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Friday, June 18, 2010

Fartisan bakeries

I was watching A Current Affair and.... shut up! You don't think I do these things for pleasure, do you?

Anyway, I was watching A Current Affair and they ran one of their stories comparing items from different shops. This time it was supermarket breads compared to, well, breads from 'artisan bakeries'. The artisan bakery they chose from? None other than Bakers Delight.

Bakers Delight! How could you walk past them? (Quite simple really, put one foot in front of another...) I like to call them 'Bakers Despite', for no particular reason. But really, they're an artisan bakery, according to A Current Affair? Everytime I've shopped at Bakers Delight I've been forced to choose between a stale old piece of crust, and another piece of crust that is, well, crusty. Sometimes the crusty crusts have sugar slathered on them and currants jammed in them; those ones are all right. I have a whimsical fondness for sugar. The rest though? Horrible, terrible, awful, and worse.

You might remember the jaunty ad campaign BD ran a couple of years ago. They seemed to be so enamoured with that jolly, jazzy little tune they had their bakers bopping away to that they started playing it all the time, in all of their bakeries. It was nerve racking enough walking into that piece mid-tune; just imagine how angst-making it must have been for the poor kids who had to hear it bop-bop-bop-bop-bopping away all day.

Fawgh, Bakers Delight! They are to artisan bakeries what bubblegum is to pavements, what blisters are to feet, what cheap, unoriginal, shlocky-tabloid television journalism is to television. What sort of television show, exactly, might fit that bill? Oh yeah. Bakers Delight are the A Current Affair of the artisan baking world.

11 comments:

Cistern Harlot said...

A certain brother-in-law-in-law of yours would see eye-to-eye with you on this (he refers to them as Bakers Travesty, although I now see that there is no possessive apostrophe ... is delight meant to be read as a verb?).

TimT said...

They're no Rogers, that's for sure.

Ah, it's fun to make up derogatory versions of brand names. Dad sometimes calls Video Ezy 'Video Sleazy'.

TimT said...

Kinder souls might call it 'Video Cheesy'. It lacks a certain something though.

Tim said...

I live in a suburb that boasts TWO Bakers Delights. I'm not sure what the collective noun for Bakers Delights is. It might be "a stale", as in "I was accosted by a stale of Bakers Delights".

TimT said...

It shouldn't be so hard to find a good baker; they're ridiculously rare. There's one or two in Fitzroy but they're so overcrowded.

Nasty trick of the chains, that - put two shops in the one suburb/location so as to blow away the competition.

Cistern Harlot said...

It is in fact Roger Bakery, lacking not only a possessive apostrophe, but a possibly possessive s. Which, as Wool Spaniel pointed out this morning, makes one wonder if Roger is intended as a noun or another part of speech.

Caz said...

All fair points, including the Video Sleazy bit, but I can't say I've ever had a stale anything from BD.

The apricot bread is fabulous, and their bread roles are fine enough, even the odd jam or lemon tart.

The cakes and pastries are frightening, being large enough to feed a family of 14 and still have left overs, yet this is what people have for morning tea.

Any cake big enough to feed a nation is unappetizing to me. Not unique to BD though, all food is giant sized now.

As for it being "artisan" bread, well, that was a small joke by ACA, surely?

TimT said...

I have a weakness for their cinnamon bread - that sort of thing is hard to get wrong really - but on occasion I've fetched plain or seeded bread rolls from the North Melbourne BD when wanting something to nosh on at work and have found them very stale indeed.

The fact that in North Melbourne BD is in the middle of a shopping strip of cafes and pastry shops and one IGA and Foodworks doesn't help their case that much.

Caz said...

Actually I have to admit my grave and resentful disappointment with a walnut log, not long ago.

Stale as. Could not have been staler. Days, or weeks old.

Given that the local BD has all but no competition, sitting right next to South Yarra train station in Toorak Rd, with a squillion customers a day, there was no excuse for selling a stale walnut loaf.

At six bucks, I expect it to be (almost) so fresh it's still hot and the icing is still setting!

The nearest competition is a French pastry shop, which sells tiny little eclairs at more than $5 a pop. The bread is equally expensive. It's nice, but, is fresh cream and real chocolate icing that expensive?

Ann ODyne said...

viewing ACA is sometimes a health hazard.
give us this day our daily bread
for
bread is the staff of Life
and
my predilection is Phillipa's Olive Bread, or Irrewarre Sourdough.
eating anything baked in a supermarket or by TopTip is kamikaze cuisine though.

TimT said...

I agree, there's something supremely offputting about the plastic they wrap all their bread in at Coles and Woolies.

Email: timhtrain - at - yahoo.com.au

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