Silver Bell Bakery & Cafe
I had long heard of a Lithuanian bakery in Queens which put out some of the best bread in the world. The best bread in the world being, of course, Lithuanian. This is good, hearty dark rye bread without any caraway.
There used to be a Lithuanian bakery in Brockton, Massachusetts (Montello Baking) but it closed about five years ago. It was only a few miles from my mother-in-law's house and I always made sure to make the detour when we were visiting her.
In 1998 I brought a 2 kilo loaf back with me from Lithuania. In 2003 Carly & I took a round 8 pound loaf from Montello with us on a trip to Vermont. We had it each morning for breakfast, slathered with goat cheese and honey.
When I decided to head to Jamaica Bay for the shorebird migration I looked up the bakery as well. (A number of web pages are devoted to guiding devotees to our Source of Life; it was on one of these pages that I discovered Silver Bell).
One way of taking mass transit to the wildlife refuge meant taking the 7 train to 61st & Woodside and transferring to the Q53 bus. A few stops further down the line is the Junction Boulevard subway stop; Silver bell is on Junction Boulevard a few stops south of the station.
I spent a good five hours birding then headed back and on to the bakery. I was not disappointed. They had small to medium loaves of what they called "Farmer's Rye"; they were dark and smelled wonderful. But what really caught my eye was the "Lithuanian rye" ; a medium rye with loaves up to a 12-pound round. Yes, that's right, twelve pounds of bread. While I would have preferred a 12-pound dark loaf, I grabbed a 1-pound dark and the 12-pound medium. How could I resist?
The darker one was, indeed, much closer to the bread which I had in Lithuania and Brockton. The big round, however, is still fantastic, and with eight pounds of it to go at time of writing, we are consuming it at a healthy rate.