By way of a crowd pleaser, you can’t go wrong with cooked breakfast. Even a poor one- caged eggs, sausages and bacon from miserable pigs, water bomb tomatoes- will find an audience, and if you upgrade the quality- organic eggs, free-range meat, cherry tomatoes and so on- you’ll be catering for a hungry market, even with the consequently elevated price tag.
Of course, the calibre of the carb element in breakfast or lunch is crucial. Warburton’s white fried in cheap cooking oil, and bought-in Panini baked-off from frozen, are throwbacks to a time when we were careless with our health and knew no better. Nowadays, even carb avoiders are tempted by a bakery like Twelve Triangles that makes its own bread, pastries, and cakes, knowing that they’re fabricated with sound ingredients: butter not vegetable fat; loaves raised with sourdough starter and patiently fermented so that the micronutrients in them are more easily absorbed in the gut.
Fact is, if you only walk in through the front door of Twelve Triangles Kitchen Table in Leith, you can expect to be waylaid by the products of this bakery’s labours. Choosing is tortuous. Will it the pistachio cardamom knot or the apricot coconut version? Mind you, that lemon cardamom bun (really crisp croissant dough glittering with sugar dust), or its dark chocolate cinnamon version beckons. And bear in mind that every day is a doughnut day here, vanilla custard today, but I’m already gripped by an urge to come back and taste the raspberry violet, blood orange, and rhubarb custard ones. I mean, read those descriptions and you just have to taste them.
Breads? Should I pick the porridge, charcoal, white, seeded, Khorasan (made with kamut flour, an unusual type of wheat), or fruit and nut? Now, there’s a relief, I can buy one to take home, which simplifies ordering the cooked savouries. Oh my, how these options tantalise, but because foraging is a big thing here at Twelve Triangles, the broad beans and ricotta on toast with foraged elderflower is a clearly a must. If you’ve ever patiently twice-podded broad beans, I’m sure that you’d agree with me that this ample green mound of beans, served with the elderflowers and marigold leaves, and a thick layer of the cheese, on a first class slice of sourdough toast, is more than reasonable in labour terms alone. Crunchy house pickles- carrot batons, daikon, red cabbage- with a sweet Scandinavian type of flavour, flank a fat frittata that’s stuffed with potato, beetroot, Feta, and peppery with fresh dill.
We’ve gone for the Barwheys cheddar toastie partly for sentimental reasons. This wonderful dairy revived Ayrshire’s artisan raw milk cheese production but infuriatingly, it has been driven out of production, largely due to over-zealous antipathy to raw milk cheese production by Food Standards Scotland. https://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Article/2018/10/25/Scottish-cheesemaker-to-close-business So this excellent cheese is now a limited edition, never to be repeated, a tragedy, because teamed up with Twelve Trangle’s amazing loaf, it makes for a rugged, yet easy to negotiate proposition, with its blackened crust and oozing entrails. It's easily as good as the celebrated Borough Market toastie. A further bonus is that fermentation frenzy has a grip here, so the home-made carrot and cabbage sauerkraut that comes with it gets the acetic balance just right, allowing a mild garlic presence to come through. Twelve Triangles makes its own condiments a revelation after industrial ketchups and brown sauce. Its smoked tomato ketchup is runnier than the ubiquitous stuff and not so sweet, like a pulpy Bloody Mary. Chilli jam seems textured with heaps of minced chilli, which is suspended in a jelly that is, yet again, less saccharine than the usual I-might-as-well-eat-straight- sugar sort.
It’s a fresh idea to make brownie with rye flour; that moist, dark grainy sweetness really works in this recipe. We anoint it with the help-yourself, in-house whey caramel, which is like liquified Highland toffee. The miso caramel and passion fruit loaf, rippled with sesame peanut layers, makes another beguiling novelty, its innards like bread and butter pudding, its outer crisp. (Turns out that this is Twelve Triangles original way to upcycle leftover croissants.)
Greasy spoon joint? No way. This is brunch bliss.
Twelve Triangles Kitchen Table, 148 Duke St, Edinburgh. No phone
Food: 10/10
Atmosphere: 8/10
Service: 7/10
Value for money: 9/10
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