not just Cardiff or Wales, it's the world bread awards for the UK. We travelled up to London with it, we baked it in the night and then we went up to London with it that same day."
"[Winning these awards] kind of drummed into us that what we do is actually good, because I think you forget sometimes... But actually getting that award makes us realise what we do is actually really good. And we can be proud of our work. And that makes it worth getting up at midnight to start baking so you can have a loaf of bread on your coffee table that day. This is what we do, we start at half past midnight, most mornings, to bake these loaves of bread. So, [winning these awards] makes it worthwhile."
Betina explains that there's so much more that goes into making bread than just baking it - it's a live product with so many elements that need to be right in order for it to taste as good as it does.
"It's really quite touch and go with bread. I know it sounds ... bread is just something we eat, but actually, in this case, it is quite... it's a lot of work that goes into it. Those loaves take about three days to make. Because it's sourdough, there's no yeast in them, so you start three days before the bread is baked to make it, by feeding the culture and stuff like that. It's quite a fine tuning thing all the time."
And Betina doesn't just celebrate the bread itself in her bakery, but champions her team - "Without my team, honestly, Brød wouldn't be here" - and new apprentices who are getting a headstart in the industry too at her bakery.
"We do a lot of apprenticeships. So we've taken an apprentice every year. And my belief in the business is that we've got to make space and help the next generation of bakers. That's what we love doing because the skill of baking is out there."
"We do everything from scratch - the old fashioned, hand-crafted way. That makes us even more proud because we make it properly, we make it from scratch every day with our hands. It's not like a machine that pumps it out where we just add water. There's actually a real craftsmanship behind each loaf we make."
Alongside Cardiff - which opened in 2015 - and Penarth (2020), Brød is opening a takeaway hatch on Newport Road in the future from their brand new bakehouse.
For more information on the awards, see the website. For the bakery's website, see here.
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