Staff Writer 
While COVID-19 and the months of lockdown in 2020 restricted and changed lives, they also provided space and time for creatives in the medical field, for therapists offering advice on coping with weird dreams during the pandemic, and for authors to write books.
Jodi Picoult describes her experiences in her pandemic novel Wish You Were Here, and Let Us Dream, written in the surreal first phase of COVID-19, by the late Pope Francis, offers reflections on ‘how to dream big’ and ‘how to rethink our priorities …. in our daily life.’ With the world on pause, people sought distraction, and baking sourdough bread at home became a global phenomenon.
On lockdown at the family farm in Marula, a few kilometres outside
Bulawayo, Bry-Leigh Rosenfels, co-founder and owner of Alfresco The Bakery, started a home baking project and developed a talent for making sourdough bread. While the only ingredients required are flour, water and salt, the making of sourdough bread requires a feel for different types of flour and a blend of understanding and patience.
Inspired by her mum, Christine, also an excellent cook, Bry-Leigh continued to refine her cooking and baking skills, and enrolled at Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork in Ireland. Located in a 100-acre organic farm, Ballymaloe shows students how to recognise the best sustainably grown ingredients, and how to cook them perfectly. ‘At Ballymaloe’, said Bry-Leigh, ‘I learned how to taste food.’
Later, Alfresco The Bakery opened up in the City of Kings, and following its success, Bry-Leigh and her business partner Ashley Smith opened a second branch at Honeydew Lifestyle Centre in Harare. Open every day of the week, Alfresco was pumping when George and I arrived for a mid-week lunch recently. The kitchen specialises in takeaway sandwiches and bagels made from artisan breads, pies and delicious pastries, but customers can also have sit down meals on the verandah, surrounded by attractive pot plants and flourishing green ferns.
A chicken pie was well-seasoned and delicious, the pastry crisp, flaky and cooked through, with no hint of a soggy bottom. A sourdough bagel, generously filled with smoked salmon and avocado pear, was liberally dusted with both black and white sesame seeds.
If you arrive early enough, you can choose from a tantalising
selection of sandwiches, such as roast beef and onion sambo,
Teriyaki chicken sambo, chicken Caesar focaccia sambo and fillet steak bagel. Generously proportioned sausage rolls encased in golden, flaky puff pastry sat enticingly on the shelf, and I made a mental note to try them another time.
When surrounded by many delicious options, it’s important to always leave room for dessert. The irresistible confections at Alfresco range from Red Velvet and Victoria sponge cakes, to Danish pastries, brownies, blondies, cruffins (artful cross between a croissant and a muffin) to an astonishing range of doughnuts.
A pillowy creme brûlée doughnut filled with vanilla creme patissiere and dipped in a hard shell of caramelised sugar, was too good to share, while a chocolate babka, made from a rich brioche dough wrapped around a dark chocolate filling, paired well with a good cup of coffee.
Coffee at Alfresco is also something special. Made from coffee beans grown at Kashaku farm in the misty Bvumba mountains, and roasted at Pilgrim Coffee Co in Bulawayo, the flavours have notes of chocolate, vanilla and black currant. One cup of coffee is never enough at Alfresco.
Alfresco Bakery recently received 200kg organically grown wheat flour from Cicada Africa, a leader in the green economy, and an agri-business focused on sustainable food. Grown by small scale farmers in Village 7, Gairezi in Nyanga, the wheat is cultivated by hand, without the use of pesticides. Irrigation, using the cleanest water, is provided by gravity fed sprinklers, making the use of diesel unnecessary.
Alfresco opens every morning at 7.30, when a large range of artisan bread is available. Handmade and using high quality ingredients, the bread sells out quickly, so if you need an alternative to mass-produced bread with all its additives, swing by Honeydew Lifestyle Centre and enjoy a range of treats made with organic, locally sourced produce.
