The first time someone seriously suggested we bake every day, we were quiet for a long while. Not out of politeness — we were thinking about what we’d have to sacrifice. A sourdough made from emmer won’t be rushed. It demands time we can’t take away from it just to make another morning delivery.
That’s why we bake only once a week. On Thursday. Not because it suits us — but because it suits the bread.
What we do on Wednesday
On Wednesday at five in the afternoon, we mix the starter. Flour from Košariská, water from the well behind the bistro, salt from Piran. No yeast, no dough improvers, no enzymes. Two hours later we knead — briefly, almost lazily. The dough needs peace.
Then comes the most important part, the one where it seems like nothing is happening: 22 hours of cold fermentation. The loaves rest in baskets in the cold room at 4 °C. That’s when the crust, the aroma, and the holes are born. The thing you’ll later mistake for butter in your mouth.
Sourdough is alive. If you push it to work faster, it stops tasting good. This rule applies to most things.
— From the bakery diary, March 2025
A wood-fired oven and a single temperature
We light the oven on Thursday morning at four. Beech wood that Adam from Podkylava brings us every fall. It takes three hours for the oven to reach 280 °C. Then we put out the fire and let the oven “breathe” — the bread bakes only in the radiant heat of the stone.
We load the first loaves at seven. We slice the last ones around noon. In between, the oven still has room for focaccia with homegrown cherry tomatoes, a cake with local fruit, and in season, lángos too. Over a single Thursday the oven cools from 280 °C to 140 °C — and each of those temperatures bakes something different.
Why not every day
The question we get most often goes: “If it’s such good bread, why don’t you bake it every day?” The answer is, in practice, more boring than we’d like: we couldn’t keep up. One loaf needs a day of preparation and a day of baking. To manage a daily delivery, we’d have to either split the team into two shifts — or shorten the fermentation. We don’t want either.
But there’s one more thing we only understood after a year: scarcity belongs to food. When something is available every day, we stop seeing it. For many of our customers, Thursday has become a ritual. They know the bread is still warm on Friday morning, sliced with coffee on Saturday, with scrambled eggs on Sunday — and by Tuesday they’re already looking toward the next Thursday.
Recipe · How to reserve a loaf
Spelt and rye sourdough
- We take orders until Wednesday 5:00 p.m. — via the form, email, or phone.
- A 1.2 kg loaf / €5.80. Bistro members €5.20.
- Pickup Thursday 2:00 – 6:00 p.m. right at the counter.
- Storage: wrapped in a linen towel, on the counter. Keeps for 5 days.
If reading this has whetted your appetite, Thursday is seven days away. All it takes is one text message, shorter than this paragraph. The rest is taken care of by the time we owe the bread.