Emerging from wedding and festival land

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Meet Harris, keeper of the dough secrets

That's Harris above. I'm sat in a Shoreditch coffee shop writing this newsletter, a flat white sipping cliché.

The caffeine’s required though, there’s a lot to catch up on. Our last newsletter came out just after we’d returned from our US pizza road trip. Time dilates in wedding and festival land, the long evenings, cheery customers and late night drives home blurring into one another. Flicking back through the calendar we’ve been busy.

Did we even mention we were finalists in the BBC Food and Farming Awards?

We made the last three in the street food category, which with less than a year’s trading under our belt was more than we could ever ask for. We got to meet some amazing people, Giorgio Locatelli had a play on the oven and has even taught me the ‘poor pizzaiolo hands’.

DO

I struggle to describe the DO Lectures, an ‘ideas festival’ comes up short. It’s the moments around the campfire, the chat with the speaker you admire on a crazed early morning run / swim, which make it special. But special it is and we were lucky enough to be there. Bertha did us proud through a pizza worshop, two hundred plus bread rolls and a hundred odd pizzas, she likes to think of herself as official oven supplier to DO 2015. Look out for our article on dough in the latest yearbook.

Blogatron

Would be the name of a Transformer which sporadically morphs into blogs and we’ve just about kept them ticking over. If you’re that way inclined you’ll find introductions to starting your own sourdough mother, tales of my paper bag collection, interviews, videos (the same as above), and a rant on doing things right the first time - 10 Bertha’s points to anyone who clicks through to all of them, redeemable in our restaurant.

…once we finally find a site.

I promise you we’ve been looking. I roam the streets, searching for advertising boards and vacant plots. We’ve a crack team of Friends of Bertha’s - we love you guys - sending us tips on where might be available. Feel free to join this team, come one come all, a shedload of Bertha’s points available to whoever finds us our home. We’ll get there.

So where can we find you now?

Well since you ask we’ll be at BrewDog Bristol this Saturday, 15th August and Moor Beer Taproom the following week, 22nd August.

What’s not to love about pizza and beer?

Sandbags

I have no regrets in life. That’s a lie, I bloody hate these sandbags.

At a generous estimate they’re 30% reconstituted with Gaffa tape, that’s on the rise, I’ve owned colanders with fewer holes.

We bought these before our first mobile event, one of the many last minute items we scrambled to source before selling to the public. I was working at my old job, my last free weekend not the most productive with a 19 pub stag do yomp across the Lake District and each evening consumed ticking off the tasks to get us up and running.

I knew the proper way to fill the sandbags, to line each section with a thick plastic bag, pour sand into each, keeping it contained and secure. But in haste, and with the weather forecast threatening to blow our marquee away, we dumped the sand straight into the bags and hoped for the best.

Error.

If you ever see two feet protruding from the back of a yellow Land Rover, muffled curses emanating from the bowels of the van, chances are that’ll be me. Typically I’m lying face down, pinned under a hot oven, trying to wrestle a limp, slug of a sandbag free as it ejects sand from at least 4 orifices. Half a tonne of oven bolted to the chassis doesn’t make the clean up operation any easier.

From that point onwards we vowed we’d always do things the right way, first time. If a job’s worth doing and all that.