TOP-class chefs can be notoriously hard to please but when your bread wins the approval of someone like Paul Tamburrini, you know you're doing something right.

The Glaswegian, who runs Paul Tamburrini at Macdonald Holyrood Hotel, in Edinburgh, sources his daily bread from an unusual bakery in his home city.

"It's wicked," he says enthusiastically. "To be honest, we would struggle to make that quality of bread day in, day out. It has a beautiful crust and the textures are just incredible. It just gives you peace of mind that they deliver quality at all times. Matt," he adds, "is just so inspirational. He's a lovely man, just awesome. He's got a nice way about him ... unlike,” he says with a quick laugh, “us chefs."

The artisan bread comes from an operation located in Unit E5 of Rosemount Business Park. Freedom Bakery, it's called. (The 'freedom' in the name carries a cleverly subtle message). And the 'Matt'? That would be Matt Fountain, a 32-year-old social entrepreneur.

Four years ago Fountain established the bakery at HMP Low Moss, in Bishopbriggs. It was a bold step in all sorts of ways. At first it was a small operation, training prisoners in the exacting art of making artisan bread, and selling the produce to city restaurants and cafes. In 2017, having decided to expand properly, Fountain opened purpose-built premises in the business park. The move was realised via funding from the social-investment charity, Resilient Scotland, and from nearly £17,000 crowdfunding, which was raised in just 28 days.

Today, the bakery has a staff of 12, a quarter of whom are former prisoners, and who work under the direction of professional bakers. Its wholesale menu ranges from wholemeal or ryeberry sourdough to croissants, pain au chocolate, brioche buns and baguettes. Fresh bread is supplied not just to Tamburrini's kitchens in Edinburgh but also to Gamba, the Ubiquitous Chip, The Ox & Finch, and Crabshaak in Glasgow. They are among 117 businesses that have accounts with Freedom.

In addition to the ex-prisoners on the staff, the bakery offers day-release training programmes to prisoners from Greenock, Barlinnie and Low Moss. And, where it can, it seeks to offer jobs to its 'trainees' once their sentences come to an end.

For this is the point of Freedom Bakery: it's a social enterprise that believes that people who are at risk of committing crime can benefit significantly from professional training and job opportunities. It bridges the gap between being in custody and suddenly regaining freedom, and maintains a continuity for such people at a time "when nearly everything else about their lives," it says, "is chaotic."

Fountain points out that 30.8 per cent of prisoners in Scotland commit another crime within a year of being released, but that a prisoner who finds work is 50 per cent less likely to return to prison. A recent report by a Commons Select Committee at Westminster said that re-offending in England and Wales costs an estimated £15 billion a year. Put these figures together and you can see the advantages of small but thriving ventures like this bakery.

The business is open to every category of prisoner, except those who have committed sex crimes, or crimes involving children. It mostly works with inmates serving sentences of four years or more. Some have done time for fraud, others for drug-related offences. Some have spent most of their life behind bars. Some have physical disabilities, or mental health issues, or are recovering from addictions.

The bakery has also paid for therapy for some employees and in a number of cases has helped place a deposit down for a home to rent.

Prisoners can get placements here while they are serving their sentence. "For some prisoners, when they are in the last year of their sentence, as part of the rehabilitation process they're given the opportunity to go out of the prison on day release," says Fountain, 32. "For the prison, it's primarily about risk, and seeing that the person be trustworthy and not run away.

"Actually, it's a great opportunity to meet someone while they're still in prison, part of - for want of a better word - a captive market and try and bring them round to the sort of hard-line outcomes that makes someone employable and able to do a job, but, more than that, getting them used to the stresses and strains of a fully functioning bakery and being part of the team.

"All of that goes with a job that you and I experience every day but for some of these people, who have literally never had a job, it's a bit more difficult. But it's also more rewarding.

"A lot of research - policy and criminological - shows that if you can form a relationship with someone while they're still in prison, and maintain that relationship once they leave, the likelihood of them reoffending is greatly diminished, and the likelihood of them changing their life for the better is all the more assured.

"So the relationship changes," he continues, "and they become employees of ours, on the same pay-scale as everyone else in the bakery. Eventually, people move on, but it's not something we push necessarily. You could see that there might be a problem in a couple of years when we have too many employees and not enough work or capacity, so we're trying to develop a way of starting up people in very low capital-intensive businesses, jobs, which we fund and in which that person is able to make his own cash."

Fountain stresses that these plans have still to be finalised, and says it's only because the bakery has been "quite successful that we feel confident that we can slowly but surely expand that business to be able to do this."

Back in December 2015, when the Low Moss bakery was but a few months old, Fountain told a reporter from this paper that he had recruited his team of prisoners by placing adverts in the halls where they lived, then issuing application forms. One inmate had already developed a walnut and rye bread, which was proving remarkably popular. (It is, incidentally, now one of Paul Tamburrini's favourites).

Fountain acknowledges that the Scottish Prison Service was more than happy to work with him at Low Moss. "The honest truth is that this came about because the SPS wanted it to happen. Unfortunately, I've no powers of lobbying or of understanding the politics, which are very bureaucratic and fraught. So this really did come from them. It was always an experiment for them, and I guess it was an experiment for me, because I had never done anything with food before, never done anything with criminal justice.

"It's a miracle that it ever survived, and flourished. But here we are. We're still going, still learning many lessons, but with a little bit more breathing space than we used to have."

Were there any models that he looked to when he was setting up at Low Moss? "Not really. I did look at a bakery in Italy [San Patrignano, which works with recovering drug addicts], but that was more for inspiration: if they could get recovering drug addicts to do amazing things, why couldn't this happen elsewhere? I looked at the Clink charity, which runs restaurants inside prisons in England and Wales. It's really impressive, and I guess that had a great deal of influence on me when I was starting out. But as with so many things, you don't know what you're really doing until you're actually doing it.

"Wrongly or rightly, one of the things that I was quite passionate about was to not be publicly funded. One reason was reputational: it's a very common agenda in criminal justice that the public doesn't want justice to cost more. The other was because there's a degree of freedom in being able to operate the way you need to, rather than conform to the really quite regimented funnels of how money is measured in terms of outcome."

Fountain is happy with the success the business has achieved but is far from complacent. "I think it's down at the end of the day to what we make," he says. "Artisan bread seems to be getting more popular. There's always a place for bread like this in high-end restaurants like Paul's.

"However, over the last year I would say that we've been getting wholesale requests from customers that perhaps you wouldn't expect would want this product: you wouldn't expect them to be paying the premium for it. So I guess the market is growing, where everything else in bread is dramatically falling."

With some bemusement he notes that a well-known Scottish bakery recently sold off its equipment. Its traditional bakery market had collapsed to the point where it made more sense to retool the premises so that it could make dog biscuits instead. "There is more money and more sustainability in making dog biscuits than there is in making bread," he observes.

Some 33 prisoners or former prisoners have worked with the bakery. Ten of them have gone into employment, two of them have reoffended.

"To this day," says Fortune, "my experience of them is that every one is pretty different. Some of their problems are similar but everyone reacts in a different way and their experience of prison has been different as well."

Of the four former current prisoners working at Freedom, their length of service ranges from one month to two-and-a-half years, "on and off. We have one guy whom we trained while he was in prison and was given a job as soon as he came out. He took a full-time job elsewhere and I asked him to come back - 'headhunted' is too grandiose - because he's really good at his job. And come back he did."

He modestly downplays the role played by the bakery when it comes to those prisoners who, through it, have found employment and started to rebuild their lives.

"At the end of the day, one of the things that I feel really passionate about is that people get places because they work at it. In our factory you have a great situation on the table that someone can take advantage of. Some people have thanked me but equally they would be thanking some of the other team-mates.

"Some of the best connections that people here make are with someone who has been through the prison system and is now working at the bakery, slightly further down the line. But what I would say about our team is that it's incredibly strong, and very close-knit, but," he adds with a laugh, "are entirely a pack of strays as well."

Fortune is equally modest on the subject of his own circumstances. "I basically haven't done anything with my life. I was an eternal student and was offered a funded PhD at Oxford. I had quite severe cold feet about going onto that, so I stopped it and started to think about what someone like me could do.

"As it happens, I couldn't really get a job. Like quite a lot of people you look to charity work because you can see it as being fulfilling, and for my sins that's what I did. I realised after a little while that I wanted to do my own thing, I wanted to do some social enterprise, I wanted it to be in food, because I've always been very interested in food. I think it's a very social thing when you're making it for other people. The bare bones came from these impulses and instincts, and slowly it became a bakery idea.

"Though my experience of this world is quite short, I think there is genuinely more and more of an interest that businesses have some positive impact beyond their shareholders and their profit margins. And one of the things that I try to do ... is that we don't really market anything about our products as having anything to do with our social impact agendas, so much so that I'll go to a tasting with a potential customer and they'll have no idea that we're a social enterprise.

"Rightly or wrongly, I quite like that, because it gives me the sense that people want our bread because they like it, and not because of the story. There’s dignity in it and dignity is what our people need to get their lives back on track.

"At the end of the day, we'll go nowhere if we can't sell our bread. The idea is that we are masters of our own destiny, and in this sort of recession-post-recession and who knows what's happening with Brexit, that's really important."

The head baker at Freedom, Scott MacKenzie, 35, has been with the operation since its earliest days in Low Moss. He started a matter of weeks after Fortune got permission to build a bakery there. "I did all the recipes and the menu and the training for all the guys.

"When we got the opportunity to set up the bakery the way I wanted it done, I designed it around a process that would be as simple as possible, to try and maintain consistency. That is the biggest goal for me."

In his time he has worked alongside numerous former or current prisoners. "There are two sides to this," he says. "Not everyone wants to be a baker, long term, in their life. But when they're in jail it's a very surreal environment; what the bakery does is create a normal working environment, where they all get treated equally. Even if they don't go into baking, it helps them with team-work and communication. I've seen some guys who have benefited from that, even if they've not come on board after they've got out of jail."

Paul Tamburrini for one is full of praise for what is happening at the bakery. "What he is giving to those guys is just incredible," he says. "I can't speak highly enough of him as a person."

The chef was impressed by what he saw when he posed for photographs at Freedom the other week. "I'm hoping to take my kitchen staff back up there to see what they do," he adds. "Our head chef is going to spend three or four days there - not to pinch ideas or anything like that, but just to see all the aspects of it; what they're doing to help these young guys, how they make the bread ... I was blown away when I saw it. It is," he says again, "awesome."

* www.freedombakery.org