Companion Bakeshop

Goat Horn: Almost Superb

Visited the bakery during the ride to Santa Cruz (read more on the ride here). Got there around 1pm when most of the breads had been sold out. Initially picked a generic whole wheat sourdough for baselining. But then spotted this unique horn shaped bread and couldn't help asking more about it. The staff highly recommended it as his favorite. Changed my mind and picked up the last one of its kind. Gotta say it's a good choice.

The bread is 60% white flour, 40% whole wheat. You can tell its whole wheat base by the darker crumb color with speckles of wheat bran and the hearty taste. The crust is nicely chewy but not hard at all. The crumb is moist and glistening even after two days. The base whole wheat sourdough is on point in every aspect. But the highlight has gotta be the goat part.

Goat cheese has been so smoothly and homogeneously incorporated into the dough that you can feel the cheesy flavor permeating the entire bread, as part of the bread's intrinsic flavor on top of the sour whole wheat base. Unlike most of the specialized cheese bread, you will find pockets of cheese in the crumb. It's more of bread with cheese rather than cheese bread. Goat Horn really has goat cheese baked in that you don't find any pocket of cheese but every bite is so goaty.

Imagine normally if you want to have goat cheese with bread, you'd get a slice of bread and spead a layer of goat cheese on it. Now with a slice of Goat Horn, you get a similar experience, but two in one.

Another worth-mentioneing is the crust. There is a layer of crispy cheese on top of the normal crust. It's like parmesan crisp, the edge, aka best, part of some cheese bake. It's just absolutely divine.

Why I gave "Almost" Superb not Superb? Well, the only nit pick is that some part of the crust gets a bit burned so tastes bitter. With cheese in the dough, it's kinda inevitable as protein solids are more easily burned than normal dough.

Last words, upon assembling materials for this post, I just noticed on their website that the bakery uses a goat with wheat stalk in the mouth as the logo. Seems that I picked their signature bread.