The Living Section
The New York Times
Taken from an article published February 8, 1989

Back to the Basics At a Catskills Bakery

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Boiceville, N.Y.

In the office of Bread Alone, a bakery in the Catskills village of Boiceville, about 90 miles north of Manhattan, there is a color photograph of two smiling men standing waist-deep in a sunny North Dakota wheat field, an “America the Beautiful” kind of scene that brings “amber waves of grain” immediately to mind.

One of the men is Daniel Leader, who owns the bakery. The other is Marshall Kargas, one of the main suppliers of grain for the 17,000 pounds of flour that Bread Alone uses every two weeks.

Bread Alone bakes the gamut of breads, from elegant French baguettes to hearty, peasant-style four-grain mixtures. All are made from the flour of organically grown grains, and all are baked in an enormous wood-fired brick oven that was built 18 months ago under the supervision of André LeFort, a master oven builder from France.

The bread, which is sold at the bakery and at two New York City Greenmarkets, as well as to restaurant and retail shops in New York and New England, is extraordinary, with the crisp, friable crust and the dense, moist crumb of the best European versions. Mr. Leader credits its quality to a number of factors, including the long, slow rising of the dough - it takes a minimum of five and a half to six hours - and the traditional method of baking: loaves are cast directly on the floor of the masonry oven, with its combination of intense, even heat and steam.

But most of the credit, Mr. Leader says, goes to the quality of the flour, especially that made from hard red spring wheat like Mr. Kargas’s. This wheat is stone-ground, and part of the bran is sifted off to make a powdery cream-colored flour that feels like grainy silk and releases a nutty aroma.

“I love those fields,” Mr. Leader said, showing off the photograph of him and Mr. Kargas. “When you walk through them, you start partridges and pheasants - imagine, partridges and pheasants in a wheat field.”

This is not, he explained, typical of most American wheat fields, where the combined use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers have tended to eradicate the insects that some game birds feed on. “When I walk through a regular wheat field,” Mr. Leader said, “the ground is hard and unyielding. It’s cracked and dry. When I walk through that wheat field” - he pointed again to the picture of Mr. Kargas’s wheat - “the earth gives under my feet like a sponge. It’s alive.”

“Bread Alone is selling something everyone has to eat,” Mr. Leader said, “whether it’s a vanful of hippies, a couple in a Jaguar, a bunch of yuppies or bread nuts.” The bakery now sells 10,000 loaves a week and employs 15 people.

A European connection has been important. Traveling frequently in France and Italy, Mr. Leader said, has taught him that it is possible to eat simply but well. But European attitudes, more that foodstuffs, have helped him form his philosophy. “When you talk to a baker in France about bread,” Mr. Leader said, “you’re talking about his life. There’s a certain spirit that you don’t find here when you talk to people about bread.”

And it’s Mr. Leader who usually drives the panel truck to the Greenmarkets in New York City. On Wednesday and Saturday, the truck can be found at the market at 57th Street and Ninth Avenue, while on Fridays, it is parked at Union Square.

“It’s really selling bread to people,” he said, emphasizing the last word, when asked what he likes about the markets. Sales of Bread Alone’s products have been brisk if a recent 8-hour stretch at the Union Square Greenmarket was any indication. There, customers bought 400 rounds of bread, 100 baguettes, 50 demibaguettes and 140 currant buns.

Back at the bakery, about 5 A.M. on a Saturday morning, reggae music was humming softly in the background, and Cashmere, the bakery cat, stretched in front of the warm ovens. Mr. Leader is in charge of the baking on Saturdays, and while he stacked pans of baguettes, he continued to talk about organic growing.

“The land should never be bare,” he said, as he pulled the lever to release a jet of steam into the oven. His assistant Mark Wyso slashed the baguettes, making seven or eight longitudinal cuts on each. Then he pulled open the iron oven door, and the two men rolled the baguettes, 24 at a time, off a sliding table into the oven. A nutty, smoky, yeasty aroma filled the bakery.

“Do you notice the smell?” Mr. Leader asked. “I forget about it when I’m working here, but when I’m away and come back, it’s the first thing, coming down the road. I smell it, and I think, ‘Oh, yeah . . . bread.’ ”

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