 |
 |
|
More about Daniel Leader
In earlier days my grandfather would have done great business on such a morning. He was a burlap-bag maker, supplying new bags to the farmers and taking old ones for repair. Paper and plastic retired him. Nearby was an open-air market, and as light dawned I could see tailgates and tables filled with fresh fruits and vegetables for sale, with the farmers who grew them standing nearby. It was exhilarating for me–rubbing the dirt from a potato, smelling the melons, listening to my grandfather bargain for several bags of apples. A great sense of well-being came over me as I took an apple from the farmer’s crate, rubbed it on my sleeve the way my grandfather always did, and ate it–simply ate it. I knew where it came from and how it got there. It was all incredibly immediate, and I felt connected to it all. In college, when I started to cook, the pleasure for me then was finding the freshest ingredients at the Saturday farmers’ market at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. I bought tomatoes just off the vine, corn from a farmer’s stand, cheese made at the dairy on the outskirts of town. Preparing simple meals from food grown close to home made me feel whole and connected to where I was living. It was this romance with food and wholeness that led me to study to be a chef. My dream: to court local farmers, selecting their best produce, then prepare and serve simple meals in a homey atmosphere. I put myself through the Culinary Institute of America as fast as the school would allow, and I landed my first job as a chef at Le Veau d’Or in New York City. It was a cozy bistro, featuring the kind of fare I liked–simple French country cassoulets, soups and stews. I began to move up quickly, changing jobs regularly, moving from restaurant to restaurant–each time stepping up to more responsibility and prestige. With each advance, however, I got further and further from my dream. Manhattan seemed to be the farthest possible place from local farmers. I was so busy, I couldn’t be precise about the selection of fresh produce and meats. I had no idea where they were grown and under what conditions or by whom. The sophisticated restaurants I was working in were more like stages than homey refuges, and the meals I prepared were foods for performance–overpriced entrées made to look dazzling, served with fancy sauces. The patrons came to be entertained and stimulated. So each night was another opening, another show. And while I was garnering respect and notoriety, I was slowly giving up what I really wanted to do–offer fresh, honest meals in classicly simple surroundings. After my first child, Liv, was born, I began to settle for keeping a busy schedule among the noise, congestion, and crowds of the city. But each time I went to Europe to study or visit, I found myself in the tiny countryside kitchens. I would wander in open-air markets and find myself in the bakeries–watching as the flour and water became bread, watching the muscular hands of the baker, watching the intent faces of customers selecting their loaves, watching the breads be carried away in sacks. Each time I came back to New York, I knew I had to find a way to get my life back to the basics. Perhaps a bakery of my own, perhaps a small country inn, maybe a little restaurant in a quiet spot. With the first extra cash in the bank I bought a small summer cottage near Woodstock, New York. Weekend escapes to the quiet of the Catskills alleviated some of the city pressures. For relaxation, I read the work of Helen and Scott Nearing, and became enthralled with their accounts of how they built their house from stones they gathered from the land, how they grew their own food. I then landed the job of chef de cuisine at the Water Club in New York City. It was an enviable position, but as the months went by I was torn between feeling grateful for the job and being suffocated by it all. The food was still high performance and the restaurant scene still too chaotic. After a few months I decided to find my niche outside the complicated kitchens of the very complicated city. When my son Nels was born, so was the resolve to become a baker–a country baker. Bread Alone was born, too. There was a building for sale on Route 28 near my summer house. I bought it for an unbelievably cheap price, but I prolonged the closing as long as I could while I tried to figure out what I needed. Should the oven come first or the mixer; a staff, a phone, or a business plan? I decided to research ovens first. I had no doubt that I wanted a traditional wood-fired brick oven because I had seen the brick oven of Bernard Lebon in Paris, one of only fifty left in the city, and had tasted the wonderful breads the hearth produced. I had also spent time visiting my friends Jules and Helen Rabin in Vermont and raved about the breads they turned out from the brick oven in their backyard. A local mason and I began to draw up plans. We decided that the oven would be made of stones, which we eventually would carry one by one from the stream across from my house. I closed on the sale of the building and, while the masons worked, spent nights and weekends in New York City at D & G Bakery on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy. Theirs was a brick coal-fired oven, but it gave me a chance to get the feel of a traditional oven and to get used to working with huge amounts of fermenting dough. When the oven was ready, I bought a used mixer and a baker’s bench at a shop in the restaurant supply district on the Bowery. We named ourselves Bread Alone, fired the oven, mixed our first dough, and began to bake. It was all done very unscientifically–a scoop of flour, water in various amounts, guestimated baking times–and we baked a lot of bad bread those first months. There were yeasty loaves that fermented too quickly at too high a temperature, tough breads that were overbaked, and wet doughy breads that were underbaked. My “must have” oven turned out to be capricious and unpredictable; it wouldn’t hold heat well or provide steam. But I kept at it. Each morning I’d get up at 3:00 A.M. and bake. I became a little more precise about weighing ingredients and timing fermentation. By 10:00, I’d load the bread into the back of my Mazda hatchback. I searched for customers, going off to markets, fine food shops, delis, restaurants–anywhere I thought I could sell the bread. I had no trouble. People were eager for the fresh, simple, and honest character of our bread. I was dissatisfied, however. The pain au levain was too sour, the wheat walnut loaf was flat-tasting, and none of our loaves had the eye-catching beauty or vibrant flavor of those breads I had tasted in Europe. I wanted to reproduce the rich and hearty traditional Old World breads: large wheaty round loaves, thick crusted and studded with walnuts; pain au levain with a fine sour tone without a dominating bite; high and light country loaves with crisp golden crusts; and robust farm breads fragrant with the smell of the earth and chewy with cracked wheat and rye. I became a hound for information on Old World baking techniques and traditions, making it a point to visit bakers who were making the kinds of breads I wanted to bake. Wherever I traveled, if the breads in a shop window caught my eye, I dropped in and introduced myself, then asked to see the oven and meet the baker. One old baker in Amsterdam told me that the success of his breads was due to the organic flour he imported from central France. A woman in Monaco made me a delicious pissaladière, a famous Provencale onion pizza. Then she told me it was the water in the region that made her dough taste so good. In a Brooklyn shop where the front window was packed with exciting-looking rows of loaves, a passionate third-generation Italian baker told me that every loaf of bread has a soul. He baked his breads in a coal-fired brick-hearth oven because, he insisted, without the hearth the soul of the bread withers. Whenever I heard of an old-fashioned baker, I wrote a letter or called and made plans to visit. I talked to dozens of sons and grandsons of bakers who ran small one-baker-one-oven shops in Italy, France, Denmark, California, Vermont, Michigan, New Hampshire, and New York. But instead of discovering the “secret formula” for traditional breads, I accumulated more opinions than there are breads. The bakers in the Pyrenees said an authentic hearty loaf could only be made with mountain water and baked at high altitudes. Some Parisian bakers told me truly great pain au levain could only be produced in a brick oven, while a Jewish baker in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn said it was not the oven but the freshness of the whole-grain rye flour that produced good bread. “Ordinary flour yields ordinary bread,” he insisted. There were young New Wave “old-fashioned” bakers in Berkeley, Los Angles, and Paris who also bowed to high-quality flour, but they emphasized that the secret lay in the length of time and the temperature during fermentation of the dough. I had already built a traditional wood-fired oven at my bakery, and I was using local Catskill Mountain water in the breads. So I began to question the quality of the flour I was using. It was pretty unspecial–much like the flour available on most supermarket shelves. Then it became apparent that I was trying to make Old World breads using New World flour. The wheat berry had been stripped of most of its outer bran layer and ground in high-speed steel mills, a process that destroys most of the nutrition and much of the wheat taste. I had to have flour from grain grown the way it had grown two centuries ago–before New World techniques added chemical fertilizers to soil and sprays to plants–and when the whole grain of wheat was ground slowly between two heavy millstones. I wanted flour that hadn’t been denuded of its nutritional components, bleached white, then enriched with vitamins. I wanted a flour as close to the natural state of the grain as possible. Good flour from good earth. The search wasn’t difficult. I discovered a small but lively network here in the United States of organic farmers who grow acres of wheat in soil fed with organic manures, not synthetic agents. There were stone millers, too, who milled the grain the old-fashioned way between heavy stones. I called one of these millers in Minnesota and ordered a ton of fresh organic stone-ground flour. The breads I produced started to acquire that hearty European character and deep taste I had been searching for. Next, I began to experiment with fermentation, letting some doughs ferment longer at lower temperatures. This had an even more pronounced effect on the flavor of my breads. Through trial and error and living a day at a time–one dollar ahead of the bills–the bakery business grew. We continued to experiment with organic flour; I was always on the phone with a new miller somewhere. And we continued to experiment with fermentation of the dough, allowing some dough to ferment at lower temperatures, some at higher. The breads were becoming star attractions. It took five years to build a solid clientele, and about that long to master our moody and idiosyncratic oven. We were finally feeling somewhat secure when I made plans for an extended trip to Paris–a trip that was intended to be one of those times away when I would connect with other bakers and strengthen my ties. However, it was in fact a trip that changed the bakery and my life dramatically. One afternoon in Paris I stood talking with my friend the baker Basil Kamir, in front of the brick oven in the basement of his bakery, Le Moulin de la Vierge on rue Vercingétorix. A hundred loaves had just come from the oven. They crackled as they cooled in willow baskets, and I watched as the tiny cracks appeared in the thick crusts. The pronounced aroma of sourdough wafted to my head. It permeated the air and stayed in my clothes until the next laundry. When André LeFort, the famous oven mason whom I had yet to meet, descended the stairs, Basil was quick to introduce me as un boulanger Américaine. His tone was tongue-in-cheek amazement as if it were a small wonder that America could produce a real baker. I had heard of LeFort and of his fine work. He had rebuilt the oven for the celebrated Lionel Poilâne. I felt honored to meet him, and told him so as we shook hands in front of the iron plate on Basil’s oven wall, which read “Jean LeFort et Fils.” Then Basil popped a sudden question. “So, André, do you want to go to America and build Dan an oven like mine? Imagine a LeFort in the United States! Wouldn’t that be something?” I laughed at the question and the total improbability of it. André didn’t laugh. “But I don’t have a passport,” André said, looking seriously at Basil. “Oh, don’t worry about the passport,” Basil said, comforting André and putting his arm around his shoulder. He knew André had never been to America, had never been far from Paris at all. “And who would take care of Madame, my cat, and the bird?” André went on, truly concerned. I really had no idea or hope of ever replacing the old stone oven at Bread Alone. After all, I had spent five difficult years learning to deal with its limitations. Even to imagine having an oven built by LeFort was like dreaming of a move up from a Volkswagen van in need of a valve job to a Rolls-Royce. But because Basil is rarely serious about anything, always setting up jokes, it was easy for me to be a player in the scene that was unfolding. I added my bit. “Do you think,” I asked Basil, “if Mssr. LeFort comes over to build one oven, might he just as well build two?” “Well, what do you think, André,” Basil laughed, “will you build one or two ovens for Dan?” André smiled at us both and said, “Well it is a long way, a very great distance to travel. I may as well build two ovens.” “So would you build them end-to-end?” I asked. “Side-by-side,” André said, matter-of-factly, “side-by-side would be good.” When we shook hands to say goodbye, the play was over and yet by some quirk I felt a real agreement had been made. The next day Basil helped André fill out his passport application. I returned to New York to tell everyone that soon a Frenchman they had never heard of was coming to the bakery to build two new ovens. When they asked what would happen to the old oven, I told them we would tear it down. When they asked how much this project would cost, and I told them that I didn’t know because André and I had never talked money, they told me I had lost my mind. In a way I had lost my mind. There are those moments when you lose your mind, but come to your senses. Moving on instincts and sixth and seventh senses only, I trusted that this vague arrangement with LeFort for two new ovens would unfold in its own way. It seemed oddly fine that I had no further details. In a few months I returned to Paris and shopped with André for materials. I wrote checks all over France ordering over ten tons of brick and ironwork. Eight thousand dollars worth of materials filled a cargo container to be shipped to New York City, and still André and I hadn’t made a formal deal. I had no idea how much the project would cost. Meanwhile back in Boiceville the local planning board was fighting my proposal to build the ovens. Bread Alone was making headlines: “Local Baker Fights Town Planners For Oven.” When it came to the final vote, fortunately the board locked in a tie–fortunate because the bylaws stated that a tie is a pass. I won the right to build only shortly before André LeFort arrived ready to work. We threw a crew together, and in six months André and his crew built the two ovens side-by-side, as he had promised. And the cost? $100,000. From that day on, the entire life of the bakery changed dramatically. First, the other bakers and I had to learn how to use the fiery new ovens. Great puffbacks of flame singed many eyebrows. But the big change was in the breads. With two solid, reassuring ovens that produced even heat and steam, the enthusiasm and expertise of all the bakers began to grow. The bakers working here with me in those days experimented freely, developing greater flavor and character in the breads that have become the stars of the Bread Alone family. We now have a repertoire of thirteen traditional breads, from husky peasant loaves to pain au levain to baguettes and walnut breads. I owe a lot to the devotion and imaginations of those bakers. Soon after the new ovens were finished, we were able to bake more and more bread and began selling from trucks at the open-air farmers’ greenmarkets in New York City. This was a dream come true! At last our freshly baked loaves were available to the ordinary working people of the city. Up until then, we had only been selling over the counter at the bakery and wholesale to fancy food shops, restaurants, and some health food stores and markets. Now I got to be a player in the hustle and bustle of the open market, right alongside the farmers and growers who set up stands and opened up their trucks. We arrived at 6:00 A.M., were set up by 7:00, and I hustled bread all day long. The Bread Alone bakery is now twice the size of the original building. André’s ovens are in plain view from the bread counter. There’s a small café in front where customers can have cappuccino, stay a while, talk with each other, and smell the bread baking. The staff has grown slowly and steadily. High-school kids have come in the door looking for work; many have learned baking, gone off to France to study, and have returned. Graduates from my alma mater, the Culinary Institute, also come knocking to develop their baking skills. From a Mazda hatchback delivering a few bags of bread, we’ve grown to a small fleet of trucks making daily deliveries to Boston, New Jersey, and New York. The most important element in my life as a baker–the people I bake for–has grown stronger and richer each year. My customers who travel Route 28 every day for fresh bread have nourished my heart as well as my business. They have become so attached to fresh bread from Bread Alone that they won’t be daunted by weather, circumstance, or other inconvenience. One day during the mess and chaos of our rebuilding and expansion, for about a half-hour the entrance to the retail area was blocked by scaffolding. Truly a temporary disturbance. Yet two older women climbed up the loading dock and over stacks of flour sacks to get in to buy two loaves of bread. Then they climbed over the flour sacks again, luckily one of the bakers insisted on helping them down off the five-foot loading dock. During the same half-hour a man stole around to the back of the bakery, jumped a wide ravine of rainwater runoff, scaled a steep pile of gravel, and came through the backdoor. His prize? One baguette. That’s all he wanted. He bought it from the back side of the counter and left the same way he came. I like that kind of passion for bread, not just because it’s good for business but because there’s something magical and paradoxical about it. I still don’t get it myself. A desire for something as simple as a loaf of good-tasting, freshly baked bread makes one willing to take a long drive on a country road or climb over a stack of flour sacks. My life as a professional baker is far from simple; in fact, I’m busier now than I ever was as a chef. Running the business is very demanding. I can get scattered, spread thin, and lose touch with the simplicity that I crave. So when I need to come down to earth, I hang around the customers at the bakery. I eavesdrop. I hear old customers talk to each other about the bakery as if it’s a child they have watched grow. They remember the old oven, the creaking screen door, the shop cat. New customers smile, taking obvious pleasure as they look for the first time at the loaves for sale sitting in baskets. They throw back their heads and inhale the warm yeasty smell of baking bread and they sigh out loud. They ask questions of the woman behind the counter, and they compare prices. Excited to be in the bakery that baked the bread, and paying the baker who shaped the loaf, they are part of an old and natural chain of events. They are like me, the little boy at the open market with his grandfather, connected for a moment to the source of something good. I melt a bit, then. My cramping concerns about schedules ebb gently, leaving me free for a moment to also feel the connection to simple bread alone.
|
|
About Our Bread • Why Organic? • Owner Daniel Leader Contact Bread Alone • Locations & Map • Tour Schedules • Press |
|
When I was a little boy, my grandfather took me to the wholesale food market on the outskirts of Buffalo, my hometown. In the pre-dawn hours, local farmers and distributors converged there twice a week with trucks and railway cars. Bundles, bags, baskets, and crates of fresh produce sat stacked on truckbeds and loading docks, ready for sale and movement to the several hundred markets in the upstate area.. The growers and businessmen raced excitedly through all the fresh cargo, dickering over prices, while forklifts and workers quickly unloaded pallets of boxes and burlap bags. The energy was intense, the atmosphere chaotic. The perishable goods had to move fast. Deals were made quickly.