Bradbourne Bakery is an award-winning microbakery, baking and delivering handmade bread to households in Sevenoaks.
The bakery is run by lifelong bread enthusiast Annabel Carter. It is named after Bradbourne Lakes, a lake and community in North Sevenoaks where Annabel used to feed the ducks as a child, and now lives with her family.
Bradbourne Bakery is a small batch bakery with a weekly changing menu. All bread is baked to order and customers can order as it suits their household. There is no obligation to order every week.
You might choose the bakery’s stone baked sourdough, delivered to your door, often still warm. Or a weekly special including rye, focaccia, ciabatta, sandwich loaves, sticky buns and sourdough cookies.
Handmade
Every loaf is mixed and shaped by hand, with the radio on, in a process crafted over three years. The focus is on a long, slow ferment for great flavour and digestibility.
Stone baked
Every loaf is baked on a hot stone in a specialist brick oven. Steam is manually injected to give the bread a beautiful rise and blistered crust.
Organic
Every loaf is made with the very best ingredients. Organic flour from specialist millers Shipton Mill, Sicilian sea salt, and locally sourced ingredients including honey, ale and homegrown herbs.
The story so far
Unable to find the bread she wanted to buy in her home town, Annabel Carter set about starting a real bread revolution from her home kitchen, baking loaves you cannot find anywhere else in Sevenoaks.
In 2018 she sold her first loaf, baked in her domestic oven. 6000 loaves and two awards later, she finally bought a specialist brick oven.
Bradbourne Bakery was named Best Bakery in Kent at the 2020 National Bakery Awards. In 2021 Annabel's sourdough was awarded a coveted Great Taste star from the Guild of Fine Food. In 2022 she was awarded funding to buy an electric cargo bike, committing to making all future deliveries emissions-free; the first business of its kind in Sevenoaks.
Annabel now bakes and delivers more than 100 loaves every week to local doorsteps and organises pop up events at her local duck pond.
About the baker
Annabel grew up in Sevenoaks, and returned again in 2013 with her young family. Along the way she has had a varied career - some of it deliberate and some accidental - being a news reporter at The Scotsman, running a national filmmaking programme for young people, and working in a flea circus. She moonlighted on national live radio, and has been to Number 10 to make breakfast for the Prime Minister. Her first job was at an Edinburgh cinema where she managed to set fire to the popcorn machine.
None of this is much use when it comes to making great bread, but it gives her a lot to think about while baking.