We do everything differently here,” says Naomi Davies, the owner-baker of Bread and Honey café in Pine Hills. “We are the only bakery doing artisan bread in Albany.” One look at the counters in the storefront shop on Madison Avenue confirms that her baked goods are indeed different from the breads generally available locally. The small-batch bakery specializes in bagels, but also offers baguettes, Danish pastries, brioche rolls, ciabatta, and such specialty loaves as golden flaxseed, and, on occasion, pretzels.
“Everything is handmade from scratch,” Davies says. “We don’t buy bags of mix, we buy, for instance for semolina bread, dark unfloured millet seed and sesame seed, and it’s all mixed and shaped by hand, and baked in an oven that produces that nice, crusty artisan bread.”
The oven, she explains, is a steam-injection oven. “That’s what ‘shocks’ the bread and gives it a really nice crust. And it has a stone deck, and that creates a nice crusty bottom. The oven was my major investment.”
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