Thanks for visiting the state is know for Biddulph's greatest export - the oatcake!
Povey's Oatcakes was began by Steve Povey in 1994. Getting developed in Leek Steve was well referred to as a local councillor and fervent supporter of the local people.
Steve described: "There is an oatcake shop around before - previously you could discover a baker in each and every street in someone's back kitchen - however the proprietor went bankrupt and that i required a bet, saved the machinery from his garage, copied the recipe, and it will be history."
Sadly Steve died this year and the untimely dying might have meant the finish of Poveys Oatcakes.
Advance his boy Alex. Just 23 Alex made the decision the very best tribute to his father is always to carry the bull through the horns and undertake the company, and that is precisely what he did. Ongoing producing Staffordshire's favourite junk food by having an eye to growing the company and distributing the oatcake gospel everywhere.
Alex has elevated production continuously since overtaking not just selling oatcakes from his shop but at numerous outlets including local shops and supermarkets. At busy occasions production reaches 80 dozen oatcakes each hour - but Alex has plans afoot to double this.
He's buying a completely new production unit in Biddulph and it has ambitious intends to supply more leading supermarkets and chains. Expanding the company in this manner may be the logical key to Alex: "I am youthful, ambitious and also have total confidence that my investment pays off many occasions over." he commented. " Everybody who tries the oatcake the very first time is bumped out because when good they taste and that i view it as my own campaign introducing the oatcake to some global market."
Ex-pats working abroad so crave their taste of home they are ready to stump up the cost of postage to possess them sent, a current order originating from Barclays Bank staff located in Japan who buy eight dozen oatcakes each month.
In your area, Alex has Alton Towers and both Stoke City and Port Vale football clubs on his ever-growing listing of regular customers.
His recipe is really a carefully guarded secret, but he will explain the oatcakes contain no artificial additives, fine oatmeal, plain flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda, yeast and water.
Tales abound around the good reputation for the oatcake. Many believe that it is a Potteries tradition and it is been known as a variety of names, from Tunstall Tortilla, through Potteries Poppadom to Clay Suzzette. But Alex reckons it really has its own origins within the Staffordshire Moorlands where isolated maqui berry farmers would eat oatcakes once they were stop by rainwater and could not achieve the businesses to obtain bread.
He revealed: "My father was presented with a really old recipe from Ecton within the Manifold Valley where maqui berry farmers will make their oatcakes from milk and oatmeal. There's a Derbyshire form of the oatcake that is much thicker and stodgier. The recipe appears to possess been turned because it spread."
" Only one factor is without a doubt, there's nowhere on the planet serving up traditional oatcakes like we all do in North Staffordshire and it is a convention I am proud to uphold."