Bantam Bread

This is the quintessential bakery in all of Connecticut. Organic, reliable, and all hand made products. Try the Flax Bread or the Dirt Bombs if you want a sweet.

Everybody loves this place and everything is good here. Bread, dirt bombs, desserts, cookies. ALL THE BEST IN THE AREA. Also they have chocolates and cheeses and dog biscuits.

Semolina baguette with sesame seeds was a truly superb loaf of bread — golden brown with generous seeding and crunchy points on each end, with crisp crust, moist crumb, right amount of chewiness and great flavor. Chocolate truffle tart was out of this world — silky texture; intensely chocolatey yet not-​too-​sweet or heavy filling; crisp, flakey, non-​soggy bottom crust and contrasting crunchy crumbs on top — really excellent.

This place is totally legit. From the «dirt bombs» to peasant bread, baguettes… everything they create here is magic. I highly recommend getting a loaf of bread from here and then some farmers cheese from Arethusela up the street. I had a delicious strawberry-​rhubarb «hand pie» and it was out of this world. You may blink and pass this place, but make sure you turn the car around!

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh– it’s ok. In a pinch. I was actually going to love-​heart bakery, but it was 4 and closed, so I went down the street to here.
When I walked in, I was mildly confused but ok, I’ll poke around. Glass refrigerator full of way overpriced cheeses and two ricotta cakes. Ok, next. Medium sized cookies for $ 1.25 each… little pricy, but I grabbed a chocolate chip & peanut butter chocolate chip. (They were OK, grocery store cookies are about as good).
Then, out of the corner of my eye I see BLONDIES. MY FAVORITE. Ok. I’ll take two of those, and two brownies for the hubbster. Saw a fruit tart that looked good, but not $ 20 good. The girl rings me up and it’s $ 12.50!!! Gaht dang. Ok, so each brownie/​blondie was $ 2.00. That’s outrageous to me. They weren’t HUGE, for two dollars more in Plainville you can get the best cupcake ever and it feeds like three people. But you know what, that would be a one star knock off, I really don’t mind paying decent money for good food (especially BLONDIES).
Cookies were, ok at best.
Blondies were good, but not $ 2 good. Moist on the center but you could tell they were a few days old. Hubbster said the brownies were ok, but not amazing. I am giving them three stars because I have not yet tried the bread. I will update this when I do, but based on bakery sweets alone, I would pass in the future.

the seeded rye bread is fantastic. staff of young ladies who work here are very pleasant. nice ambience inside. in addition to a variety of fresh baked breads made on site and some sweet baked goods, there is a large selection of artisanal cheeses some being local, olive oils (not exactly local to connecticut, olive trees don’t like snow and ice too
much lol), local maple syrup (yum!) and honey, and coffee beans.

Their breads are great. I love the salted rye, the jewish rye, the sourdough, Their baguettes are good but I still prefer Blue Wave.
I love their pies, their dirty bomb, their palm leaves, and many other sweet goodies.
Their cooler has a nice mix of craft cheeses.
This is a very good artisan bakery.

Get their Holiday Bread for Thanksgiving. Get it for any holiday. Get it for anytime, since every day’s a holiday. Then go across the street diagonally to Arethusa Farm Dairy and get some butter. Then go home and gorge. Makes great toast, too.
And all their other stuff is great, by the way. Dirt Bombs are made to devour. Buy one and rue the fact that you only had one to eat. Buy two, eat one, and save the other to eat later. Ignore. Eat that one, too.

Yum, got the perfect pie for memorial day weekend– peach and blueberry crisscross. this little bakery is so pretty, sitting along a brook. I love coming here got up at 8am sunday just to bring home some treats for breakfast.

Delicious bread and pastries. Cute, small place. Glad I stopped in!

Why, WHY, WHY? did we not notice the strawberry-​rhubarb tart? The minute we left, we heard a regular asking for it, and I nearly turned around and went back in. But no. My husband is a model of sanity.
We would have to survive, somehow, on two kinds of biscuits (heavenly), two kinds of cookies (ginger = chewy/​spicy excellence; peanut butter chocolate chip = crunchy and just ok), and a multigrain loaf (crusty outside, tender inside, delicious).
Why only four stars? Minor stuff. Overpriced cheese in the case near the door. Fancy-​schmancy Euro-​sodas instead of local stuff. The lady waiting on us was taciturn to the point of comedy. (I grew up in New England, and I get it, but c’mon.) Plus, Nigel T. now informs me that BBC makes «dirt bombs.» Holy crap.

Far away from the bustle of Manhattan during a weekend of Connecticut country pursuits, a stop at this charming bakery is essential. The dirt bombs are lethal yet fantastic. You eat one, you want another. Two should suffice, but you want three which makes you a greedy fat bastard. As we say in Blighty, naughty but nice.

Absolutely fantastic homemade breads and desserts. They set the bar for organic hippie breads in my opinion. Multigrain miche makes me swoon. GO GO GO. Seriously. Go.

I have been hearing about Bantam Bread for years — and haven’t had the time to take the trip up to Bantam to check it out. Unfortunately they had another location closer to home that closed before I had a chance to stop by. So, on a slow Saturday we decided to take the ride up toward Litchfield and see this nice rustic bread bakery.
It’s a nice ride to Bantam, and the Bread Co. is a good reason to take the trip. The bake shop is a basement in a house located on one of the towns main roads, easy to find and parking was no problem. The store wasn’t fancy or a café or anything out of the ordinary — a focus on their baked goods is all that is really necessary here. They do have a small fridge with some cheeses and bottled beverages. The staff was super friendly and nice, helpful in trying to narrow down my baked good purchase to a reasonable amount.
We were there sort of late in the day and it was clear that some of their selections had sold out earlier. We tried a few cookies and some breads and they were all excellent. The cow cookie was a nice crisp sugary cinnamon pastry. The ‘dirt bomb’ was also very good — if you haven’t had one of these yet, check it out — its a muffin covered in cinnamon sugar, sort of like a donut but not fried. This is the kind of place you know you will return to, and that you want to try one of everything.
Bantam is a place to go for some really great bread.

YEAST. On a human… very bad. On some flour… very good.
This bakery, est. 1997, is in the sunken lower level of an unassuming building on the side of a random highway in the Litchfield Hills area of Connecticut. We were looking somewhere to stop for a quick breakfast on the drive back to Boston and found it in the free magazine Edible Nutmeg in the advertising section, heralded as one of the top 10 bakeries in the US according to
. Also, it was 2 miles away on the highway we were already driving on. Perfect.
When you walk in, it is difficult to know where to settle your hungry eyes first because even though the room is the size of a walk in closet, there is so much goodness in every direction you look. Inevitably drawn to the display case in front of you, you immediately begin calculating how many pasteries you can eat during a 3 hour drive. But then you discover the jars of cookies, and the rows of pies, and all that bread behind the counter. Since we had just gorged ourselves for three days we restrained and only bought one medium sized loaf of banana nut bread, a mixed berry galette, and 3 cookies. Why we didn’t buy any bread when it was a bread bakery was a question I asked myself the rest of the day, because the loaves looked like they were baked 20 minutes ago (and they probably were as we got there just as they opened on a Sunday morning).
We got in the car and drove away (big mistake, should have tried the goods before leaving the parking lot so we could have bought more) and I ate the entire banana walnut bread loaf in the next 20 minutes. The loaf was like your first kiss on the very first day of spring… magical and refreshing. My girlfriend allowed me the last tiny bite of her galette and we both agreed it was the best danish/​gallete/​sort of thing we had ever tasted. The pastry was light and fluffy but crisp on the outside and dusted with sugar, and the middle berry part was fresh and not too sweet. I can only imagine what those lattice berry tarts tasted like. The girlfriend asked me to turn around so we could go buy the other varieties of the galette (peach and strawberry, peach and blueberry) about 12 times during the drive home. After we savored the aftertaste of our baked items for an hour or so we started on the cookies. The peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies were not our favorite, but the giant gingersnap was wonderfully flavorful, perfectly soft, and just a bit chewy (in a good way).
This is a place that should be a destination and not just a convenient roadstop on the way back to the city. Highway 202 will definitely be the route of choice for any trip out to the western part of New England from Boston, whether it be western Connecticut or Vermont.