Lets deal with the big issues here for a moment. The future is a loaf of bread. It is places like Kossoffs, like Karma, like BreadbyBike, like E5, like Fabrique, even like the Filipino Panadera. If you need proof of what I am saying then you can include imports like Paul, like Ole & Steen. […]
Lets deal with the big issues here for a moment.
The future is a loaf of bread. It is places like Kossoffs, like Karma, like BreadbyBike, like E5, like Fabrique, even like the Filipino Panadera. If you need proof of what I am saying then you can include imports like Paul, like Ole & Steen.
Or more depressingly you can see venture capital pouring in from America with Bain behind Gail’s – right idea, probably wrong people. The wise folk of Walthamstow were right to resist the arrival of Gail’s on their doorstep, not so in Primrose Hill where Gail’s is about to arrive to compete with the venerable Little Bread Pedlar.
Bakers change things, they change the neighbourhood. They change the way people eat. The way they approach food. Good bread, proper sourdough bread, is transformative. It is social engineering of the kind we have not seen in this country since for how long? Since? Since the answer is the industrial revolution which ultimately led to factory bread which is far removed from the real thing, or what the real thing can be. Relying on factories to feed the family is not a good way forward.
A baker on the high street creates a different dynamic. It is combustion. The heat from the oven leads logically (cooking-wise) into croissants and cakes, and the coffee as an extra, while behind the scenes the baker is also selling his loaves to restaurants. There is a holistic commerce here.
Restaurants don’t do bread, which is sort of logical. Big restaurants will have pastry sections because baking is different to cooking. Different skills, different temperament. We are not talking here about the travesty that is Greggs, the rise of fauxdough, or even what you see in the fun and games of the Great British Bakeoff – these are things that come afterwards, the evolution. These are relics of an old fashioned notion that has passed its sell by dates. Old school. The last knockings of Victoriana.
Interestingly many of the people taking things forward are self taught. They are picking up the fragments of old practices and putting them back together, literally putting the germ of an idea back into the baking.
Ole & Steen, who now have 27 outlets in London, were self taught. Amateurism does not seem to be an obstacle. Or rather they are picking up the threads of an old craft that has been overlooked. Two of the best selling bread authors in Sweden – Martin Johansson and Martin Fjeld – are also self taught – Johansson is a school teacher whose books have become a Scandinavia watch word, and was picked up Fjeld who in turn now has his own bakery.
Ben Mackinnon, who started E5 was self taught, Tami Isaacs at Karma taught herself at night classes. So too, the founders of Fabrique were in finance before they saw the chance to do something they discovered they loved. Now they are also in New York.
There is money in bread. Money in doing it properly.
It is just flour and water after all, an accountant’s dream. Even the sourdough element is free – it is in the bacteria in the air. Necessarily local.
Old style bakeries went out of business because they just got too big perhaps or they failed to see that bread was not really a retail item that people wanted to go shopping for like a hat or some shoes.
The breakthrough bakeries today are also cafes. Both Fabrique and E5 started in railways arches. In the case of E5 it quickly morphed into a sit down and hunker down quasi restaurant. The Fabrique original by Hoxton station did have a few metal tables and a bench and a few spares to put out on the street on sunny days but now supplies six of its own shops across town. The lesson is simple enough – sell direct, keep control, cut out the middleman, stick with the idea.
You sort of want to send the bank manager back to school to learn all this. Dear Mr bank manager this is the new world, this is how it is done, get with the programme.
And in a sense there is no good and bad bread with the thesis of sourdough, it becomes a self filling endeavor. The cakes are just the validation that everything else is working.
Sourdough had its moment in lockdown. Its 10 minutes of fame as Andy Warhol would have it. The Facebook page for Sourdough Geeks has 668k members, Sourdough Nation 17k members, Perfect Sourdough 129k members. Adrian Chiles even wrote a stunning review in the Guardian of Martin Fjeld’s Sourdough book. The penny had dropped even in the Guardian towers.
But making bread at home outside of lockdown is impractical when you have to get the 8.30 train to Mathew & Son. Or you don’t have enough mouths to feed, because baking is essentially a communal enterprise. Baking is communal, as it was historically when you might take a pie to the baker to warm in the oven, before we had ovens. Hence the Cornish pasty, hence the steak and onion pie.
The French have always acknowledged that the boulangerie is separate. The perfect French housewife of mythology was never expected to bake the bread as well as doing everything else. She sent the eldest child to the baker to get the bread each morning. The Germans too recognize that bread is something that is made on the high street, not at home.
The going out to buy the bread each morning is like signing up to the local community.
On another level, one that is not popularly recognized and one that in this country was abandoned when the craft was dispatched to the factory, is the interactivity.
In France you will get a croissant for a euro because there are other things that the baker goes on to do – the flans, the quiches, the tarts. The croissant is a loss leader. The baker might not challenge French cuisine as in the restaurant but he does offer an everyday alternative of lunch. To call it working class is too dismissive but it is for the proletariat. The nature of bakeries is that their produce must be shared around, affordable for everyone.
The rise of the coffee shop and caffe is not because people are anxious to have a cup of coffee or a sweet cake. The psychological key is that they go out because they want to be a part of the town, of the city. They want to be away from home, away from work, away from the pressure of retail, but still in the mix, to have a moment to themselves. To sit inside the bakery, next to the mother, is all encompassing.
Caffes and coffee shops are the far end of the evolutionary spectrum. They are supplied by the baker. Which begs the question of what kind of foods are they merchandising. The advantage the local artisan baker has in any district is his product will be better. Greggs will be depressing because it is worse.
That does not obviously give any independent a commercial edge when they are facing up to corporate giants backed by venture capital like Gail’s, like Caffe Nero, like Costa, like Starbucks.
Estate agents like venture capital. It sounds more secure than a mom and pop business. But that is also why the high street has collapsed. The rents on the high street and the guarantees demanded are just too much for most ordinary people, too much for a bank manager to loan against. It is cultural imperialism.
Accountants may not see the difference but there is a gulf between working in an artisan bakery and being a part of a local community on the one hand as against picking up a minimum wage contract in a coffee shop owned by an invisible multi national.
The first cross on the map for anyone designing a new town ought to be a bakery. It creates jobs, community, it is an economic anchor from which other businesses can go forward.
There is another East End venue I would bring into the argument here – Rogue Sarnies.
Actually it is a very good restaurant, but in lockdown they developed a new strategy. An old pizza oven was converted to bake flat sourdough loaves for sandwiches. This is rather a good notion in part because it does not require bakers to work all night. The dough can do that work overnight and they can just come in the morning and do the cooking. Order online and you get a hot baked fresh sandwich that is probably as good as anything in London at the moment. It is a restaurant experience in a warm flat bread. There are queues. There should be queues. At its most basic financial expression it introduces would-be customers to the restaurant, and it probably makes enough to pay the kitchen wages. Rogues Kitchen is a good restaurant but it is not the most expensive restaurant in town either as a result.
At the other end of the conversation is the farmer, and what they are growing and what they are doing to the environment.
Farmers may well complain, but they always complain. For many decades they have lived off the fat of EC grants to just grow and grow and keep growing. As Yuval Harrari says in Nexus about information, just growing a lot of stuff does not equate to wisdom or truth or even now in this context profit. Farmers have moved away from the rest of us, like a ship cutting its mooring, they have floated off into a nether world of barns and hay and manure and Landrovers. In the process they have abdicated the responsibility as to what happens to their product. It is just a commodity. Yes they grow foods but they exercise an absolute minimum influence on what happens to that food. Brewers at least opened pubs to sell their product, which is not quite the same but it will do for now as an analogy.
Farmers sit back and let the market send them a cheque, not a particularly big one apparently unless the scale in terms of acres is huge enough.
Farmers really need to support bakers, grow different varieties of wheat, see the edge in the market place, in the environment, not sanction wholesale swamping of the high street with cheaper and cheaper nutritionally useless stuff. They have allowed their product to be the basis on which the nutritional value plummets so a slice of bread + the fats from the butter + the sugar from the jam. That is a Victorian diet. Their ideas are Victorian. Wake up and smell the grain. Instead of buying another combine harvester, they might be better advised to set up a bakery of their own.
