You simply cannot beat the scent of a freshly baked loaf...ribbons of steam rising from the oven, releasing that intoxicating aroma of sweet yeast. Gorgeous.

Happily for Emily Aitcheson, this is the smell that pervades her senses when she gets up each morning. The fruits of husband Alex’s labours. And the product at the very soul of their new business venture – Acre Bakery.

Both Emily and Scottish native Alex are known on the Suffolk food scene. Emily and her siblings run a variety of ventures over at the family’s Kenton Hall Estate (Emily largely overseeing weddings, events and The Hub Cookery School), while Alex ran The Queen at Brandeston, just up the road – the pub is now in the capable hands of his sister.

Like many other folk in the hospitality industry, the couple were heartbroken by Covid-19 and its lockdowns. But they resolved to find something positive in the experience.

And that ‘something’ was baking.

“I could see villagers were struggling to get flour during lockdown,” says Alex. “We could get big sacks of it delivered so we initially started getting that into the pub, re-bagging and selling it. The kitchen was lying empty so I thought, ‘why not bake some bread?’.”

The Queen’s front room was converted into an essentials shop, proving a lifeline for local people. And as the lockdowns ceased, Alex found himself drawn more and more into the world of dough.

Over the summer, at his and Emily’s home, Monewden Hall, the chef has been perfecting his bakes in an enormous speciality wood-fired oven brought over from Germany.

“I chose it for its capacity,” Alex says of the kit. “It can take about 60 loaves at a time. Our pizza oven would only take 12. I’d say I’m managing about 40 per bake at the moment. It’s all done with the residual heat. You build the fire up, and the heat is trapped in the bricks. I can do about three or four bakes, I’ll make some cakes and biscuits as the temperature drops, and then I dry out wood. I use every single bit of the oven.”

Cooking in this way is more time effective too, says Alex, who’s managed to avoid those early shifts in the wee hours so often associated with the baking trade.

“In the electric oven our capacity was 12 loaves at a time. I was there from about 3am to 12noon. That’s quite labour intensive, and electric ovens are very power hungry – it's a major cost, especially in this current crisis.”

He tells me the wood oven, once it gets going, cranks up to about 450C, dropping 10C an hour, which burns off the soot, leaving a clean baking surface at around 250C for tin loaves to slot into the bottom.

Sourdoughs are cooked in the top of the oven at around 220C. Followed by more tin loaves, and a round of cakes and brioche-based treats.

“You have to be quite clever in your recipes to utilise the falling temperature,” he adds, saying he lights the fire in the evening, leaves it to do its thing, and gets cracking on with shaping and baking when he’s up at about 6am – though he’s not able to put anything in the oven until around 10am. Positively leisurely for a baker.

All bread (apart from those with inclusions such as rustic grains) are made the time-honoured way – with flour, water and salt...oh, and Barry, the sourdough starter, who came with Alex from his restaurant in Edinburgh, but can chart his birth back around 120 years.

Alex points out it’s not any old flour going into his loaves. Some is grown and milled for them at E5 Bakehouse’s Fellows Farm in Suffolk, with the rest sourced from Wildfarmed – a venture by former Groove Armada member Andy Cato (now an award-winning arable and livestock farmer).

The range includes a country sourdough based on a French pain de campagne, a malted tin loaf with malted barley (apparently it makes a nice sandwich), baguettes, and focaccia sprinkled with sea salt smoked in the oven.

As for cakes and bakes? There’s a seasonal approach here, using the bounty of fruit, nuts and produce growing around them – which should increase dramatically in coming years. Working with the Woodland Trust, Alex and Emily are putting 1,500 nut trees and 400 fruit trees on their 11 hectares of land. There are even plans to introduce pigs, which will devour the hazelnuts and sweet chestnuts, and could be destinated for a new range of charcuterie in the future.

Anyway, back to the sweeter side of Acre, and Alex rattles off a dreamy list that includes a Breton-style apple cake made with Fen Farm butter and buttermilk that’s somewhere between a batter and a custard. He’s made a moist carrot cake, incorporating pears from the orchard. And recently there have been pear and frangipane tarts made with just-picked hazelnuts in place of almonds.

“This is a great way of using up any gluts and windfalls,” he says.

Acre Bakery isn’t directly open to the public, instead offering local collection points, including The Queen. Deliveries can be made within villages around Monewden, with a £10 minimum order for anyone outside a five-mile radius.

“We want to have a hub in all the surrounding villages so we can do a delivery once a week,” says Emily. “And people can go to our website to order for click and collect. We will also be adding a subscription service for people to have bread delivered weekly or monthly – a bit like the milkman model.

“It’s really fantastic bread and I think people are really going to enjoy what Alex is making.”

To find out about deliveries, click and collect and subscriptions, go to acrefarm.org