Pump Street Bakery opened in November 2010 in a 15th century house on Orford’s Market Square on the idyllic Suffolk coast. The renowned bakery was founded by father and daughter Chris and Joanna Brennan who more recently have ventured into the world of chocolate. Pump Street now make one of the country’s few small batch, single farm, bean to bar chocolates. Owner Sally Jones tells Postboxed what she thinks makes Pump Street's chocolate so special.
The Pump Street Story
We believe that using only the best quality ingredients, along with obsessive attention to detail in production, yields the best quality chocolate. We spent two years sourcing our beans before we launched our first chocolate.
We look for beans that come from owner-operated farms in fertile cacao-growing locations, with good bean varieties. The terroir, variety, growth, harvest, fermentation and drying of the beans will all affect the final flavour of the chocolate.
Upon arrival in our bakery, we hand sort the beans and then carefully roast, winnow, grind and conch them for up to 5 days before maturing and tempering the chocolate into bars. We tailor the process at each step of the way to coax a unique flavour from our different types of beans.
This obsessive care and attention to detail yields a chocolate that is entirely manufactured in Suffolk and unbelievably delicious, just like the bread we sell in our bakery.
Is your product organic? We use organic cocoa beans when we can and organic cocoa butter to make our chocolate. However, not all of the farmers we work with can afford organic certification.
Is your product Fairtrade? Our chocolate is better thanFairtrade, it is Direct Trade. We work closely with the farmers who supply us with cocoa beans, discussing bean production with them frequently and most importantly paying them directly. We rely a great deal on the farmers to produce the best beans they can; beans which have great genetics, have been fermented well and dried correctly. As we know such beans are of superior quality we are happy to pay more for them; often four or five times the normal market price. It is important to remember that you cannot make great tasting small batch, single farm chocolate without the highest quality beans.
Postboxed stocks a selection of Pump Street's chocolates including their unusual, bakery-inspired Sourdough & Sea Salt and Rye Crumb bars.
