Delta Sky Magazine

June 2003

The baguettes have just come out of the oven and are sitting on the cooling rack, golden brown, their smell tantalizing.

Amy turns to me and wonders aloud, “Can you hear them?” Puzzled, and not sure I can hear anything above the din of salsa music that fills the cavernous bakery, I shake my head “no.” “Lean closer,” she tells me, so I do, placing my ear next to the still-warm bread, and sure enough, they are making a snap-crackle-and-pop sound as the hot, brittle crust contracts in the cooler air. This is definitely not Wonder Bread.

Amy is Amy Scherber, a baker and the proprietor of Amy’s Bread, one of a handful of artisanal bakeries that have sprung up and prospered in New York City in the last two decades. Using the very best ingredients and traditional, European-inspired methods, she and fellow New York bakers at places such as Balthazar Bakery, Sullivan Street Bakery, Tom Cat Bakery and Pain D’Avignon are making wonderful, richly flavored, satisfying breads that couldn’t be more different from the flavorless commercial substance that masquerades as bread today.

What has pushed the subject of bread to the forefront, beyond its immense flavor and the creativity of its bakers, is that so many people today are rejecting bread. Yes, that’s true, rejecting bread. Hard as it is to believe, certain dietary fashions have declared carbohydrates in general, and bread in particular, “bad” food, to be treated as weight-adding anathema.

I find this inconceivable. It has been suggested to me that I might even profit from such a diet, but resolutely refuse to try one. That anyone can consider going through life not eating bread, especially bread as good as Amy Scherber’s, is my idea of blasphemy.

And when she slides one of the cooler baguettes into a paper sleeve and hands it to me, the temptation is just too much – it is close to lunchtime and I am hungry, so I take a large bite. As crumbs scatter down my shirt and I munch away, she smiles with satisfaction. It is, of course, wonderful.

People have been living on bread since the dawn of civilization. Protein, in the form of meat of fish or cheese, was a luxury, but bread was a universal essential, the sustainer of life. Thomas Hood’s lament,“Oh God! That bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap, “could describe any one of hundreds of revolutions triggered by the price of bread.

It seems that there’s no better way to make bread that to do it slowly and by hand. Of course, that is the way it was for thousands of years, until the early 20th century in America, when advances in packaging, automation and preservatives transformed bread production from local craft to an industrial process. The only trouble is, this results in bread that sacrifices in flavor exactly what it gains in method.

For Amy’s Bread and other artisanal bakeries to make toothsome panne and pain is not easy. Doing so means passing up the tempting shortcuts of rapid fermentation, dough improvers, chemical additives and automation, explains Paula Oland, the head baker at Balthazar. Artisanal bakeries use a production system that would drive a consultant to distraction, a system that is the very antithesis of an efficient business model. It demands a lot of time, a lot of labor and a lot of space to create a limited supply of a product that is unsalable after one day.

“The bakeries who do large volume can get pretty good results making B-plus bread in large quantities,” explains Uliks Fehmiu, owner and chief baker at tiny Pain D’Avignon, a European-style bread bakery in Queens. “We are making what we hope to be A-plus quality in small quantities.”

The bakers of these delectable creations make up for the extra labor with high prices, or at least higher that their commercial counterparts charge. They’ve found that people who know food will pay the extra dollars.

Thus, cutting corners is just not an option for these bakers. “We sell bread to the most fussy and discriminating chefs in the world, Jean Georges [Vongerichten] for instance, and if it’s not perfect, he sends it back,” says Matthew Reich, COO of Tom Cat Bakery.

All bakers I talked to are dedicated to making bread, even obsessed with it. “This is a business,” says Reich, “but it’s also a labor of love.” This is an opinion I heard echoed in one form or another by every baker I talked to.

Small, native bakeries, still thrive in numerous European countries, from Sweden to Italy, from Portugal to Greece but this American labor of love had its conception in France. Many U.S. foodies mark the early 1980s down in history as the French Invasion of good bread, when Parisian Lionel Poilane began exporting his signature 4 ½ pound loaf to the United States.

At the same time, American bakers were seeking ways to make European-inspired bread on their home soil. It was a bicoastal phenomenon: Californians, having already whetted their appetites with traditional sourdough, welcomed the floury delights of Joe Ortiz’s Gayle’s Bakery Capitola, California, and Acme Bread in Berkeley, California.

In New York circles, Eli Zabar is regarded as a pioneer of the movement. (Yes, his two brothers own the famous gourmet food emporium bearing the family’s surname.) In 1973, armed with nothing more that a 19th-century handbook and a lot of enthusiasm, Zabar set out to make the sort of bread he had enjoyed in Europe. Now Eli’s Bread employs 50 bakers and has 27 delivery trucks to service more than 1,000 wholesale clients, including Costco and Price Club.

Pioneer, yes but is Eli’s still definition “artisanal”? Eli’s is going through the same struggle as many of its successors. As hard as it is to make great bread on a small scale, it gets even harder as the operation grows, and automation becomes more tempting with each new account. John Villa, executive chef of Patroon and Pico restaurants, understands this well. “Artisanal bakeries start out great, and as they expand their bread gets worse and worse,” he says. “Eli’s is still pretty good, but at one time it was amazing, the best bread in the city.”

However, expanding intelligently can mean widening the bakery’s selection of products. Looking around Amy Scherber’s retail shop in Chelsea Market, I am awed by the range of her breads: country sourdough, semolina raisin fennel, picholine green-olive bread, double-seeded organic whole wheat baguette, and on and on. There are big breads and small, round breads and flat, organic whole wheat walnut mini breads, rosemary mini-breads, ciabatta sandwich rolls, semolina black sesame twist, organic whole wheat oat pecan and golden raisin rolls.

Amy’s Bread started in a 650-square-foot storefront so small she couldn’t even make baguettes because she didn’t have room. Now she has 10 times the space and 100 employees, but has managed to maintain her focus. Nick Mautone, managing partner of Gramercy Tavern and a customer of Amy’s, explains, “Amy’s not tiny tiny, the way she used to be, but her goal is to produce the best product she possible can. You can do it on a larger scale, but you have to do it with the mind-set of a small baker.”

Mautone’s bread selection includes more than one kind of handcrafted loaf. “We get a big boule from Balthazar, which is really crusty and made with beer in it, as well, so it’s just a yummy type of bread,” he says.

I can vouch for that. It’s Balthazar’s signature bread, the Pain de Siegle, a French country rye, and it’s quite a sight. Huge, round and flat, it looks like a big brown boulder. It weighs a hefty 3 pounds and has a wonderful earthy, rustic appearance. The crust has a Balthazar “B” cut into the top of it, and is dark, even burnt in parts. The aroma is tangy, and the flavor tart, pungent, meaty – almost gamy.

While there are stylistic differences between New York’s various artisanal bakers, one ingredient they all use is passionate commitment. This is brought home to me as I watch Jim Lahey, co-owner of Sullivan Street Bakery, show a trainee how to make the special pizza pugliese that he bakes for his lunchtime customers. Lahey’s menu is inspired by the bakers of southern Italy, and like many bread experts, he spent time studying in Europe. He presses small tears of fresh oregano into a thin sheet of moist dough, tops them with tiny cherry tomatoes, drizzles olive oil over the sheet and slides it into the oven. A few minutes later the heat has broken down the tomatoes so their juice has infused the bread with tomato flavor, and the resulting soft, chewy foccacia is aromatic, slightly sweet and delicious.

As long as Lahey and his fellow bakers go on producing this wonderful food – for foodstuff it is – I am going to go on eating it, whatever the current dietary fashion decrees.