Batgung

There's a place called Luba's Bakery - near the North Point tram terminus. It's no longer run by Russians but the bread there might be worth trying. (I like the banana bread -- but don't think that's what Mr Tall's looking for! ;b)

I thought I knew the shops in Kennedy Town, but this is a new one to me - and it opened in 2007! I must be spending too much time down the tunnels...

They are on the seafront at Shop 1, G/F., Grand Fortune Mansion, 32-34 New Praya, Kennedy Town, Hong Kong. Here's their website.

>> but the German bread shop in Elements has good looking stuff.

can you provide the shop name ?

>> Roman meal

Where exactly do you get it ?

Thanks

Thanks for that - I drove past it the other day and was thinking that it looked interesting and worth a visit!

My husband has decided that now we're moving to Pokfulam that Kennedy town will be our new 'hood'

I have found another loaf worthy of the manly bread designation.

The Family Tall had dinner the other night in Simply Life in IFC. We'd eaten at their branches in Festival Walk and Tai Koo previously, and I'd noted their bread was nice, but probably not worth making a special effort to acquire.

That perception has changed: either the whole chain has upgraded its bread recipes, or the IFC branch has a particularly good baker, but the bread we had this last time was superb. A bread plate with slices of both country-style white and a fantastic, dense, delicious multigrain was plopped down on our table, and believe me, it went back empty.

Both varieties of bread are available at the restaurant's take-away counter, with the multigrain offered sliced and packaged, or cut directly from the giant pillow loaves in which it's baked. It's not cheap -- $24 for a quarter-loaf, or about seven big slices -- but it's definitely worth it.

We also took the plunge and got a bread machine about a year and a half ago, and it's worked well for us. In the States, I went through phases of making bread by hand; but in HK I find it too hot most of the year to contemplate turning on the oven, and I had far more disappointments with hand-made loaves here since I never mastered the heat and humidity variations. The bread machine does add heat to the kitchen, but much less than the oven does.

I've used it mostly to make basic whole wheat/oatmeal "sandwich" loaves and the occasional fruit bread; too lazy to attempt anything more complicated so far. I doubt the machine is capable of a great crusty bread. But it makes pretty good, FRESH bread consistently available at home with a minimum of fuss; and that has been a great addition to our lives.

If your breadmaker has a "rise" function, it can also be useful for preparing dough even if you then bake it in the oven or do something else with it. (We use it sometimes to rise dough for mantou and huajuan (steamed buns). After a bit of experimentation, you know pretty well when the dough will be risen, so you can plan (and in the winter, it saves quite a bit of time). Also, we've used it sometimes if we want to make a recipe which calls for a double or triple rise (since each rise strengthens the gluten, or, as they say in Chinese, the "flour muscles" 麵筋 :-)).

On the down side, breadmakers are not cheap (around 800 HK and up when I looked in 2009-2010, at least for something that will make a loaf of any size), and they can take up a fair amount of counterspace. You can sometimes find them used on the geoexpat and asiaxpat sites;  a neighbor found a Sanyo breadmaker at a garage sale for 50 HK. We (that is to say, my mother-in-law) ordered a Donlim 東菱/东菱 for us online in the mainland (about 250 RMB) and ended my miserly shilly-shallying. I wondered afterwards if we might be in violation of some tax law, but in any case, I'm a convert and won't mind shelling out here in HK when this one passes away.