The Ultimate Guide to Craft Bakeries in Ireland

Where to find your Daily Loaf

The Artisan and Craft Bakeries of Ireland

Lucky us. We are living in Ireland’s Age of Bakeries.

A dozen years ago, there were scarcely a dozen specialist bakeries in Ireland. In 2024, this comprehensive survey describes more than 100 artisan bakeries throughout the island, a tribe of men and women who bake with skill, integrity, and a focus on health and well-being.

The Age of Bakeries is actually a Second Coming. Ireland used to be crowded with local bakeries: if you lived in West Cork you ate Cotter’s Bread; in Kerry it was Harrington’s, and this identification with local places and local bakeries covered the country.

The network was largely destroyed by the supermarkets and their bread price wars, most especially in 1989 when Ben Dunne of Dunnes Stores slashed the price of a loaf to 35 pence. The number of local bakeries halved almost overnight and, despite anguished discussion in the Dail on the matter, the local bakery scene was shattered. There were a few holdouts – Barron’s in Waterford; Bretzel in Dublin and a scattering of others. But, for the most part, if you ate good bread it was because you baked your own.

But then, echoing the artisan practices of Ireland’s cheesemakers, real bread bakers began to appear here and there, and they brought with them an ancient secret: sourdough fermentation. By 2012 the revolution in bread and baking was under way, and it has been a tumult ever since.

Sourdough bread baking revolutionised the scene, toppling the culinary travesty that is the Chorleywood bread manufacturing system, and introducing us to real bread, made with flour, salt, and water. And, along with the loaves, there is precise attention being paid to expert pastries, and the arcane art of lamination: the jambon and the sausage roll now share counter space with the kouign-amann and the alfajores.

Lucky us. Welcome to the Age of Bakeries.

This is part 1 of a comprehensive look at baking in Ireland. Coming soon, watch out here for our upcoming feature on sweet and speciality bakeries and Irish flour mills.

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