Country & rye
The Kiln Row Country, a 30% wholemeal rye, and a seeded spelt batard. Whole loaves and halves, sliced on request.
Our story
A cold oven, a stubborn starter, and a very long winter.
Hearth & Stone began in the back room of a hardware shop on Kiln Row, with one secondhand mixer and a brick oven everyone said was beyond saving.
Nell Ashcombe had spent nine years baking in other people's kitchens — a hotel in Bath, a bakery outside Lyon, two years of night shifts in Manchester — before she found the oven. It had been bricked up behind plasterboard since the seventies. It took four months and a retired stonemason named Ger to bring it back.
That oven still sets the rhythm of the day. It holds heat for hours, which is why the crusts come out the colour they do, and why we bake in a strict order: bread first at the fiercest heat, then pastry, then tarts as the deck cools through the afternoon.
The day
What happens between midnight and noon.
No shortcuts, no part-baked deliveries, no dough that arrived frozen on a lorry. Just a rota that starts when most of Kiln Row is asleep.
11:30pm
Maud gets fed
The starter is refreshed and the first mix goes into the bowl for a long, cool autolyse.
4:00am
The deck comes up
Fire in, temperature stabilised at 250°C. Loaves are shaped, scored and loaded by hand on a wooden peel.
6:15am
Pastry hits the heat
Croissants and morning buns, laminated the previous afternoon and proofed overnight in the cold room.
7:30am
Doors open
Everything is out on the shelf warm. We sell until it's gone, which on a Saturday is usually just after eleven.
Where it comes from
We know the name of everyone who grows our flour.
Thwaite Mill, Wharfedale
Stone-ground wheat and rye from a family mill twenty-two miles up the valley. Delivered Tuesdays, never bleached, never treated.
Ampleforth Dairy
Cultured, 84% fat, churned in small batches. It's the reason our lamination shatters instead of bending.
Hollins Farm & the market
Rhubarb in February, damsons in September. If it isn't in season here, it isn't on the tart.
The team
Six of us, one bench.
Nell heads the bread; Josip runs pastry and has an unreasonable opinion about cardamom quantities. Fern and Callum work the counter and know roughly four hundred regular orders by heart. Ger still comes by to check on the oven, and Maud, technically, is staff.
We pay above the real living wage, we close on Mondays so everyone gets two days in a row, and we donate the end-of-day shelf to the Kiln Row community kitchen.
- Founded
- 2016
- Starter age
- Maud, 9 years
- Loaves per day
- Around 240
- Oven
- 1932 brick deck
- Wholesale partners
- 7 local kitchens
