Earth's CrustBakery

Tom and Pavlina van Rooyen opened Earth's Crust on Castle Douglas's St Andrew Street in 2015, after the backyard bakery they had started burned down — the phoenix framing is theirs, and forgivable given the circumstances. The bread is slow-fermented sourdough from organic flour, made to Real Bread Campaign standards, and it reached the finals of the BBC Food and Farming Awards' best-producer category in 2017, which for a two-year-old bakery in a Galloway market town is a considerable rise. The shop keeps short, honest hours built around baking days rather than footfall, which is how you can tell a bakery means it. Castle Douglas calls itself a food town; the claim rests partly on this oven.