Allam Paul - Bourke Street Bakery: Breads

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the birth of a bakery

Bourke Street Bakery evolved in a beaten-up old car. Two friends talking about their dreams and aspirations makes for a long drive. David and I spent six months driving around Sydney looking for the perfect site. Somewhere between hours on the road punctuated by eating research breaks, we began testing recipes. We discovered we had similar ideas, tastes and opinions.

Our vision of the perfect bakery was small, rustic, homely and timeless; we wanted to create a bakery people would feel comfortable in and make food that people wanted to buy every day. Most importantly, it had to appeal to the whole community. We kept the focus on the quality of ingredients rather than the aesthetic. We were both former chefs who had dabbled in bread and pastry. David had more experience in pastry and I had more in bread, so the demarcation of duties was obvious.

After many false starts, we finally found the site at 633 Bourke Street in Surry Hills, Sydney. Bourke Street Bakery is blessed with incalculable charm and character, which is only enhanced by its positioning close to the local methadone clinic and housing commission high-rise butting up against restaurants, artists and gentrified streets. It was the perfect site and we owe a debt to its previous inhabitants, Crissy and J.C., for selling their space to us and allowing us to live our dream.

Our first sale was a pan au raisin and a bear claw. It was just past 7 am on Tuesday 5 July 2004. We were not yet tired, although that would come; we just felt the fear and excitement of the unknown and the inevitable responsibility of starting a new business. As it turned out, this was the only day we could recall of that first six months. And so started the big blur.

David and I worked from 4 am to 9 pm every day. In the few hours we spent with our respective partners each week, we fought constantly. Selfishly, it seemed not to matter. Each day was better than the last, but even so it was a vicious cycle. We wanted the bakery to be a success, yet every extra sale placed a strain to produce more. We were too paranoid to let just anyone make the product and were also distrustful of our success. We were scared to put on more staff and pay wages, so we raged ahead with what seemed to be a social experiment to test whether two men can happily co-exist in a bakery seventeen hours a day.

We made it through the tough times, but one year on we were running out of space and David took his pastry production elsewhere. So was born Bourke Street Bakery on Broadway. We produced and swapped bread and pastry early in the morning for about a year. Both shops were booming and we started looking for a third, bigger and more sustainable, space where we could reunite our products. This happened in Alexandria; bread and pastry happily co-existed for two years. Then, predictably, arguments started to occur over the mixer, scales and bench. Space in the coolroom was hot property and rather than descend into some sort of primordial chaos, we realised it was once again time for pastry to leave. In the summer of 2008, pastry marched out to Marrickville. The valuable extra space allowed us to extend our range.

The growth of Bourke Street Bakery has been totally organic. We had no grand plan on that first day. We took our time. We did it well. We stayed true to our product. We have never had marketing or PR people involved. We have always felt that we needed to turn each person who walks through the door into a PR machine. And to do that, we make sure the product is damn good. Simple really.

When we go to round up the people who helped us in those first days, weeks and months, its the usual suspects of family and friends who deserve the most thanks. The success of Bourke Street Bakery and the culmination of all our wonderful recipes in this book would not have been possible without our chef friends who worked the odd day, Daves brother who did the carpentry work, my sister who chose our infamous brown exterior, our wives who served and washed and smiled at us like we were lost, our good friend Dan, who offered counsel and coffee in equal measures. My in-laws, who probably represented half the takings on any given day, and also my parents, who made the shelves and cushions for the shop, and would have made anything really, I only had to ask.

And, most importantly, a big thank you to all of our customers who continue to support us at Bourke Street and beyond.

Thank you

about this book

Baking is part science, part stoneground milling and part river-running romance. But its not the romance that will keep your baking consistently good, its the science. Thats not to say you should not feel a deep connection to the earth. At Bourke Street Bakery we buy organic flour directly from a stoneground mill. If you take out our electric deck oven and mixer from the production process, you are not far away from how bakeries would have operated in the 16th century.

Hopefully, with good-quality ingredients and a little technique, the rest of the baking process will take care of itself. A good pair of scales and an electric mixer are indispensable when baking. We have tested and retested these recipes but allowances still have to be made for the equipment and experience of each baker not every mixer is the same; climate is a large variable in any commercial bakery, let alone a domestic kitchen; and the oven, or more to the point, its thermostat, can vary greatly.

If your first attempt doesnt look exactly like the pictures in this book, dont give up. Think about why it didnt turn out and youll have a greater chance of fixing the problem next time and becoming a better baker. When you think you have isolated the problem, just change that one component. Try not to change too many things at once so that ultimately you can understand the process and learn from your mistakes. This can be a slow but necessary part of becoming a good baker and as you will quickly discover, the results make the effort well worthwhile.

before you begin

For any baker, and in particular a home baker, creatingsomething from scratch is a beautiful thing. Being able toshare your creation is a double pleasure. Baking at homefor yourself or your loved ones is always going to be wellreceived. No matter what the outcome you can be sure thatanything you make is going to be much fresher than whatyou can purchase in a supermarket.

As in any trade, knowing how to work your tools andequipment is as important as the method. Baking is nodifferent your tools may be your bare hands and yourequipment flour, water, yeast and butter, but it is no lessimportant knowing how they should act and react.