Pitching itself as the home of Dubai’s real sourdough bread, fine viennoiserie and exceptional pastries, Birch Bakery shines a light on artisanal baking within the city. Founded in 2019 with an aim to feed the community wholesome and nutritious bread, it’s run by those who are passionate about good-for-you ingredients and artisanal methods. All breads are made using ingredients from small batch farms to small batch mills, to Birch. The wheat is sourced from family farms in Skagit Valley, Washington, where it’s grown using sustainable farming methods, avoiding any environmentally unfriendly insecticides and harvest-aid chemicals. Then when it comes to creating the loaves, Birch Bakery only uses traditional baking methods that take plenty of time and even more patience, involving hand shaping, and fermenting for over 20 hours. Conventional yeast is used, with the exception of baguettes, which only requires <1% to be added. As well as this, no sourdough flavour imitators, vinegar, or packaged liquid sourdough are used throughout the process.
The menu consists of a mix of breads, like country loaf sourdough and potato and rosemary focaccia slices of 100% sourdough, then viennoiserie like pain au chocolat and cheese and jalapeno croissant. For pastries, expect options like classic apple tart, choc chip croissant bread pudding, and kouign amann (bread dough layered with butter and sugar). Then on Saturdays and Sundays, you can get your hands on some sourdough malasadas with cinnamon apple, cinnamon sugar and jam.
If you’re able to take a seat and dine in, there are dishes like miso hummus and bread, salmon roe tartine, and a harissa egg sandwich for lunch.Or if you’re just looking for an opportunity to stock up the pantry, there are items like homemade cashew butter, raw emirati honey and vegan rice labneh to put aside for a rain day.