Drawing up my personal list of Melbourne’s ‘top 10’ bakeries was a tough job. Not because ten great places are hard to find, but because there are now so many bakeries in the metropolis which deserve to be included – bakeries which are turning out bread and cakes which are noteworthy by any standard. I’ve tried to make the task easier by excluding everything outside the metropolitan Melbourne area (so no Irrewarra or La Madre), and anything essentially ‘ethnic’ will have to wait for the ‘Melbourne Foodie’ list (sorry, Balha’s Pastry).

I then decided that, as I’d written about and recommended Phillipa’s, d chirico and Loafer elsewhere on this site, I could afford to leave them off this list – not because they didn’t deserve inclusion, but because they were already up there in the posh seats. But I still couldn’t whittle it down to ten; and so what I’m now able to give you, not in any particular order but all unmissable,  is my baker’s dozen of Melbourne’s finest, not-to-be-missed bakeries.

n.b. Many, many Australian businesses still don’t have even the most basic web page. Go figure.

1. Knead
396 Burwood Road
Hawthorn 3122 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9819 5883
Try their ‘pinolate’ pine nut cookies, tarte au sucre (sugar-and-cream-filled brioche), gluten-free chocolate brownies and their seeded and sprouted grain breads.
www.kneadbakers.com.au

2. Natural Tucker
809 Nicholson St
Carlton North 3054 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9380 4293
Melbourne’s oldest traditional sourdough bakery, the website says, owned now by John and Jan Bryers but started in 1984 by John Downes on the site of one of Melbourne’s oldest, turn of the (19th/20th) century, bakeries. So many other great bakers in Melbourne can trace their careers back to time spent at Natural Tucker. Try their sourdough loaves, pies, organic Anzac cookies, sourdough croissants.
www.naturaltuckerbakery.com.au

3. Let Them Eat Cake
147-149 Cecil Street
South Melbourne 3205 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9686 0077
No wonder their website describes Christopher Montebello as their “Artist and Pastry Chef”. There’s something of the exclusive fashion boutique about this utterly beguiling shop. This isn’t a bread shop, it’s where you come for perhaps the most creative, original, and occasionally madcap petit fours, cake making and cake decorating in the whole of Victoria.
www.letthemeatcake.com.au

4. Aviv Cakes & Bagels
412 Glen Huntly Rd
Elsternwick 3185 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9528 6627
Apparently, ‘Aviv’ is Hebrew for Springtime. Quite simply, the best bagels in Melbourne, if not Australia; doughnuts and almond scrolls, cheese, apple or apricot danish, and at the end of the week (Thu/Fri/Sat), challah.

5. Brunetti
194-204 Faraday Street
Carlton 3053 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9347 2801
A Carlton icon. Patron Giorgio Angelé originally came to Australia as a pastry chef with the 1956 Italian Olympic team, returning later as a migrant, and acquired Brunetti in 1991. Excels at all the things you’d expect – cannoli, rum baba, panzerotti (filled pastries), bocconcini di nonno (flourless almond biscuits with an amarena cherry centre).
Also at: 214 Flinders Lane
Melbourne 3000  VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9663 8085
and: 1-3 Prospect Hill Road
Camberwell 3124  VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9882 3100
www.brunetti.com.au

6. Firebrand Sourdough Bakery
69 Glen Eira Rd
Ripponlea 3185 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9523 0061
There’s an ‘Italian’ bread style popular in Australia we don’t see in the UK, the ‘casalinga’ (lit: housewife). Made here in a 1930’s wood-fired oven, using a wholewheat leaven, white flour, water and sea salt, hand-shaped, risen in canvas cloths and baked on the oven floor; or buy their walnut bread – white flour, biodynamic wholewheat flour, organic rye flour, wholewheat leaven, water, and sea salt, mixed with top quality Californian walnuts.
www.firebrandsourdough.com

7. Dench
109 Scotchmer Street
Fitzroy North 3068 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 94863554
There are some terrific loaves being made here – potato bread, walnut, apricot & honey loaf, beer bread, raisin loaf; on the sweet side, don’t miss local favourites like their friands; and most of all, gingerbread cats, sold to benefit the Whittlesea Vet Clinic, which provides free care for animal victims of bush fires.
www.denchbakers.com.au

8. Sugardough Panificio & Patisserie
163 Lygon St
Brunswick East 3057 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9380 4060
There’s something ineffably sweet and irresistible about this shop which struck us the moment we looked in the front window. Maybe it was the striped awning, maybe the cosy, almost domestic interior – but really, it was the obvious love, skill and attention to detail which had gone into everything they had on sale. As another reviewer commented, it looks and smells just like grandma’s kitchen. The best bomboloni in town; we went in for a bread roll and came out with one of everything.

9. Babka
358 Brunswick St
Fitzroy 3065 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9416 0091
Most of what’s baked here fits in with the east European air (isn’t ‘Babka’ Russian for Grandma ?) Sunflower and rye loaves, baked cheesecake and a highly recommended lemon tart. Can get very busy, and we hear that service can suffer at those times.

10. Laurent Boulangerie Patisserie
306 Little Collins Street
Melbourne 3000 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9654 1011
Sourdough olive bread, rye loaves, baguettes and epi, pain de mie; macarons and meringues. And numerous branches; Laurent is also remarkable for having maintained quality while expanding the business to over a dozen locations.
www.laurent.com.au

11. Brioche by Philip
208 Commercial Rd
Prahran 3181 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 95251966
Run by Philip Chiang, their eponymous brioche can be found with interesting flavour combinations, such as fig, walnut, and blue cheese. In the 2010 Foodies’ Guide To Melbourne, their sourdough baguette was named ‘best bread’, bringing together a full-flavoured moist crumb with a crispy crust. And in a way, that’s what Philip is best at – the fusion of different styles, trends and flavours. Must be seen.

12. Fatto a Mano
228 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy 3065 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9417 5998
Means ‘made by hand’. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it.  Still using the leaven handed on by their predecessors on this site, the much-loved Gertrude St Bakery. Pumpkin loaf, focaccia, or for your takeaway lunch, try either the eggplant (aubergine) or potato and olive pizza.

13. Dolcetti
223 Victoria St
West Melbourne 3003 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9328 1688
Marianna Di Bartolo was brought up on her mother’s Sicilian cooking, and it shows. Lemon-spiked ricotta cassateddi, panna cotta tarts, almond or pistachio biscotti, chocolate, prune & grappa cake – and some amazingly good nougat. George Biron, from Sunnybrae, clearly approves – and if George likes it, that’s good enough for me.

I took these photos when Loafer was owned and run by brothers Georg and Antoine von Baich and their family, two Canadians who were such a vital part of good baking in Melbourne during their years there.

Though they’ve now moved to Europe to pursue new ambitions, I understand that Loafer continues to produce some excellent bread and cakes, under its new owner, Andrea Brabazon, and it remains on my ‘must visit’ list whenever I’m in Melbourne. The shop has a wonderful sense of light and space, which I hope these images capture.

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Loafer Bread
146 Scotchmer Street
North Fitzroy 3068 VIC
Telephone: (03) 9489 0766

looking out from the back seating area at Crust and Crumbs in Amsterdam, down a 'tunnel' lined with big loaves and preserves

When we visited, this bakery was known as ‘Crust & Crumbs’, but we understand it has since re-opened as the ‘Vlaamsch Broodhuys’.

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above, (left to right) raisin bread, olive focaccia, wholewheat, seeded & sprouted sourdough, and the white sourdough

Baking in a big city is fine; it has a ‘buzzy’ urgency. Chef customers hot on the phone, whining the instant they see anything unusual with the delivery. Shoppers spinning in the centre of the store with bored expressions and dismissive hand flicks while moaning, “God, this place has lost its edge, I knew we should have gone to [here insert the name of whatever the 'hot' shop of the moment is]”. Those questions, “Do you have any carb-free bread?”, “Do you have any croissants without butter?”, “Is this the bread Gwyneth and Angelina buy?”

It’s enough to make me wish I could just click my fingers, vanish, and reappear in some little idyll with my own wood fired oven, a forest for wood, and a spring with the cleanest water. Then a voice shouts, “Earth to Planet Dan”, and the bubble pops.

There are many spots in this big old world where the living is, well, not easy. In some the beauty of the land and the sky temper those moments of hardness. I get mail from bakers, living and working in breathtaking scenery, willing to give it all up for a shot at big city success. But I also hear from others deep in urban life desperate to escape the tangled city.

Living and working upfront with an extraordinary and often alarming landscape is real life for some bakers. I visited one such bakery,  in the Yarra Valley north of Melbourne.

above, soft and flowing divided pieces of Iain's white sourdough sit on the table before shaping

At Fruition Bakery, Iain Banfield and Lyndall Francis have slowly and steadily built their bakery business to a healthy manageable point. And by built, I mean built. From building the oven to delivering the bread, it’s all their effort and reward. It’s not a ‘big buck’ bakery, but something on a human scale, and good for that. Though it is organic, a better word to describe it is “sustainable”. As one writer noted, “Iain and Lyndall ensure that they plant at least a hundred trees each year to replace the sawmill offcuts that they use to fire their oven”.

The region

The bakery is situated on a farm owned by Lyndall’s father and mother near Healesville, on the edge of the Yarra Valley. Though established as a route from Melbourne through to the goldfields during the 1800s, the area was also the scene of a shameful episode in Australia’s history, at Coranderrk Aboriginal Reservation (5km to the south of Healesville).

From the early part of the 1800s through to the mid 1900s the area was gradually stripped of its forest to clear the area for cattle farming, orchards and tobacco plantations. The first vineyards were planted in the 1830s at Yering Station in Yarra Glen. During the early 1900s artists were entranced by the rough, stringy beauty of the local trees and the harsh light, and over the next 50 years the area became renowned for its community of artists as much as for the soil that produced excellent wines, hops, and other produce. So this community began to protect the area, and re-establish planting of local shrubs and trees.

Lyndall’s parents moved to the area in the early 1970s, still quite an unusual move with the hint of the pioneer to it. The Dandenong Ranges, by this point a national park thick with tree ferns, white gums and animal life, separated the Yarra Valley from outer Melbourne. This park was a mesh that protected the valley from the bulging suburbs around inner Melbourne studded with shopping malls, roller discos and vast eat-until-you’re-sick palaces like “The Swagman” , a hall of gluttony given the name of a frugal traveller.

above, the remaining leaven after the days dough has been mixed, ready for refreshment

But during the recession in the 1980s the excesses slowly gave way to an appreciation of nature and the landscape, and the hills and valley became respected as a treasure of the State. Food production from the area over the last 25 years slowly began to be cultivated for quality rather than sheer bulk, and this began to be appreciated by the media and, in turn, the public. Perhaps it also marked the beginning of a new era of excessive consumption, but at least this had the benefit of promoting the work of small producers.

The bakery

Many businesses have fallen apart soon after trying to set up in a beautiful location. Sometimes the demand just isn’t there. Other times the sightseeing tourists simply want take-away food, and don’t want to carry a loaf back home. So, like any bakery anywhere, to succeed it has to make what local people want.

The greater Dandenong and Yarra Valley area was home to several Steiner communities, and for them good bread was an important part of life. There were restaurants and cafes as well that fuelled the food-loving day-trippers from Melbourne, and they needed good bread. Local people longed for a bakery that provided something other than the bouncy loaves from the hot bread shops. So the market was ripe, and just needed the right kind of bakery.

Lyndall and Iain had set up an organic farm on Lyndall’s parents’ land in the 1980s, though that was proving to be an almighty task. On a whim they built an oven adjoining a small outbuilding on the farm with the plans and help of Australian Alan Scott who, in Johnny Appleseed fashion, was sowing both the US and Australia with small wood-fired ovens. They called their bakery Fruition, and it was instantly popular, if not a sturdy commercial success. It was clear to all that it needed to grow.

The key to staying afloat and earning enough was in growing to the right size. Too big and the constant flow of money could mean losing any control on the quality. Too small and it might as well just be a hobby. After a great deal of thought they got building a second larger oven, again with the help of Alan Scott. This gave Fruition the size to maintain an excellent production without working so much that the spirit of the venture got lost.

above, Iain in the bakery at Fruition

I’ve arrived about midday at the bakery, so when I talk to Iain, production has been in swing a few hours (my questions are in bold):

What sort of flour is it here?

It’s organic, Laucke. It’s all roller milled and stone-ground, it’s a white and a wholemeal.

I can smell…this is a sourdough?

All we do is sourdough…

It looks beautiful, the texture is incredibly soft and wet. There is this wonderful, almost yoghurty smell that comes from the dough. And this old Artifex looks great, this twin arm mixer.

Yeah, that was a bit of a find actually.

Where’s that from?

We got it from a place up in Brisbane. I’d only before used single arm mixers. I’d started work at Natural Tucker years ago and they had an old single arm mixer there. I’m trying to think how I actually got onto the double arm.

Did you read about it somewhere?

I’m not actually sure that I did. We had been looking for a small mixer, and the thing is with a single arm mixer that the bowl’s huge. When we started we were mixing by hand for the first year.

And you were probably taken by the look of it too, because it just looks quite beautiful. It’s battered, painted white with little chrome handles.

They sent us a photo from Brisbane of a similar one that had been reconditioned and we thought “that looks beautiful” and we got very excited about that. Then we rang them back and that had been sold. And then he said “But I’ve just come across another one”, so we thought, “oh yeah, we’ll grab that”. And when it came down it was nothing like the photo (he laughs). We were disappointed when it first came, it had cut cables coming out of it, oil in the bowl, there was a crushed Coke can in the bowl – we almost sent it back when we got it out here.

above, inside the brick oven at Fruition, built by Iain together with family and friends, according to the plans and advice supplied by Alan Scott

I noticed that as you were cutting into the dough that the aeration is already there, I can see little holes, air bubbles. When was the dough mixed?

Ah, about a hour ago, about 45 minutes….

Amazing…. And what sort of temperature? It feels about…

About 24C. A bit warmer than in the middle of winter.

And what are these little flecks in the dough that I can see?

That’s the bran from the wholemeal. The wholemeal flour has got quite flaky bran pieces through it.

There is a beautiful cream colour to the dough. It’s definitely white…It’s got about 10% wholemeal in it.

(A little later) What are you putting in here?

Sultanas and currants soaked in apple juice and spices.

It smells beautiful. And you’ve heated them through?

above, Lyndall and Iain outside their bakery and home in Healesville, Victoria

Yep, just to plump up the sultanas, then I’ll let that cool a little..

They’ve gone into the bowl so hot that now there is this great cloud of wonderful cinnamon steam over the bowl…

It’s the Speculaas mixture…

Speculaas is an Amsterdam…

A Dutch spice mixture.

So the white dough that you’ve taken out you’ll leave for….

Usually 3 hours for a bulk ferment, then a pre-shape and shape.

So what’s this next bread you’re going to make?

Well that’s the… I’ll take out this one here, that’s just the white dough I’ll mix back in and mix the fruit through that

Ah right, ok, so you’ll make one big dough, then out of that…

I’ll make the fruit bread, this will be the focaccia, and then I’ll come back and cook up onions, garlic and rosemary and I’ll mix that through this dough. And that’s it out of that dough. And then I’ll mix a combination of white, rye and wholemeal, and we’ll do what’s called a ‘seeded sourdough’, which has the linseeds, the organic linseeds and some sesame seeds mixed through that. And then it’s rolled through sesame seeds as well.

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Any reason for using both light and dark linseed?

Just because they’re available at the moment. You can’t always get the golden ones.

These cloths look great that you have hanging up, have you just got these locally? They’re long sheets of Belgian linen about a meter and a half long by half a meter wide. And you can see the imprint of the loaves in flour on the cloth. Do you wash them?

We bang and brush them well at the end of the night. We used to have some before that were 6 years old and falling apart, the health department said, “I think you should get rid of those”.

I’ve see them in French bakeries and they’re black.

I read Poilane saying that was where half the goodness comes from. That mould…

I’ve heard bakers say that insects in cloths and baskets are good luck.

Waxing lyrically about the different hues of green and blue…The Belgian linen definitely makes a difference, ’cause we used to use just calico ones. But they’re actually hard to get here. I’m trying to find another distributor at the moment to get me some as we need some more.

I prefer the linen, because I find with calico that because the fibre is much finer that it sticks to the loaf, giving you all these hairy bits on the loaf, whereas with the linen you don’t seem to get any hairs or stray fabric stuck to the outside of the loaf.

So there is a lot of liquid that you’re adding in with the Sultana and spice mix. Are you going to add in more flour as well?

No, no more flour. There’s not a huge amount of liquid that goes in with the mixture, though the dough is very moist.

And the dough is going to go into these tins?

Yes, the small tins. We don’t do many breads in tins, but a lot of people demand them. They like the slicing and the toasting. I’ve always said that I would prefer not to use any tins. But it’s what they want.

A bread that fits into the toaster.

It does, yes. People need to buy new toasters, toasters with space for four slices instead of two.

the crust and crumb of the wholewheat loaf are as they should be - the crust the same even colour around the edge, the crumb lightly aerated yet dense enough to please a wholewheat afficionado

There is a corrugated iron covered veranda out front of the bakery, making it look a little like an old homestead. I’m sitting with Lyndall’s father in the shade, talking about the start of the bakery….

Your mother lived here too…

My mother died at 105. Yep, we had her here for a while in a granny flat as she was no longer able to look after herself.

So you moved here in 1978? That must have been such thing to do. I remember growing up then and this was really quite ‘the wilds’. We didn’t really have a big wine industry at that time, and moving out to Healesville was quite alternative.

Oh yes. Why did I do it?

What appealed to you about it?

I wasn’t well. In fact, no one new what the trouble was at the time. And there was a coincidence. My wife happened to be a schoolteacher, and I just happened to read about a school camp for sale. And she suggested that I investigate it. And I refused because I wouldn’t have had the patience with the kids, and she thought I would. Anyhow, some while later we took Lyndall to her school camp which was up Alexandria, beyond here, which was on a farm. And at the time we had a farm as an experiment, at Mt Gambier, to see if I liked farming as a retirement exercise. And we did. So we took her to her school camp on a farm and I thought, “well, perhaps we could do something similar”. So we spent a lot of time, and I mean a lot of time, looking at properties to do just this. To the stage where Nan was reduced to tears, she just didn’t want to go out any more and look at any more places, and I was getting sick of it too. But all of a sudden we discovered this place. We just saw it and bought it as quickly as that. And never regretted that for one fleeting moment.

above, old school chairs from the 70s are orange dots in the bakery - here looking in the office

Was it quite bare around here? I noticed a lot of young trees, it must have had a wonderful view.

This place here was totally bare. The paddock that’s up here had one tree on the crest, and nothing else. Now you can see that it’s quite a wilderness because we’ve planted many hundreds of trees on the property.

And how is it living with all the family?

How is it? No, it’s fine

You didn’t want them to go away and leave?

No, it works out quite well. We’ve been a bit jammed in on occasion, and we still are. But that’s changing. Lyndall and Iain used to live in the cottage here, but that got beyond “livability”, especially with the size of their family. Though we’ve extended the place upstairs. They’re living in the extension [now], and the other branch of the family has just started to build a house on the property. So that, for the first time, we’ll have adequate accommodation for everybody.

That’s excellent. So tell me, before you were talking about the oven…

The oven. So with the first oven that was built here, I had a suspicion that it was too small. But Iain felt it would make so much bread that it was adequate in size. Well, after some period in time he discovered that it was, in fact, too small. And after some years he contacted Alan with a view to making a larger oven. And they sent the plans out and decided to go ahead with it.

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Did you like the idea from the beginning?

Of them doing it? Well, they had the problem of making a living of some sort, and when they came to the farm they spent time growing organic vegetables. Which meant that they worked very hard, sold the stuff mainly to their impoverished friends who couldn’t afford [to pay] very much money. So they worked very hard for an inadequate income. And winter being a quieter time here, and with another son-in-law who’s a capable builder and does bricklaying quite well, we thought it would be an opportunity to put in the first oven. And so we in fact put in the first oven with Mike building it. So this got going with a view to complement the veggies.

But in fact what happened was of course that the bakery took over completely and the vegetables were completely forgotten. And so they carried on for quite some while, and in fact the [smaller] oven doesn’t make enough bread to make a really good living. Not that bread is a good living anyhow – you need to do something a bit more major than that.

Anyhow, the next oven came about and this did appear to be a reasonable size. But of course Alan’s plans were drawn in America, so that they were in the old imperial system, whereas we’re of course metric here. So I thought I’d examine the plans to see if they suited our building materials. And in doing that I felt “ok, I have to make some changes, not much, but I’ll take the opportunity to make sure that the insulation is top quality”. Because the first oven plans did in fact allow too much heat to escape. And you could feel the heat all around [the outside of the brickwork]. And I didn’t want that to happen in the new oven.

So what did you use?

I basically stayed with Alan’s plans, and he had in fact made a bit of an improvement on the hearth. Because there’s an insulated slab underneath the hearth which contains vermiculite – which gives a certain amount of insulation which doesn’t appear in the first oven. But I thought, “ok, I’ve got to change the dimensions slightly. I want to be absolutely certain that the minimum insulation that Alan has laid down will be achieved satisfactorily”.

So then I thought, “well since I’ve got to make some slight changes we’ll make [the oven] just a little bit bigger all around”. So I did. Then having done all that we though the best thing to do was then of course to refer it back to Alan to make sure he was happy with the various changes that had taken place. And he was, fortunately. So the oven is Alan’s design with just a few minor alterations.

So did you put vermiculite across the top as well?

Oh yes. But we just made sure that there was stacks of insulation. And you can go around now and you wont find any escaping heat to speak of in there. So it’s a very, very efficient

It’s excellent, really good…

I think in some ways it’s a bit too efficient. When they want it to cool down to make other products it doesn’t get there in time [he laughs]

Oh well, you can’t have everything…

Fruition Bakery
(no shop, contact details only)
531 Healesville KooWeeRup Road
Healesville 3777 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 5962 3175

above, the bakery looks out on Fitzroy Street in St. Kilda, an old part of inner Melbourne. Tables are outside under the awning

There is something about excellence that stands out like a beacon. Some bakeries jump out at you, demanding attention and captivating passers by from the pavement. I guess I do judge books by covers, and expect shop windows, lighting, display and even the look of the customers going in and out, to tell me just what is in store on the other side of the glass.

It was a few years back now, in December 2001, when I wandered up Fitzroy Street in Melbourne and stopped outside a bakery. It just had the look of a good place. The bread in the window looked great, and the look of the place with loaves stacked on bare steel shelves, the walls and fittings plain and unfussy, let the colours of the few simple baked bits that I could see really stand out in relief. At that point it was a little rough diamond, set in the jet black walls of an old bit of a 30s building, but it just looked so good. So I marked it down as a place to return to again.

above, a cut through the bannette loaf showing the open aeration in the crumb, and a dark crust

Baker D. Chirico, the bakery set up and owned by Daniel Chirico, is located in Fitzroy Street, in a part Melbourne that I knew well from my teen years in Australia. When I was growing up, St. Kilda was the bad side of town, which marked it as a must-see destination from every boy from the suburbs. St. Kilda was where the prostitutes were, the shops selling porn magazines, all ringed with more that a hint of the crime we felt sure must be going on in dark alleyways and pubs. Every visit would be somewhat exciting, even when dad would drive through quickly on the way back from the beach, while I’m looking out the car window and wondering what forbidden things were going on at the exact time we passed by. Mum and dad would never make it quite clear what the danger was, so I would sometimes go in after school with a few mates, just to see whether danger would jump out and hoping it would wave about in front of us like a scene from tv. But it never did

Now, due to its leafy inner city location, St. Kilda is prime real estate. This is the area where the Melbourne Grand Prix zooms about. Houses regularly sell for over a million dollars, whilst the working girls have moved out to the suburbs. Though there were always good delis and overblown cake shops (lots of fake whipped cream and chocolate vermicelli), now the area is filled with better restaurants, smart cars and even smarter residents. Who like good bread, understand a crust, and are willing to pay for it.

Daniel is one of a growing number of bakers around the world who don’t see themselves as an extension of the existing baking establishment. New-breed bakers who would rather be seen as the beginning of a new world of bakeshops that cater for the tastes and lives of a generation born well after post war British austerity, who want to eat good things carefully made, and that desire rules the way the shop and live. For them its not about bulking up on cheap stodge, that can be worked away through hard labour in the workplace. Instead this generation looks ahead at a lifetime of sitting at work, typing at keyboards, talking on telephones and driving in cars. This is a moneyed generation who, even before Dr. Atkins made us worry about carbohydrates, wondered if their childhood diet was right for the rich lives they intended to lead.

above, in the front window ready for sale is a newly baked loaf of Casalingua Bianco

So customers expect to see words like organic, provenance, wholegrain, sourdough, and biodynamic written somewhere on the label, words that reflects their own sense of social responsibility, a responsibility well coated in a desire to be seen as fashionable. Like new Edwardians, these customers just want the best and expect the way the bakery looks, from the bag the bread is packed in to to the t-shirt worn by the staff, to reflect their attitude. And this sparks work for a host of allied creative and craft based trades, all helping each other keep afloat.

But, best of all, I like the bread here. The crumb has a gutsy moistness that makes it a pleasure to eat in the evenings. Daniel bakes a mean baguette, and the seeded loaves are chewy with a crisp crust.

The bakery window looks out onto the street, a common feature that it becoming typical in modern artisan bakeries (from Erez Komarovsky’s groundbreaking set up in Tel Aviv in the mid 1990s through to Johan Sörbergs excellent Riddarbageriet bakery in Stockholm). So the mechanics of the breadmaking process are on show 24 hours a day. This requires an eye for order as well as discipline, to stop the view looking like one of flour-strewn carnage.

above, the bakery staff at Baker D Chirico

Back in 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.

above, Daniel Chirico, sitting outside the St. Kilda bakery, photographed in June 2004

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.

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.

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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?

above, deliveries go on through the day, to restaurants, bars, and other retail customers

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.

above, every morning the shop is crammed with customers, trying to grab a space at one of the few tables. Daily newspapers are scattered on the bench, to read with a hot espresso, a jam tart or a sourdough currant bun

Q. Do you sell half a loaf?

A. We do sell half a loaf, for 90% of the breads.

Q. When we spoke before you said, “I want to keep the bakery small.” Why did you say that?

A. Well, [big] isn’t what artisan baking is about. I guess that the number one rule of artisan baking is that it needs to be expressive. And it needs to be part of the bakers mood, and beliefs and philosophy. Working in a small bakery restricts the baker, and stops him from becoming greedy. We see that happening every day, the baker becomes successful, and then looks for ways to make more bread. I don’t think that’s the answer. The answer to good bread practice, for me, is maintaining a product, once you’ve got it right and got a following. It’s very difficult to maintain it. And in this bakery I think that’s a part of our success. We started with a product that we’d fine tuned, then got to a point where it was very well received. And then it was just a matter of maintaining that for our customers. And we’ve done that successfully. But I’m afraid of the idea of getting big, and trying to maintain that. It only results in your bread becoming unpopular.

above, biodynamic spelt and rye flour are held in bins on a trolley, in reach of the baker

Q. Now, it’s just coming up to 12 midday, and there are clearly bakers working everywhere. You could avoid that, they could all work at night. They could start at 10 and finish at 6 in the morning.

A. Absolutely. I was taught never to trust bakeries that have counters and shelves filled by 7am. You know, it can only mean that it was made a long, long time ago. Especially refrigerated counters. We don’t have refrigerated counters, or a refrigerated display in the bakery shop. Which forces us to make things on a daily basis fresh. Which ultimately is always going to be the best result. Which ultimately is part of our philosophy. Bread making, to produce good bread, any good baker will tell you that time is necessary. As long as it’s not exhausted, you can over do it. We kind of feel, well, our bread production is allowed 12 hours from start to go, and that’s for a normal days production.

Q. So is the production started by one baker and finished by another?

A. That’s right. I feed the leaven at 2pm in the afternoon; it then needs 6 to 8 hours. It’s probably best at the 6 hour mark, but it tends to get 7. At 9pm our dough maker comes in, and he’ll prepare dough for 9 hours of the day. All our dough is scratch dough, and we do at least 11 varieties per day.

Q. And the dough that he makes will be baked the following morning, or the following day?

A. The following morning. The first dough will be bulk proved, scaled and shaped by 1am. We start baking at about 5 or 6 am. Prior to that the bakers prepare all the pastries for the day, and bake them off, and prepare the counter for about 6am just with pastries.

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Q. So who orchestrates the production through the oven? You have three decks that are quite small, so it must take some thought to make sure that there isn’t this backlog of risen dough.

A. That comes only from experience. I only really have experienced bakers in baking the bread, like myself and Tony who I’ve been working with for some time. Tony oversees most of the bread production these days during the week. And then we share that on a weekend, when it gets a bit busy. He orchestrates it, with my guidance, and then I come in and finish the baking off, pretty much, that’s how it works these days.

But in the beginning it was not like that at all. It was just Tony and I doing everything, it was just [a] kind of unspoken understanding about how things should be done. But when you have young bakers in, who have only been doing it for a year, I certainly try and instil in them that good baking is about common sense, and what improves that is foresight. Most of the young bakers I first meet only concentrate of what is going on in front of them, and wont think about how that affects the guy at the oven, pretty much. But that foresight takes a lot of time to develop, because you need to be working the oven to understand what is happening on the bench, and what is happening on the doughmaker.

Q. Do you rotate the shifts around?

A. No, not really.

Q. So when people take on a position in this bakery, they stay there?

A. Yes, until they have it set in their memory. We test that by getting somebody fresh in to do the job, and let that person explain to the new one how the bakery works. And from that we have a good idea of where their knowledge is at. It’s working, so far.

baker d. chirico
Shop 3-4
149 Fitzroy Street
St Kilda 3182 VIC
Telephone:  (03) 9534 3777

above, from left, a deep rich custard tart with a layer of soft fruit in the base; middle, the shelves in the shop are packed with jars or preserves, and good baking books like Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Bread Bible"; right, fig and anise sourdough loaves sit in the on the shelf in the window

So Tyler Brulee, the London FT newspaper’s style colossus and globetrotting “bun lover”, listed this Melbourne bakery next to New York’s Dean & Deluca and England’s ethically aware Waitrose supermarkets in a round-up for the New York Times in 2005. British chef Sally Clarke described its founder to me as “like a British rose in Melbourne, though of course very much Australian. She’s deeply passionate about her food and you know, we all miss her here”.

Both are talking about Phillippa’s, the Melbourne bakery and foodstore that rubs its customers up the right way, and other bakers raw with envy, founded by Phillippa Grogan and celebrating over a dozen years in business. I spoke with Phillippa and her partner Andrew O’Hara in Melbourne about steering a bakery business through the stages from a small idea to a smooth running sustainable business….

Dan: I was just thinking how good the shop looks. How does it feel, after all these years?

Phillippa: Well, it’s a bit of a shock that it’s passed so quickly, but it sort of feels good though. But it’s going along well. And the response from the customers who have been coming along from day one, though nobody is counting years, but they’re pretty excited. And it took a while to get the shop really buzzing. Perhaps you really have to have a knack to get retail working. We reduced a lot of our 3rd party lines, and sell hardly anything bought in. It’s mainly just what we make here and we’ve expanded our range. And that just works.

Dan: What stops you getting jaded, a dozen years is a fair chunk out of your life?

above, Phillippa Grogan outside the Armadale shop, where the original bakery was situated

Phillippa: Well, I did feel very jaded for a while, several years ago, very disillusioned. The business had grown and, inevitably when you reach a certain point, you think you still have to be in complete control. So I wasn’t doing the creative stuff, the product development, the marketing and all that. I was pretending to run the business with 40 or 50 staff, two premises, with Andrew working 6 nights a week. He kept telling me to stop, and I kept saying to him “How do I stop”? I really didn’t know how to do it, that isn’t my skill. My skill is on the creative side.

Dan: So what was the point where you held up the white flag? When you say you were pretending, what was the point when you realized that had to change?

Phillippa: When I had Sophie, when I was trying to do it all [compressed into] 3 days a week, that’s when I thought “this is b***, I can’t do this”. I just felt things were slipping because I wasn’t paying attention to the things I should have been paying attention to because I was trying to do the things I wasn’t very good at anyway. My Dad is involved in the business, and he’s more of a businessperson, and for a long time he used to say, “well, we’ll just get somebody in to run the business”. And we used to do a lot of talking about that. Then finally, one day, we had a serious talk about it, and Dad went off and found somebody in 3 weeks who just turned out to be fantastic. He used to run a shoe manufacturing company and understands the intricacies of family businesses. And I just said, “I want to see serious profitability because I know this business can do much more than it is”. I didn’t even talk about sales. I just said, “I want to totally reduce the staff turnover, I want happy staff, and I don’t want Andrew to work nights”. So he comes along and the sales line goes up, Andrew is banned from nights and staff are much happier.

Dan: Was it a bit scary? Here, you had given someone else control…

above, Phillippa's Spelt Sourdough, showing flour rings from the wooden proving basket

Phillippa: Well, we’d tried other things to educate ourselves, had consultants in. Consultants don’t take responsibility for the company, they’ll just “chop, chop” here and there…

Dan: It can cause morale problems as well…

Andrew: The thing with consultants is that they have to show a result. And it was pretty easy to show a good financial result simply by cutting into the staff costs….

Phillippa: Straight away I knew that this guy that Dad had found was going to be good. He’s older; he’d been a CEO… And when he came in here he saw that the brand was very strong, but we were surrounded by all of this “simple-to-fix” stuff. And for him it was work he could do with his eyes shut, but he got a lot of pleasure out of it. He scored points every day, and he could really drive it, and we were quite easy to work with.

Dan: So tell me, what has been the most difficult thing about taking the bakery into this stronger position. When you travel up and down the coast I see Phillippa’s bread everywhere. At Piedmonte’s [a local supermarket] in North Fitzroy you see lots of Phillippa’s bread there. Getting it to this point, into the “comfort zone” perhaps, how difficult has that been?

a scorchingly hot loaf, straight from the oven at Phillippa's

Andrew: It has been incredibly difficult at times and probably the biggest obstacle has been Phillippa. But then the biggest champion has been Phillippa as well. In the early days at the high street shop, when you’re standing there in the middle of the night staring at the wall, and the wall is talking back to you, and you’re really wondering if you should give up but you keep on going. Phillippa’s has really grown because of Phillippa and myself. I brought the ability to make the product to the table but Phillippa was the one with the bigger vision. And she stepped back from the business after about a year. She worked in the shop initially. And then she stepped back and worked on the business. And there were a lot of things she did that I probably got frustrated with, that I didn’t really understand. And a lot of things you probably could say could have been done a lot better.

But it’s Phillippa’s vision, and what Phillippa was working on. But she’s got the palate and when she develops a product she knows where she wants it to go – she knows the market for it. And what I learned early on was, with most bakers they’ll say “what you want doesn’t matter” and they’ll continue to do it their way. With Phillippa what I learned was I’d say what you want doesn’t matter, and I’d do it my way, and the sales would drop away and there wasn’t much interest. And she’d badger me saying, “just try it, just try it”. So I’d give in and start doing it, and the sales would start to come, and the interest would come as well. She has the palate, she knew the market that she was aiming at, and I responded to that and I’ve learned to do things the way she imagined they should be. It took a bit of work to get to, but once we’d established that in the relationship, that’s when Phillippa’s just naturally started to move along.

above, descriptive fun signs written by the shop staff help emphasise the quality and the handmade ethos of the shop

Dan: The Spelt bread that you have, it seems to be incredibly popular, but I’m not seeing so much spelt bread around in Melbourne. How have you been able to get a lead on the market in this way?

Andrew: There are few bakers in Melbourne who understand flavour…. I know that lots of other bakeries make all these kinds of breads, but I seriously find few bakeries have flavour in their bread. Why? I’m not sure, I don’t really understand it. Us, we keep everything as simple as we can. The production methods, the flavours that we’re looking for, it’s all very simple; the ingredients going into the bread are simple. In the spelt bread there is just spelt, salt and water. And the rest of it is just the method that we use. And again, the method is very simple. For whatever reason those flavours just come out when you bake simply. There are a lot of people who are using spelt flour but I don’t think that they achieve the kind of result that we’re achieving.

Dan: When you are baking without improvers, without stabilizers, the appearance of the bread can sometimes change. In hot weather the loaf can turn out as flat as a pancake, and spelt flour is particularly prone to this. How do you explain to your customers that sometimes the shape of the loaf does vary?

Andrew: Um, probably unsuccessfully! Though you can manage the quality of your bread you have to accept what the parameters are, and you have to accept that when you’re working without improvers or chemicals that you have to allow slightly wider parameters. But you can still produce a reasonably consistent loaf. But there is a balance there between understanding where we’re going wrong – if there is a problem – and understanding what the parameters are. We get a lot of feedback from the customers and we watch that feedback like a hawk. And we listen to what they’re saying and we challenge ourselves all the time too, to make sure that we’re not making excuses for what might basically be our poor performance. And I work really closely and I work really hard on the bakers. And I pick them up on these points – if it’s a hot day I work on them. I make sure that the dough temperature is really cool; make sure that the fermentation time is shortened up because the dough activity is going to be greater than if it’s a cooler day when it might be very, very slow. And it’s just about getting the guys to think – if they walk in and it’s really, really hot that day, and they’re only wearing a singlet outside, then they know that their dough needs to be cool and they need to shorten the fermentation time a little bit. If it’s really cold outside and they’re putting a jumper on, and the weather just has that chill in the air – then leave the dough a little bit longer. But just getting them to think about what’s happening to the weather that day, that’s really important. The spelt is one of the earliest doughs they make in the shift, so they don’t have the comfort of the bread coming out of the oven and warming the bakery up, adding humidity to the bakery air. It’s pretty stark when they start off with the sourdoughs.

above, the exterior of Phillippa's Armadale shop, where the original bakery was situated

Dan: Working here in Australia you’re rather limited in the types of flour you can get, compared to London or anywhere in Europe really – where we have an enormous choice of different flours from different grains, made using different milling techniques. Have you found that difficult to adjust to, or complicated to get over?

Andrew: No, the flour in the southern hemisphere I like more than the flour in the northern hemisphere. It’s the other ingredients I have an issue with. Like butter for instance, where you don’t have regulation through the EU. Whereas over here you might get a really good price on butter, and you think “fantastic” but pretty soon you realize there is a significantly higher percentage of moisture in it. So those ingredients you put to one side and you learn that game pretty quickly. The flour – I actually quite like the movement [in the dough] the flour gives. I’m happy with the varieties I can get and we’re learned there are only one or two mills that we can deal with. And the type of flour that we use definitely affects the flavour. We tried one mill from Queensland when we did some trials, and there was such a metallic taste to the bread it made. The flour that we use from the millers in Victoria gives us a very nutty flavour on the outside of the loaf and a very moist loaf internally. And there is still quite a flavour in behind that. We tried using another type of flour from a mill in South Australia and we just lost all of the flavour. The colour was there, the texture was there – but no flavour. So we went back to the mill from Victoria.

above, soft sticky loaves of honey-rich pain d'epice - a traditional french honey cake heavy with spices

But it was interesting to do that. The flour in Australia, from what I’ve seen, has got better characteristics as far as our bakery is concerned. It has the protein to construct the sort of loaf we’re looking to make. So because the protein is there you can give the dough a long fermentation, which gives you the flavour, texture, colour and boldness we want in the loaf. I don’t think the farmers have to work the soil as hard [in Victoria] as they do in the northern hemisphere. There are good mills cropping up regularly now. There is a new mill in Benalla, there is Wholegrain Milling (www.wholegrain.com.au) in New South Wales that produces really lovely organic flours. And they mill the grain using very slow turning stones, and they’ve got some really fantastic flours coming out of there. There’s a reasonable amount of consistency coming out of there too. I feel a lot more comfortable baking with their flour than I would have done, say, five years ago. There would have been too much inconsistency then.

Phillippa’s Armadale: 1030 High Street, Armadale 3143 VIC;  Telephone (03) 9576 2020

Phillippa’s Brighton: 608 Hampton Street, Brighton 3186 VIC; Telephone (03) 9592 7340

www.phillippas.com.au

above, the guys on the shop floor at Phillippas Armadale store. The counters are jammed with freshly baked cakes and biscuits in colourful mismatching plates and bowls

above, large wheels of tourte de meule (a naturally yeasted leaven bread) sit on a shelf at Eric Kayser's eponymous bakery, 8 & 14 Rue Monge, Paris 75005

I’m regularly asked what bakeries might be particularly worth a visit when in Paris. Very briefly, and in no particular order, this is my ‘top 10′, a personal and far from exhaustive list.

1. Max Poilâne
87 rue Brancion
75015 Paris
Tel: 01 48 28 45 90
www.max-poilane.fr

2. Lionel Poilâne
8 rue du Cherche-Midi
75006 Paris
Tel: 01 45 48 42 59
and 49 boulevard de Grenelle
75015 Paris
Tel: 01 45 79 11 49
www.poilane.fr

3. BE boulangépicier (Alain Ducasse)
73, boulevard de Courcelles
75008 Paris
Tel : 01 46 22 20 20
www.boulangepicier.com

4. Eric Kayser
8 & 14 rue Monge
75005 Paris
Tel 01 44 07 17 81
www.maison-kayser.com

5. Le Quartier du Pain (Frédéric Lalos)
74 rue Saint Charles
75015 Paris
Tel: 01 45 78 87 23
and branches
www.lequartierdupain.com

6. Gosselin
123-125 Rue Saint.-Honoré
75001 Paris
Tel: 01 45 08 03 59
www.boulangeriegosselin.com

7. Le Pain au Naturel (Moisan)
5, place d’Aligre
75012 Paris
Tel: 01 43 45 46 60
and branches
www.painmoisan.fr

8. Boulangerie au 140 (Mr. & Mme Demoncy)
140, rue de Belleville
75020 Paris
Tel: 01 46 36 92 47
www.au140.com

9. Moulin de la Vierge (Basile Kamir)
166 ave. de Suffren
75015 Paris
Tel: 01 47 83 45 55
and branches
www.lemoulindelavierge.com

10. Pierre Hermé (Patisserie)
72 rue Bonaparte,
75006 Paris
Tel: 01 43 54 47 77
and branches
www.pierreherme.com