The Pennyloaf Bakery

About

The Pennyloaf Bakery is a small-batch artisan bakery located in the Corydon Village. We offer takeaway handmade wood-fired bread & baked goods.

Story

The Pennyloaf Bakery is a small-batch artisan bakery located in the Corydon Village area of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Our bakery is a retail local that offers take-away high quality, old world-style bread and bakery products baked fresh daily on a wood-fired brick oven. Whenever possible our bakery uses local, seasonal and organic ingredients.

About Our Bread & Baked Goods:

Our breads are made with wild yeast (traditional sourdough leaven) and through a controlled, long fermentation process. We also make an effort to include whole grains in our bread and baked goods. The use of wild yeast, whole grains and a long fermentation creates bread that is tasty, has a longer shelf life (than breads made with commercial yeast) and has health benefits. Our bread is different than loaves found in traditional supermarkets and grocery stores. For example our bread:

- Has no additives or preservatives;
- Is made with only flour, water, salt and wild yeast (sometimes we add ingredients like cheese and nuts to tempt you!)
- Has an open crumb (the inside part of the bread)
- Has a shiny and dark crust and
- Has a sweet and nutty smell


From the Wood Fired Brick Oven:

At the Pennyloaf Bakery we bake the majority of our bread and baked goods on a wood fired brick oven. We chose to bake on this type of oven for a variety of reasons:

- Wood fired brick ovens bake bread amazingly well because they use three types of heat:
o Radiant heat (the bricks absorb heat from the fire and radiate the heat),
o Conduction (heat transfers from the hot bricks to the cool bread) and
o Convection (hot air swirls in steamy currents in the oven chamber helping to bake the bread).

- Immense stores of heat remain in the masonry mass of the oven dome and oven floor, making it possible to bake for days after one oven firing.

- Wood fired brick bread ovens retain steam exceptionally well, which is key to making beautiful loaves. The low chamber ceiling helps steam collect creating loaves that have large volume, open and shiny crumb and crisp crusts.

Our oven was built by traditional oven crafters and is referred to as a “black” or direct-fired oven (a fire is built and burned in the oven chamber – where the bread is baked).

Baking on a wood fired brick oven also has nostalgic value. Fire, wood and hearth baked bread has deep roots in all our communities and their baking/culinary traditions. While this type of oven has many practical benefits, we at the Pennyloaf Bakery feel its charm and old-world-craft tradition are what make it unique and much needed in our present day, fast-paced world.