The Grocer on Warwick Street is, as the name suggests, a place where you can pick up your sundries. That is if your sundries consist of high quality vacuum packed foods prepared in the restaurant kitchens behind. And why not? It’s very good food and it beats M&S, although I can’t see much of a market for pre-prepared Brussels sprouts even from such an up market ‘epicerie’ as this.
What really flies out the door, though, is the bread. A range of sour dough
loaves, bagels, ciabattas and other delights. This same bread is also used
to make the sandwiches that are in incredible demand at lunchtime from the
workers in offices all around. It’s all the work of a remarkable young
baker from New Zealand called Julian Sciascia. I dragged him away from his
beloved ‘starters’ to talk to him about the resurgence in artisan
baking and the increasing desire for real bread. Resplendent in chef’s
whites and day glo orange plastic clogs ‘they add a bit of colour’ he
was enthusiastic about his calling from the word go.
So first off, what is ’sour dough’? It doesn’t sound very
pleasant. ‘Basically it’s the starter,’ Julian explains. ‘You
keep a quantity of dough in a state of permanent ferment by ‘feeding
it’ water and flour and you use portions to begin the fermentation process
in your main bread mix.’ Why not do what other bakers do, mix up yeast
with water and lob it in the mix? This to Julian is pure heresy
‘A sour dough starter is inoculated from the natural yeasts flying around
in the air,’ he points out.’ There is no added yeast, it just
happens and it’s part of the magic. It becomes your starter or ‘mother,’ as
some people call it.
A
little bit of flour, some water and within a few days in a warm place it
starts to froth as the live yeasts start to do their work.’ After
that he warns, it needs watching and cosseting. ‘It can go too far
and become acid,’ he shrugs, ‘it needs feeding every day, Once
the starter gets going you keep feeding it to get a real depth of flavour,
and wait maybe
a few weeks before its first use feeding all the time. Never let the starter
die!’
Downstairs he shows me some starters being kept in the fridge to slow down their action. A large plastic box holds a kind of monster, shiny and clearly alive the starter can be picked out of its box like a giant sea creature. Julian deftly flips and folds it a few times and you can see the air pockets that get trapped and then burst under his manipulations. When he finishes hardly a piece of it has stuck to his hands and it settles contentedly back into its box and you can almost hear it sigh.‘Most of our starters have been going since we began here in December 2004’ he says with all the pride of a new parent. ‘If one does die on us its not the end of the world, you just begin again, but you do lose all that time that its been getting better and better. So you pay attention and you look after it correctly, you balance it correctly and you don’t let it ‘run’ too fast. Once it’s going well you keep it in the fridge. Pull it out now and then to give it a feed and leave it uncovered so that more yeast can get in.’
So do you get different flavours depending on where the bakery is, considering
that all the yeasts are natural? ‘Oh yeah for sure,’ he agrees. ‘That’s
why each bread is unique from bakery to bakery, even between bakeries in the
same street.’
And yet given the great qualities of bread making in this way, why do so many places use instant yeast? Julian doesn’t mince his words on that one. ‘It's safe, its easy, it’s a crutch for people who aren’t confident bakers,’ he says with disdain. ‘But the problem is that the yeast is non descript and there’s no flavour and what’s more some people are developing allergies to this kind of yeast that’s used in this forcing process that pushes the bread too fast.’
Which makes me think about all these wheat allergies that mostly affect people
exposed to too much income. Can wheat be bad for you? If it’s so bad
how come just about every culture has eaten wheat and bread since earliest
history?
‘
It’s not bad for us, its not,’ he says firmly. ‘What were
trying to do here is tell people that if your bread’s made correctly,
your flour fermented correctly, breaking it down to its natural sugars, then
your body can take the energy directly from it and your body doesn’t
go into overload to try and break down all the bad stuff that’s in
the flour. Breads a natural product from the earth. You get the right flour
from
your miller, someone who understands the process and what you as a baker
expect from him.’
So you’re fussy about where you get your flour from? ‘Extremely,’ he confirms, ‘we have to be if we’re going to make the high quality bread we want to. We have to be certain our suppliers are on the same path as we are. I had a huge problem in the first months trying to get the flour I wanted, the flour that was good enough’ he continues. ‘It’s not like meat, or vegetables or fish, you can't necessarily see how good it is, the only way is through trial and error. You ask them how they mill it, how old is the grain, where do they get their grain from, is it an organic supplier, can they prove it? And then you have to bake with it, you have to have your sour doughs running, you have to use it basically to see how it reacts, then once your on to something you stick with it.’
There’s been a craze for a while now for cheffing as a career but baking, no. What got you into bread? ‘ I started working in a French bakery in NZ because I wanted to be a pastry chef, a fine dining pastry chef and this place had some real stars from France, he explains. ‘I ended up in the bread section because my personality just drew me to this natural, live, process. Its unpredictability I found appealing, I don’t like structure too much. It’s crazy hours too which kind of suit me.’ But he’s not in a bakery, but in a kitchen is that a different way of working. ‘Yes here inside a kitchen makes special demands, we have to fit in with the chefs and we had to literally fit into the space. The bread mixer is half inside a cupboard and my starter doughs are squeezed into spaces inside the main kitchen fridges. Even my bread board is a temporary affair, mounted over the sinks.’
Julian really likes being in the kitchen, though. ‘Oh yes,’ he
agrees. ‘I love the theatre of restaurants and the passion of chefs.
You don’t get to see that sort of thing in a bakery. And it’s
good too to be that bit detached from the action around you. Bakers work
by thinking
six or seven hours ahead, we don’t have sudden disasters or stressful
moments like the chefs do. My main stress is calculating quantity; we don’t
have a lot of oven space because we never imagined the bread would be as
popular as it is. We’re now way over demand versus supply, which is
good. Once people have tried proper bread they don’t want to go back
and they are happy to pay the higher price. It’s healthy too and everyone
wants that. That sliced white is pushed, it has pretty much no nutrient or
energy in it.’
What else do you make? ‘Well we do bagels, a boiled bread which is odd in a way. It’s dense and chewy and fantastic, but it does need something inside, just plain they aren’t so good. I put a hint of sour dough in and they’re hand boiled. And we have Ciabattas, which is a different bread again, all those big airy holes in it are caused by water. 'You know,' he says contemplatively, ‘with a lot of these breads, doing them properly is something of a lost art. What’s exciting is how young bakers are bringing the old skills back. You can see it in France too with the bakers making ‘proper’ baguettes once again.’
When we started supplying bread to the restaurant here, we were thinking simply ‘well why not’. But it worked and customers were surprised, saying "hmm this sandwich, it’s not soft and gooey, and it actually tastes of something" Now we literally cant make enough b read to satisfy the sandwich demand. I thin k we will have to move to dedicated premises nearby.’
‘Demand needs supply, he says finally. ‘It’s about baking for the community once again and not having a great big factory and supplying as many people as you can. That’s when the soul is lost and when the passion is lost. If community bakers bake high quality bread then they will prosper and the big bread factories will start to struggle. The knowledge needs to come back.’
Julian’s own passion is genuine and his breads are brilliant. I know,
I took home two sourdough breads and everyone at home raved about them down
to the last crumb.
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