Posted by Michael Stern on May 13, 2008
Bantam is a charming little village in upstate Connecticut with a world class bakery. Since Niles Golovin opened it in the summer of 1997 the Bantam Bread Company has set a spectacular standard of artisan breads that are the equal of – if not better than – anything we have eaten in the great-bread cities of San Francisco and New York: tawny-crusted peasant bread, rugged multi-grain, chewy rye with caraway seeds, and rosemary-perfumed Kalamata olive sourdough. A “holiday loaf,” created for the bakery’s first Christmas season and studded with toasted walnuts, golden raisins, and sour cherries, has proven so popular that it is now available year around.
Of special interest are the sourdoughs baked every day but Sunday (and Monday, when the bakery is closed). “There is a tremendous amount of mystique attached to sourdough,” Niles told us a while ago. “But it isn’t so mysterious, really. What we are doing here is capturing wild yeast. We propagate it by feeding it three times daily. When I come in a little before two in the morning, I've got a full bucket of sourdough, and as I progress through the bake, I use sourdough in each batch and by the end of the bake I'm left with just a small amount in the bucket. Then we feed it whole wheat flour and well water. Three times, on schedule, we feed it until the bucket is refilled again. And it grows, it really grows! What’s happening when you put the flour and water in that bucket is that the yeast is screaming out, ‘There's a party going on!’ and all the airborne yeast in my bakery sort of migrates to the bucket to join in. So in effect what we are doing is taking a sourdough culture, which is a natural yeast culture, and inviting all the yeast in the neighborhood to join in.”
Joyous bread is more than enough to lure us to this charming little shop, but over the last few years, Niles has added other attractions: gorgeous one-man pizzas (aka foccacias) topped with cheese and olives or fresh tomatoes and herbs, biscotti and mandlebrod for crunchy munching, spectacularly beautiful fruit tarts for dessert, and a recent bakery wonder that somehow got labeled a “dirtball.” It’s a cupcake-sized sweet pastry coated with sugar that has the luscious texture of a butter croissant and the avoirdupois of a cake donut. One of these with a cup of strong coffee is what we expect to be served at the gates of Roadfood Heaven.
Overall: Worth driving from anyplace
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Reviewers "Must Eats" List
Dirt Bomb
($1.00)
Cow Cookie
($1.00)
holiday bread
($5.00)
Foccacia
($7.00)
fruit tarts
($20.00)
Kalamata sourdough
($4.00)
"Holiday bread looks a little somber from the outside. It is indeed a serious loaf, but one that induces taste buds to dance for joy."
Michael Stern
"This is the way I like my Holiday Bread: toasted and liberally spread with butter."
Michael Stern
"The dirt bomb is a cinnamon-dusted nutmeg muffin, but that Spartan description does not begin to describe its glory. For one thing, it gets dipped in clarified butter before the cinnamon sugar is applied to the outside, adding a luxurious halo to the creamy-rich interior."
Michael Stern
"Saturday morning, still hot from the oven: a variety of fruit tarts"
Michael Stern
"The only thing more perfect than the way this tart looks is the way it tastes."
Michael Stern
"Ready to eat in the car or warm up at home, these one-person pizzas are a far cry from gloppy franchised pizza pies!"
Michael Stern
"The woman who sold me the cow cookie warned that she had often plunged a thumb through the cow's stomach, the cookie is that fragile. I held it gingerly, but that did not prevent its instant decapitation as soon as it was set down on the car's console."
Michael Stern
"The baker shows some of his morning's work."
Michael Stern
"There's barely room for four customers inside."
Michael Stern
"Bread is not just a job for the Golivan family: it's a passion!"
Michael Stern
