The World’s Smallest Bakery?
If small is beautiful, our little bread booth may just be the prettiest thing ever to hit the bakery world. We are currently open for business for four to eight hours per week, depending on whether we sell at one market or two. Might seem like we’re having a lazy summer, but the four hours at the market is just the culmination of over 30 man-(and wife)-hours of work, not counting shopping, planning, and testing recipes. While even a small commercial bakery may produce several hundred loaves of bread a day, we make several dozen loaves of bread a week. In lieu of a powerful electric mixer, we use a wooden spoon and my increasingly Popeye-like forearms. This is because when we say “Homemade Bread” on our signboard, it’s not a quaint slogan to conjure images of Grandma at the mixing bowl; it’s the literal truth. All of our bread (and cakes and scones) is baked in a 30-inch range and a 24-inch wall oven in the roughly fourteen-by-fourteen foot kitchen of our Princeton Avenue home.
What we lack in equipment and workspace, we make up for in attention to detail and the personal touch. Some of the olives in our olive bread must be pitted by hand; the spices in our Swedish rye bread are hand-ground in a stone mortar and pestle; every loaf of walnut bread is individually brushed with walnut oil after it comes out of the oven; the chervil, parsley, basil, chives and thyme in the Herb Garden Sourdough we made earlier this summer were hand-picked from our backyard garden (I’d like to make that bread again, but the plants still haven’t quite recovered).
That’s all well and good, you may be thinking, but is it legal to sell this kind of uninspected bread? Aren’t there laws, to protect us from really good baked goods? Briefly, we are able to sell bread this way thanks to a provision in the state health regulations which allows unlicensed producers of not potentially hazardous food products to sell at bake sales, farmers’ markets, and the like. I wish I could say that we’re outlaw boulangers, flouting the stifling grip of government regulation and stickin’ it to The Man; sadly, that’s not so. We are law-abiding dough peddlers right down the line. The rub is that we’re only allowed to sell up to a certain amount in gross receipts. I won’t say how little; you would be embarrassed for us, and might start to shun us, to avoid the feelings of pity that would sweep over you every time you saw us.
So if we’re baking ourselves into poverty in spite of the outrageous prices we charge for our bread, then why are we doing this?, I can hear you thinking. Without going too deep into personal history, the answer is that we’re fanatical about good food, and enthusiastic about public markets, and wanted to be a part of that world in order to meet people who feel the same way. Whatever else happens, wherever Real Bread winds up in the future, we have succeeded in that goal beyond our happiest expectations. I could get sentimental here, talking about the people who have come to see us week after week, rain or shine, who have encouraged us and told their friends about us, who have delighted us with stories of fighting over the last piece of olive bread, of Nirvana in a slice of toasted walnut bread, or how our European rye tastes just like home. There, that’s why we’re doing it!
Let’s move on to some Frequently Asked Questions (well, maybe not frequently, but these questions have been asked, at least once, if only by us…):
~Why Real Bread? Is other bread fake?
In a word, yes. A global corporate conspiracy has replaced all bread save our bread with a semi-nutritive product composed mainly of sawdust and horsehair. Ouch. My wife has just struck me a smart blow to the rear of my noggin and instructed me not to be such a wiseacre all the time. I thought that was why she married me.
But seriously, if we must…. Real Bread came about as a last-minute desperate attempt simply to have something to call our little enterprise. It’s intended to be purely descriptive and not meant to imply that other bread isn’t real. Real bread to us means you start with flour, water, yeast, and salt, and proceed with care and restraint. Time and good ingredients make real bread. The things we add to some of our breads, the walnuts, raisins, olives, etc., are merely garnish, and those things also are chosen with great care to complement the breads they accompany. We’ve offered a lot of flavored breads this year—with chocolate, figs, shallots, herbs, and apricots, as well as olives, walnuts, and currants—but we’re not that interested in wild experimentation or trendy flavors. Real Bread means we take a more or less classical approach, learning time-tested recipes and then seeing whether and how to embellish them.
~When do you bake all this bread? How do you find time, with your busy social calendar?
It’s true we’ve had to cut way back on the debutante balls and film festivals this spring, not to mention the dormant semi-social activity we call “sleep”. Generally, all of our sourdough breads, including the small flavored breads, are baked the night before the market. This was a compromise we had to make; there simply was not enough time or oven space to bake everything the morning before the market. Sourdough breads, which are denser and slightly acidic, keep much better than yeasted breads. We wrap them up tenderly in dish towels Thursday night, and tuck them in with a lullaby. Our yeasted breads—French bread, Swedish rye, potato bread—are baked the morning of the market day. The French bread usually comes hot to the market.
~Why don’t you make bread without white flour?
Such bread tastes yucky. In our opinion. In an earlier missive I addressed the historical turnabout that now has whole-grain products prized by the upwardly mobile and white bread relegated to processed-poison-junk-food status. We’re all in favor of whole grains, and we use lots of them. But unbleached white flour is only “processed” to the extent that the bran and germ are removed. The bran and germ do contain nutrients, but they also contain oils which can go rancid if the flour is stored too long or improperly. This is one big reason that white flour is now the most common kind. In addition, the nutrients in white flour may actually be more readily available to your body than those in whole grains. At any rate, a loaf of bread isn’t going to save your life, or kill you (though do note: these products are not subject to state inspection!).
All kidding aside, for once: we take seriously your dietary concerns, and will do our best to answer any questions.
~Are any of your breads vegan?
Our breads don’t eat anything at all, that we’re aware of… oh, okay, you mean… I get it. Most of our breads, meaning all the sourdoughs and the French baguettes and rounds contain no animal products. Breton Butter Cake, scones, and any other cake, and Swedish rye all contain dairy products of some type. Our dog biscuits have milk, eggs, and cheese, in case your pet is vegan, God help it. We don’t have precise nutritional information on our bread, but we’ll always be happy to tell you what’s in it.
~Do you make any low-carbohydrate bread?
Huh? By which I mean: You raise an interesting point, Madam. A lot of people these days are afraid of carbohydrates, which is mostly what bread is made of. The popularity of high-protein, no-carb diets also has many people thinking that carbohydrates are “bad for you”. In our view, this is nonsense. While it’s true that lots of folks see dramatic weight loss on these kinds of diets, it doesn’t necessarily follow that carbohydrates are bad for you, or that they are the villain in weight gain. I have lived in a country—China—and spent a fair bit of time in another—France—where carbohydrates make up a large part of the diet, and obesity is not nearly the problem in these places that it is here. In China, and indeed, all over Asia, rice and noodles are the basis of nearly every meal. The French have a saying, that you should always buy two baguettes, because you’ll have eaten one by the time you get home. Note that the baguette eater is likely walking home, and the Chinese person is bicycling home to his high-carb meal. The foods that accompany their staple starches are fresh and freshly prepared. The French may make liberal use of butter, and the Chinese may stir-fry fatty pork in lots of oil, but it doesn’t seem to go straight to their hips. What can we learn from this?
~Why not make spelt bread?
We don’t know what that is. What we don’t know, we hate and fear. If we met a spelt, we might have to kill it. Then maybe we could make bread out of it. I don’t know if it would be vegan.
~Now that we’re hooked on your delectable breads and cakes, what will we do when the Saint Luke’s market ends in the fall?
It’s back to sawdust and horsehair for you, I’m afraid. Looking into the Real Bread crystal ball, I can’t really see a thing. It might have been baked a little too long. The truth is, the world’s smallest bakery is probably in a situation of grow or die. If we grow we’ll have to change, since our home kitchen can’t be licensed, and if we move into a commercial space we’ll no longer be making homemade bread.
We’ll also have to find more ways to sell our bread if this is to be a viable enterprise. We love selling at the farmers’ markets, but our position even here at the Saint Luke’s market is extremely dicey. We don’t have a reserved spot at the market, and as all the vegetables have come in and the market has filled with vendors, we arrive each week with a van full of fresh bread not knowing whether we’ll get a slot to sell from. Most of the vendors here have reserved spaces, and the rest of us just take our chances, even though, for us as associate members of the Growers’ Association, this is the one and only market available to us for fully half the season. (We’re not permitted to sell at the weekend downtown markets, or at most of the popular satellite markets.) I’m sure the market management would appreciate knowing what kinds of vendors and products you like to see at your farmers’ market. If Real Bread is one you really value, you could let them know by calling market manager Jack Gerten at (651) 227-8101 or e-mailing via their website, saintpaulfarmersmarket.com.
We’ll be pondering these questions through the rest of the summer and fall, hoping to find a way to keep Real Bread going through the winter and into next year. Any bright ideas? We’ll be happy to hear them.