Last May, 2004, I spoke to Daniel about his work in Melbourne, and his plans for the bakery over the next few years:
Q. What do you think you have done here that's remarkable in Melbourne? If there were one thing you would like to be be remembered for, out of all the things you do, what would that be?
A. Certainly the bread, and the style of bread, and the taste of the bread. I guess it's been a long time since people had our style of bread. They probably didn't have it in this capacity before. And I guess that's what really special about the bakery. It's that here in St. Kilda, these people that visit us, actually feel that it’s a part of their community. Because it’s a boutique, it's very small, and its very personal. They know the staff, they know the bakers, they can see it all happening and they feel connected in some way. And you can see that, just in the joy of them eating, the way they talk about the bread, they love it. And I guess it’s a whole package, it's not just about beautiful tasting bread. But it's also the experience you get when you come here.
Q. You're sitting here, in a tee shirt with your name on the back and a logo on the front, in a similar look to all the staff. The design seems very much a part of what you do. Where does that come from? Is it something you just brought in, or is it something about you?.
A. It's something about me. My interests outside of food go into architecture, into fashion, into art, and so on.
Q. Where does that come from?
A. From my schooling, it's something I've developed, and it's something that's an interest.
Q. So I assume initially you didn't study baking?
A. No. I studied graphic design for a short time at a college in Brunswick. After that I planned to go on to RMIT [the design college in Melbourne]. I planned to take a year out of school, take a break, earn a bit of money, and I fell into baking with a friend. He was a baker and I joined him on the weekends, and I just fell in love with the idea. I wasn't very sociable. I had alot of friends, but I could never do the clubbing, just going out drinking, blah, blah. I couldn't do that and I thought that the nocturnal life of the baker was quite fitting at that time. And it wasn't till three years in that I discovered artisan baking through literature.
Q. What books were of influence?
A. I started reading Escoffier, that was the main inspiration. It was all coming out of France at first. Then being introduced to people like Bernard Ganachaud, one of very few MO [Meilleur Ouvrier de France, for more details see the Frederick Lalos article] in France, seeing his passion for it and just where you could take it. And how serious you could be about baking. I was very serious, quite disciplined, I think that came from working with this Italian pastry chef. He was such a fascist. He was an immigrant from Sicily, a very good pastry chef, and it was good. At the time I thought, "you're a pain", but looking back he did set a very good example on how you should approach this kind of work…cont below
Q. Was he neat and organised? I notice that your bakery is very clean and ordered.
A. I think I'm probably a little cleaner. I'm very particular about the upkeep of the bakery. I just feel that, because it's such a small space, it needs to be like a clean canvas most of the time so that you can quickly identify things, and quickly do something if you have to do it. It's not a big space where everyone has a section, here we're all using the same space. And, apart from that, we're at street level. The kitchen is open to the street. And it's a good practice for the staff, to always have that as part of their work ethic.
Q. So after this you went to work at Natural Tucker Bakery?
A. Before Natural Tucker [809 Nicholson St, North Carlton, 03 9380 4293], I spent my time at Babka [358 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, 03 9416 0091], which was the start of artisan work for me. Then my passion grew to then say, 'ok, I need to start baking with the raw elements, and that meant sourdough, fire, water and flour, basically they were the four things. And the only kind of approachable wood-fired oven bakery in Melbourne was Natural Tucker. And I tried for at least 12 months to get in there. They never really employed bakers with experience, it kind of at one stage ran as a co-operative of young people who were there to fill in the space. But I was lucky enough to get my foot in the door on a part time basis and it was just amazing. It changed how I looked and bread and what I thought about bread. And it gave me the idea how I could modernize, to a degree, that kind of baking. What they were doing at Natural Tucker made it current, it made it approachable to people like me.
Q. So if you were to summarize what you did differently, after you left Natural Tucker, what would that be? Here was an established bakery that was producing breads that you already liked, that you thought were wonderful. What have you done differently?
A. I don't think, as bakers, we can change things. We can't reinvent it, it's been done - it's been happening for over 2000 years. But I think you can give it a different angle, that's what a new baker or a new business should be looking at. So I wanted a 100% natural leaven production. That was our biggest test, and everything else just fell into place. What I've tried to do is to combine beautiful bread and beautiful sweets in a beautiful shop. So no-one had really done that, and be young, like a young baker with modern ideas on the upkeep of an ancient craft such as breadmaking. Because in Europe most of the bakers are middle-aged men or women who are kind of set in ways than cannot be turned. But here I wanted it to be a place where young bakers, who aspire to have their own bakery, can work with us if there's space for them. And they could then leave here with a respect for an ancient craft but with a contemporary outlook, a contemporary perspective
Q. What about technology. What place does that have in your bakery?
A. We don't use any high tech equipment in our baking. I just think you need a good oven, if you can have an efficient wood-fired oven that's going to give you the bread that you want, and you can afford to run a business on that then I think that's great. But I don't think wood is necessarily the answer to good bread. For weighing ingredients we use electronic scales, but we use spring dial scales for scaling dough. So there is that human element, of one loaf being a little bit heavier than the other. It has that organic feel about it.
Q. I don't think there's a weights and measures act [a law setting out the required weight for bread] as there is still in the UK. Unlike anywhere else in Europe, there is a law that tells us how much a loaf of bread shall way. Which is perfect for the big plant bakeries, but unfair on the small baker who is, as you say, selling unequal loaves weighed and shaped by hand. We still have to sell in units of 1lb, or 400g in metric. You can make a loaf any size you like. Why does that work for you?
A. Why does it work to make the loaf any size? Well, it just gives you as the baker a greater variety of breads to sell. Especially in St. Kilda, where there are a lot of young people, a lot of people can't go home and eat, for example, a 2lb or a 2 1/2 lb loaf, but they can certainly go home and eat a one pound loaf. We've got the whole variety and we're covering a lot of ground. It allows the baker to be a bit creative as well.
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