‘Seriously?” said my partner, “you want us to get up early to get to a tiny bakery in the middle of nowhere, just as it opens? Why?” he asked.
I knew why.
This was some years ago: we were due to visit Orford Ness, a peninsula which once harboured top secret experiments. I had heard about a bakery, Pump Street, which had just opened in the small village of Orford. In pictures, it looked like it made the sort of pastries which would sell out an hour after opening. I was not wrong. Even after convincing my family to leave our little part of Suffolk for Orford, and arriving at 9am, there was already a queue.
That was the day I had my first anise-infused gibassier, which is now a rite of passage, and sampled the best eccles cake ever made. The latter is a heady combination of robustness and fragility, a carapace of sugar-crusted puff containing oozing cognac-soaked dried fruits.
Pump Street Bakery opened up in 2010 after Chris Brennan retired from IBM and, with no professional background in baking, “went on a quest to make the perfect baguette,” explains Joanna, his daughter, who left her job as an NHS speech therapist shortly afterwards to go into business with him. Soon the baguette quest had expanded into other breads and pastries. They sold them each Saturday at the local market. Success meant they had to expand and take over empty pink-painted premises on the corner of Pump Street. It is around this same 15th-century building that queues still coil today.
Pump Street Chocolate launched in 2013. The chocolate is “bean to bar” that is to say the beans are sourced from cacao farmers, fermented at source then sent, whole, to Pump Street to be roasted and made into chocolate in Suffolk. The dedicated chocolate shop opened across the market square from the bakery, in 2019. Pastries and bread are made in the bake house a few hundred yards from Orford in Gedgrave and the chocolate factory is on an old airfield in nearby Rendlesham.
It was these chocolate bars, easier to wholesale and post, that spread the Pump Street name. All made in the factory in Suffolk, they are now sold in more than 300 stockists in the UK and 150 international stockists in 15 countries.
The original bars, made 10 years ago, were three different types of 72-75% cocoa (“I was fascinated by how different beans could taste at similar percentages” says Joanna) but not long after the two divisions of Pump Street – bakes and choc – combined into the Sourdough and Sea Salt 66% bar, now the bestseller. There are stalwarts in both parts of Pump Street with occasional seasonal specials, eg: a three-day panettone hung upside down to maintain its delicate rise. Plus hot chocolate, the chocolate simply “shaved” into flakes (excellent in tiramisu). Joanna’s favourite is Canadian butter tart, which reminds her of growing up in Toronto. Joanna was born in the Bahamas, Chris in Jamaica.
The Pump Street operation is relatively small, employing 38 people (three in London, the rest local). This all adds to the feel of a family operation. Some may balk at the price of a loaf of bread from £3 or a £4.25 almond croissant but these are handmade and the ingredients are carefully thought of. Pump Street uses a particular range of flours selected to suit the loaf they’re making, locally milled or from the West Country. The butter for the croissants comes from France, chosen for its high fat content which provides the sublime flake.
Joanna divides her time between London and Suffolk. When I visited there was a returning customer from Germany in the queue, and her two children were happily sampling the newly launched ice-cream which you can top with offshoot “crumbs” from the bakery or chocolate factory. Chris still lives in Orford and his “engineer’s brain” shows in some of the machines in the chocolate factory which were designed by him. On the way home I ate, rather too quickly, one of Pump Street’s egg and cress sandwiches on sourdough. It was simple, but perfect.
Pump Street Bakery, 1 Pump St, Orford, Suffolk, IP12 2LZ; Pump Street Chocolate, Market Hill, IP12 2LZ; pumpstreetchocolate.com
