Baern Café

“We’re just two people who really love good food and feeding people,” says chef Hazel Powell, who last year launched Baern Café in the Bowhouse food production hub in St Monans in the East Neuk of Fife with her friend and business partner Giacomo Pesce. A glance at the menu confirms this. It is small, changes weekly, and lets the ingredients do the talking: bacon brioche, kohlrabi kimchi, haggis sausage rolls and slow-cooked beef ragu. Then there’s Baern’s signature sourdough: “We’re incredibly proud of it,” says Hazel. “Giacomo lives and breathes the sourdough; every day he tweaks something to try and improve it.”

The bread, along with all Baern’s dishes, preserves and ferments, is made “entirely from scratch” in the open kitchen of the café, which occupies the old grain store at Balcaskie, the working estate where Bowhouse is situated. A big open space, “it still nods to its grain store roots”, with exposed beams, neutral colours and an enormous picture window overlooking the estate. Then there’s “a cavernous upstairs, to which we’ve just had a mezzanine added, so you can see out over the Forth to Bass Rock. It’s pretty magical”. 

Bowhouse was set up to connect small growers and producers with restaurants and shoppers, so Hazel and Giacomo are surrounded by like-minded food creatives and can source everything they need for their weekly menu from their neighbours. The flour for their bread is from Scotland The Bread, which grows small-scale heritage grains “for nutritional value rather than for yield or profit”; their vegetables are nurtured by Tom and Connie at the East Neuk Market Garden; and “the fish landed in St Monans is incredible”.

Hazel, originally from Glenfinnan, fell in love with the place after helping out her friend Jess Rose Young, who had a pop up café in Bowhouse the year before – “I just couldn’t get it out of my head,” says Hazel, who has a fine art background but converted to cookery at Ballymalloe Cookery School in Ireland before joining the team at Ballintaggart in Perthshire. She met Giacomo while working at the restaurant Fhior in Edinburgh. Originally from Treviso, just north of Venice, he had arrived at baking via a PhD in mineral physics and a career in fine dining. 

The pair realised they shared an ethos when it came to food, one centred around seasonality, environmental values and zero waste: Baern’s leftovers get used somehow, be it kimchi juice in the sourdough or corn on the cob from the soup to make a sweetcorn and tarragon lemonade. “To us food is about community, time and place,” muses Hazel. “It’s an endlessly creative medium, changing with the seasons and constantly evolving.” 

They recently launched seasonal evening sessions “with candlelight, great tunes and a really fun à la carte menu”, plus organic wines from Futtle next door. She says that when they thought up Baern, they wanted it to be a space that became part of the community, a space where people could meet for a conversation and take home their weekly loaf. 

Is there one thing that visitors must try? “Our sausage rolls are pretty special I think,” smiles Hazel. Just now they’re rabbit and venison from the estate grounds, with mulled wine, and an incredibly old variety of apples from the estate’s orchard. “And always the bread.”

Recipe from Baern Café

Friands are beautiful little almond and brown butter cakes, and they’ve been a favourite at Baern throughout the seasons. We change the flavours depending on what is available from the gardens or the hedgerows here in the East Neuk. 

This is our summer version, but they also work really well with bay leaves and apple in the autumn, or sage and lightly pickled fruits in the winter. We like to top ours with toasted Italian meringue or whipped crème fraiche, but they’re equally lovely with just a dusting of fresh nutmeg or herbs.

Brown your butter. Warm the butter and oregano in a saucepan until it foams and turns a rich chestnut brown colour, it should smell like toasted nuts. Take the pan off the heat and let it stand for five minutes to allow the oregano to infuse. Strain through a sieve into a metal bowl, catching all the oregano and the dark brown butter solids that have formed, discard these, allow the mixture to cool slightly. 

Sieve the flour, icing sugar, ground almonds and salt into a large bowl. Whisk your egg whites until frothy, and then fold into the dry mix. Add the warm (not too hot, not too cold) brown butter and fold until the batter is smooth. We like to put the mix into a piping bag here to make the next step easier. 

Brush an oval silicone mould with unscented oil, fill the moulds two thirds of the way, and then gently press three halves of gooseberries into the centre. Bake for ten minutes at 200 degrees (fan), then turn the oven down to 190 (fan), rotate the trays in the oven, and bake for another eight minutes. This high temperature forms the delicious chewy crust. They should rise in the oven and then settle back down while they cool in the moulds on a wire rack. Let them cool for five to ten minutes before removing them from the moulds, and then allow to cool completely before icing.

words // Emily Rose Mawson - photography // Paul Hunter