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BreadMan Walking, Rialto, Dublin (2026)

04/09/2026

I do love a hamburger.

I love all sandwiches - like pizza, a food the world can agree on. Fold the pizza, technically also a sandwich.

Animal protein, fermented carbohydrate, leafy stuff, a condiment; this has been around since neolithic farmers made the first flatbread. The hero, gyro even, with a thousand faces. It defies reason that our clever species waited until 1762 for the 4th Earl of Sandwich to ‘invent’ such a thing. Always at it, the Brits.

It’s hard to improve on a good burger bar how the bloody bit in the middle eats the world, from water and feed in to slurry and methane out. Beef is a delicious disaster which I still eat, in ever smaller amounts.

These 120gm patties are nine days worth of my red meat allocation under the Planetary Health Diet, updated by the Eat - Lancet Commission in 2025. It pleases neither Big Meat or its trenchant critics, but does chart a path through the ethical maze if you are somewhere in the middle, as I am.

Think of it as a science led response to Michael Pollan and his famous injunction to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Read it at eatforum.org

Everyone should also make their own burger buns, because I’ve yet to find a serviceable one in a supermarket. These ones are sourdough with potato, if you don’t mind.

Method from theperfectloaf.com where Maurizio Leo | The Perfect Loaf is a total mensch for the rigour of his recipe development and generosity with the outcomes.

They were fantastic. Halfway to a brioche and a soft open crumb, moderate hit of lactic tang and a well fired crust. More importantly, STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY.

Right down to the last hurrah, at which point lesser buns throw in the towel and the last of your burger, the bit you covet most, is running through your fingers.

While you’re at it, make the patties too. This is minced rib not ashamed of its fat% from Seasoned heavily like a steak, on the outside, absolutely nothing else. Resist the temptation, do not play with your meat.

I made 25 of these cuntyburgers, a deplorable name which surely merits an explanatory post of its own, or I could defend it in person at an upcoming sourdough class.

I have a few slots for Oct/Nov. DM for info

14/08/2026

And so another year around the sun, my favourite and only daughter has reached her majority and a cake is called for.

Such is the widening social gyre we have outgrown the little house, but the joint shindig almost didn’t happen due to the venue, a schmancy D2 establishment not long opened to much fanfare going into liquidation a week prior. I am confident the hefty deposit is low on the creditors list.

Cue much angst for and .merrimann but to the rescue came D8 local heroes Hen's Teeth , who couldn’t have been nicer. Good folk they are, laid back and quietly professional, a rare thing.

Having worked with the client since forever, other than the brief “eighteen, chocolate, huge”, I had creative license. Something more thoughtful was in order to convey the legal transition to adulthood with all its liberty, promise and horizon but also its expectation, inevitable blunders and hard lessons. Bitter sweet, like chocolate.

That’s all very well, but the hottest day of the year was not ideal for applying ganache and this noirish mirror glaze. Butter cream forgives, blemishes covered like miracle concealer, but mirror glaze is a cruel mistress, accenting every flaw in a cake’s bone structure. Please don’t zoom in.

Nor do I apologise for its 80s maximalist aesthetic. This cake is Carly Simon singing You’re So Vain and Joan Collins on a swing at a Halston afterparty in Studio 54. Its Delboy splashing out in OFAH, its Patsy from Ab Fab on the cover of Razzle. It’s suggestively eating a Flake and it’s all because the lady loves Milk Tray. It’s all the books written by Joan’s sister Jackie and comes with an 18s certificate.

Everyone had a ball including the little knot of parents. When we weren’t marveling at the dress code of glamorous frocks and training heels for the ladies, football jerseys and dodgy combovers for the gentlemen, we reminisced at how quickly we all found ourselves here, children now adults, before ducking outside for our last chance to see a total eclipse of the sun.

24/07/2026

Dublin is a one peppercorn town, as I realised when confronted with five unfamiliar varieties in the incomparable grocer that is Rome’s Castroni last January.

I did what you would have done and bought them all. Finally got round to a tasting, and brought in Simon “The Nose” O’Connor. Museum guy, composer of music and dabbler in perfumes. Man of many sensory parts, very Hannibal Lechter. Scroll to see his tasting notes, which include words like terpenic, the aromatic compounds we associate with plants like eucalyptus.

As a control, we started with whatever was in the pepper mill, origins unknown, because who knew there was a whole world of black pepper to discover. Bashed them all up in the P&M and we dived into their world.

It was intense. The heat in black pepper comes from an alkaloid called piperine, and after tasting six of them straight no chaser, we were fairly buzzing on it.

but what olfactory treasures we found. Notes of woody spices like clove and nutmeg, some dark and musky, others bright and citrus, a range of heat and length on the finish.

The Long Pepper evoked Chinese 5 spice, the Voatsiperifery had an astringency that would pair very well with chocolate or summer fruits. You could really elevate a carbonara or cacio e pepe with any of these.

I rarely eat planetkilling beef now, but the occasion demanded steak au poivre. To the victors Sarawak, Long Pepper and Voatsiperifery I added pink peppercorns, green ones in brine, deglazed the f**k out of that pan with stock and a wee splash of best sherry vinegar, cream, dijon.

Knocked out a few jockeys whips and a green salad while that was reducing, finished it with the resting juices and chives. I will go out on a limb and say it was a sauce for the ages.

For afters I had a stab at Mickael Viljanen passionfruit and white chocolate souffle which had us momentarily euphoric and lamenting for The Greenhouse on Dawson St. I’m having many intrusive souffle thoughts since so it will have to be its own post.

High on pepper and ribeye and souffle air, we uncorked a second bottle and talked long into the balmy Rialto night as old friends must.

03/07/2026

Bit work shy here of late. There must be a word for that, like digital absenteeism. It’s not a nice feeling. Ours is after all a reciprocal relationship, like a flower that needs regular water.

You hit that button in the reasonable expectation of some bread shaped distraction provided by me, but lately not so much as a crust, crumb or heel.

I could drum up some lame excuses - afternoon curtains drawn consuming the great pageant from SW19, on into the small hours for red eye football from the Americas, the can’t be arsedness of a bit of Dublin sun in high summer, the general ambivalence I often feel about shilling myself on here, as I think most sensible people do.

I really don’t know how to ‘use’ social media beyond the erratic sharing of food adjacent marginalia when the spirit moves me, and probably shouldn’t be drawing your attention to this hiatus in the first place. I imagine the done thing is to sneak back in quietly, because in the retina scorching torrent absolutely nobody clocked you leave.

But books have been the distraction, both my work in progress and the ones I’m reading to help me navigate.

My very vague plan was to write about the realities and fantasies of our food lives in Ireland, framed through the thing I know best, the humble loaf. Given that bread can be up to 50% water, that seemed a sensible place to start, and now I am entirely in the deep end. It’s like throwing stones into a well that has no bottom, floundering as I try to get hold of water in my mind.

I am reeling from my ignorance about it, and the realisation that despite its elemental and non-negotiable role in everything we eat, we almost never talk about water. It is the most enigmatic ingredient of them all.

You might be holidaying by water yourself over the next while, and if you want to dip your toe into the vast hydrocosmos between swims, all of these are different and wonderful.

You would be in especially capable hands with and and their respective river stories. One fiction, one non, both masters of language and storytelling.

They will take you to uncharted places in the ocean of yourself.

08/06/2026

By way of a coda, here are some bits from yesterday’s celebration of at . It was a great honour to be part of it along with a fine cast of musicianers that included .marya and

While we passed out bread made with his starter, the butter absolutely slathered on by and a fine trio of Carlow ladies, I said a few words about Manchán the baker. Ok, quite a lot of words which you’ll find in the longer video.

It being Borris, the great and good were there, including who waved her ceremonial fly whisk over proceedings and gave the butter to bread ratio her seal of approval.

I brought Manchan’s starter with me for people to take home, but not nearly enough. To that end, I will get a batch active for this saturday a.m. It can be collected here, but DM me in advance, it’s not a walk up thing.

Then a day spent enjoying the wisdom of people who have made books , which has an added resonance now that I am trying to make one myself. But what most impresses is the audiences, how they offer their undivided attention for the sound of other humans in intimate, sombre, honest conversation.

There is a palpable intensity to the listening. Sometimes if a room is full, they huddle quietly around a loudspeaker outside, like returning to the golden age of wireless.

I really appreciated all the humans that made Utopia, a kind of crowdsourced history of humanity made from sticky tape, cornflake boxes, bits of string and fertile imaginations.

Over three days, cajoled it into being and then walked us through it with his formidable intellect and comedic virtuosity to close the festival. It was a defiant middle finger to our digital enslavement, it was funny, poignant and marvellous, and I hope he does it again.

25/05/2026

Tempus Fugit.

My year is a roundy one. I can’t bring myself to utter the number but let’s just say in a matter of years I will be eligible for free bus and rail travel. Well mannered, civic minded youngs to whom I already appear fossilised have started offering their seat. The cheek.

Friends will lie to your face, ‘it’s just a number’, while discreetly assessing it. Your rusting bodywork, your balding tyres, tired paintjob and wobbly chassis. Excessive mileage, barely worth trading in.

You utter something trite about snipers alley and not letting old men in, but everybody knows that this number don’t lie, and the hour grows ever later.

What this has to do with croissants is that you realise there are only a finite number of them left.

I don’t want one everyday, where is the occasion in that, but twice weekly - one at the weekend, one to get you there - seems fair.

I have done the sums. At Ireland’s current male life expectancy of a disappointing 81.1 years, my remaining allowance, assuming I don’t get knocked down by that bus, is about 2000 croissants.

I like to visualise them stacked in a cairn on the kitchen table. Small pile, getting smaller. Every croissant counts and given the gravity of the situation, I have lately taken to making the technical little bastards myself.

Plain ones, mainly. Such a pejorative word, plain. There is nothing plain about a croissant. As with everything fermented, they are a temperamental law unto themselves, but mostly they take a lot of Time, that other shrinking allocation.

There were many days making sh*tty ones before these passable specimens I now set before you. They are a work in progress.

Was it cherished time squandered on their sensuous architecture and Fibonacci geometry, the contrast between lacquered crust and latticed crumb, only to dissolve in a little gust of air, salt, sugar and fat, the moment of caffeinated hedonism already forgotten save the loitering butter on your lips and the shards of collateral damage on your lap.

Larkin surely knew;

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

23/04/2026

Tough crowd in here last Monday morning. Grizzly old specimens, battleweary from too many nights at the pass.

Underpaid, overworked, undernourished, overcaffeinated, by their scarred forearms, back spasms and bloodshot eyes shall ye know them.

Only kidding, mostly. They were 12 lovely chef humans, including a pair of head honchos from bougie joints in the wilds of Connemara and Mayo, a smattering of Dublin heads and some lovely young lads with their instructors from in Darndale.

They were here for a bread clinic organised by the lovely people at . We spent the morning shaping, baking and generally nerding out on sourdough. The fun stuff like keeping the wild yeasts enthusiastic and the lactic acids on a leash, why the grower and the miller matter, and why there is such a thing as too much hydration and no such thing as too much colour.

I made some croissants for the coffee break and nobody uttered a peep about them which I will take as a ringing endorsement. For lunch I made Fabada Asturiana, because after a weekend of reducing sauces, searing scallops and making quenelles, this is the food I think chefs on their one day off WANT TO EAT.

Chorizo, morcilla, panceta, fabe, onions, garlic, pimenton, saffron, chicken stock, big pot, makes itself. Smoky, spicy, fatty, beany, like a Dublin coddle that fell foul of the law and moved to a remote part of Spain, we ate it with bread still warm from the oven.

It was a fun morning of baking, learning, supporting, hanging, chatting and eating, and I hope we’ll do another one before too long.

For my regular full day sourdough class, I have a few places left in May, after which I’m breaking for the summer to work on my book project and my croissant technique. Both are equally torturous, but I find them effective therapy for each other.

If you want to jump on a May slot or get on the booking list for dates from September on, send me your email address in a DM and I will ping you the details.

31/03/2026

I don’t like cake, but that’s a lie.

There was a lot of trim left over from this numerological job so I smushed patchy layers of it into a loaf tin, along with the remaining fruit and buttercream smearage. The dregs of a batch of praline went in too, and a splash of rum for the bit of adult.

Coming out of the tin, it had all the finesse of a kindergarten art class and it was really good and I ate more than is sensible to confirm that it’s true, I don’t like cake.

Having both reached their majority the actual cake was commissioned by and Laoise. They are admirable young women and I have to stay on Anabel’s good side, because she is a ninja behind the counter when we do markets.

She is also one of their royal majesties The Ballsacks to whom I am official baker. That makes her Anaballsack. There are three other ballsacks, among them my daughter, smallsack. You will have to ask them about the naming convention yourself. Come by anytime. They are always here.

Anaballsack was very specific about the inclusion of soft berries, to which I conceded, even though they are out of season and flew here from Spain. It wasn’t the moment for a lecture on the sustainability crisis for horticulture on the Iberian peninsula.

I like the cake making part but the transport gives me cold sweats so Laoise’s folks picked up the big one eight. Her dad surprised me with an exquisite beech bowl he had turned himself.

I was reminded of my own dad who turned wood obsessively, chasing some elusive form over a lifetime of bowls that he didn’t have words for. It brought him deep fulfillment, and the world is generally a better place when men occupy themselves operating lathes or decorating sponges. The chisel and palette knife are mightier than the sword.

My cakes these days are all threshold gifts - birthdays, weddings, christenings. A theatrical spectacle, an outpouring of love in a room, a fleet moment of hedonism and then they are gone.

Why don’t we have grand cakes at funerals, the biggest threshold of them all. As you know, I don’t like cake but I wish there to be one at mine.

I won’t be in a position to make it and will leave instructions.

BreadMan Walking

04/09/2026

14/08/2026

24/07/2026

03/07/2026

08/06/2026

25/05/2026

23/04/2026

31/03/2026

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