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| E5 Bakehouse cheese sandwich |
Time Out London recently claimed to have discovered '
the perfect cheese sandwich'. This allegedly faultless marriage of dairy and carb is made by E5 Bakehouse - a small organic bakery with a growing rep, based nary a hop, skip and jump from
Pinch Towers. I've been hearing good things about E5 Bakehouse for a while, so this 'perfect cheese sandwich' revelation was a call to open, greedy arms. I headed to the Bakehouse, which is nestled in the railway arches beneath London Fields station, to investigate.
It was Good Friday, which you may recall was a scorcher, and London Fields was teaming with hipsters and drifters. The tiny Bakehouse provided a brief oasis from the madness but it's a working bakery, not a place to linger.
There's a small glass takeaway counter containing banana and walnut cake,carrot and coconut muffins and the like. The right side of the minuscule step-in retail space consists of a few shelves stacked with brown bags of homemade muesli and gluten-free brownies. There's room for a max of about 3 people to queue at the counter and order. To the left is a busy, working bakery - walk in and a friendly head bobs up and over the top of trays boasting freshly-made fig and walnut bread, baguettes, Borondinsky (a Russian rye bread), and the Bakehouse's acclaimed Hackney Wild - a classic white sourdough.
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| E5 Bakehouse, London Fields |
The exterior of the bakery is decorated with flowers, birds and slogans like 'work is love in action' and 'be here now.' The whole place has a certain hippyish, Alice Waters in Berkeley circa 1971 , grassroots project feel about it. But back to that sandwich...
'We only have one left,' said the cheery neo-hippy behind the counter. Clearly, word about 'the perfect cheese sandwich' is out. So J and I bought the last one and repaired to London Fields to examine/eat the evidence. And I tell you what, it is a bloody good cheese sandwich. The sourdough has a really thick, no-nonsense golden crust dusted with flour. And the bread inside is soft, springy and chewy. A slice on its own, dipped into good olive oil, would be pleasure enough. But fill it with mature Cheddar, thinly-sliced tomatoes, fresh leaves, and a layer of sticky onion jam, all spiky with chilli, and you have something a bit special.
At £2.80, it's an affordable slice of near-perfection, too.
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| E5 Bakehouse, London Fields |
But not perfect. Why? We returned to E5 Bakehouse this past saturday for a cheese sandwich fix, only to be told that they don't make them at weekends. Readers, this is madness. You may or may not be familiar with the London Fields railway arches area, but Bishopsgate on a weekday, it is not. There are a couple of small businesses, a good pub, and a vintage furniture concern, but not much in the way of passing trade. Yet come the weekend, people pour into London Fields, buying little quiches, sausage baguettes, Vietnamese Banh Mi etc from Broadway Market and taking them into the park for a lazy picnic. To deny residents and food tourists alike a weekend cheese sandwich fix makes terrible business sense. To E5 Baekhouse I say "'perfect cheese sandwiches for everyone, 7 days a week." I've tasted cheese sandwich near-perfection and I don't want to use up my annual leave allowance to get more.
E5 Bakehouse, Arch 402, Mentmore Terrace, E8 3PH.
www.e5bakehouse.com
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