Mark’s Bread

We saw the delivery guy all around Bristol on his bike.
Located in a up and coming area in Bristol, Marks Bread offers a good range of artisan bread. What really stuck out for me is the shop/​bakery. There is no behind the scenes. As you step into Mark’s Bread there is a small shop area with just a till separating you from where the bread is made. It smells amazing!

I’m rarely in Bedminster these days but whenever I am I always find an excuse to go to Mark’s Bread store. It is definitely one of the best bakeries in Bristol and definitely does the best sour doughs.
They also sell amazing cakes but they normally sell out so best to get in there early if you want one.
The bread is always amazingly fresh, the crust beautifully crispy and the inside soft and scrummy. What more could you want from bread! The staff are also super friendly.
My only complaint is the shop is tiny, you can’t get a pram in there and even struggle with more than two customers.

THE best sourdough I have ever tasted (and I’ve tasted a lot) delicious light baguettes and pastries and their hot cross buns at Easter were to die for, I was lucky to get some as they literally sold like hot cakes — the staff are always friendly and very helpful, they even come outside to take my order when I have my pushchair as I can’t get in, if I’m feeling indulgent I’ll buy a piece of cake while I’m there, the apple and almond one is particularly delicious.
We went to France last year and normally I’d be excited about the bread but actually I was trying to work out how I could take a load of marks bread with us — hee hee!
There is only one thing that bothers me about marks bread, on the wall inside the door is a signed picture from when Jamie Oliver featured them in one of his programmes and there is a glaring grammatical error, your instead of you’re — it’s a pet hate of mine — hee hee!

The third and most recent bakery to open along the length of North Street, Mark’s Bread is noteworthy for being as far from the commercial chain-​store feel of Parsons as is humanly possible. The shop is a bakery first and a showroom second. The fresh bread is displayed on racks, only a few loaves at a time, while all around you the busy work of a bakery goes on. The smell is always fantastic, and the bread, while very expensive, is quite simply some of the best bread I’ve ever tasted (and that includes freshly baked baguettes from a genuine French boulangerie). The owner is a little brusque with customers, in a hurry to serve people who would obviously rather stand and take it all in for a moment or two. However, this is understandable given that there is literally no space for more than one customer at a time inside the door, with all the available space taken up by bead ovens.

Best bread I’ve found in Bristol, hands down. I just spent an hour fighting through sunny day Saturday traffic to purchase as much bread as one could reasonably fit in a full size freezer, and I feel it was time well spent.
I really like the fact that they have so many types of healthy, wheaty breads that combine sourdough and seeds and different sorts of grains.
I just picked up 6 large loaves and the damage was only 12 quid, a bargain for the quality.

Using organic flours from a mill in Gloucestershire, Mark’s Breads is another great addition to lively North Street, which straddles Bedminster and Southville.
Not far down the road from Southville Deli, this small craft bakery makes speciality hand made bread using traditional methods. You can buy your bread from here knowing they don’t use any nasties such as additives, improvers or stabilizers — which many supermarket and big brand breads are packed with.
They bake normal yeasted breads, and also ‘wild’ breads made with levain or sourdough that contains no commercial yeast (just naturally occurring yeasts and ‘friendly’ bacteria). They also bake wheat-​free varieties such as dark rye and nutty-​flavoured spelt bread — which are great for those with a wheat allergy, but also make a tasty change for everyone else.
It’s well worth visiting their own bakery at their ‘garage’ on North Street itself, but if you don’t live in the area look out for their loaves elsewhere, because they also deliver to outlets within the local community — using a bike (which they call the ‘Breadmobile’!).

‘If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens’ — I completely and utterly, totally one hundred percent agree with Robert Browning on this one. I actually love bread. If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life it would be bread, without a doubt.
So, on a recent trip to the tobacco factory I was delighted to find his ad and went a few days later to sample his bread. Mark does sourdoughs, continental and speciality breads, everything is handmade from organic and super fresh ingredients with no additives or nasty stuff and is loving hand shaped and popped into a stone oven.
I can’t recommend one thing over another as everything looked, smelt, and tasted just beautiful, maybe try the bread of the day for a lucky dip or the English Overnight Bloomer!