Sometimes things are just too good to last. The closing of eco-bakery BarcelonaReykjavik is a recent example, leaving Barcelona less rich in fiber and variation.
Before BarcelonaReykjavik, the city was a desert of white, bland bread. Personally, I was in excellent shape, back then, running for miles through the city trying to find a bread that was a slightly darker shade of white.
When BarcelonaReykjavik opened their first bakery in El Raval my aimless bread hunts through the city stopped and my relationship with ecologic “turgidum” and “dicoccum” began. Through the years I’ve always dropped in to get a potent dosis of carbs and rich tasting baked goods.
Their downfall? Prices, I guess. Bread heavy in content, fermentation time and weight (as you normally pay bread by the gram) tends to be costly and Catalans are (in)famously stingy and not always willing to accept that quality and manual labor have a cost.
Today, the bread “apartheid” of “white only” is a thing of the past, and most neighborhoods have the darker variety, but it is truly sad to lose the original!