Modern Baking July, 1991

Bread Alone, Boiceville, N.Y.

“It’s not what we’re doing new that’s unique, but what we’re doing old,” observes Dan Leader, owner of Bread Alone, referring to the wood fired ovens and organically grown flours used to produce some 20,000 loaves of bread each week. The breads are sold at farmers’ markets, restaurants and retail shops in the greater New York City area.

Located 120 miles north of the city in the Catskill Mountains, Bread Alone faces a pool of skilled bakery labor as shallow as that of taxi cabs. So, time must be invested carefully to train a staff to produce the bakery’s handcrafted breads. How does a shop owner keep a crew of bakers eager and interested in producing bread alone? Leader trains his bakers from the beginning to become proficient in every task; a person is not hired to perform only one task.

A new baker, regardless of previous experience, starts on the bench, handling and moulding the dough. In this way, Leader explains, the new employee begins to know how the dough should feel and gets the immediate satisfaction of seeing how the breads look as they emerge from the ovens, learning which loaves were perfectly rounded, which were poorly shaped.

Next, the trainee works at the ovens, which must be refired between each load, with scraps of hardwood from a nearby baseball bat factory. After mastering that, the new baker moves on to oven loading. For two weeks the employee will practice swabbing the deck, scoring the proofed dough, manipulating the automatic loader and retrieving the loaves from the 12-ft. chamber with a long-handled wooden peel.

After Leader feels confident in the trainee’s capability, the employee is ready to learn how to mix dough. Because Leader uses sourdough leaven and poolish in many of his formulas, the mixer must be especially sensitive to temperature and time.

And which position will the new baker finally fill? All of them, leader says. The entire crew rotates positions every two to three weeks “in order to keep things from getting stagnant.” Bakers are encouraged to experiment and work to continually improve the doughs.

The team is doing something right: the bakery is under construction now to quadruple production space to meet growing demand. Bread Alone also will be adding a pastry shop and sandwiches to go. No longer will this bakery live by bread alone.

Each baker at Bread Alone learns all tasks to, in part, encourage creativity; says owner Daniel Leader (left) with Marc Wiso.

Photo: Antman/The Image Works

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