above, (b&w portraits, left to right) top row: Antoine at Loafer Bread , Iain at Fruition, Phillippa from Phillippa's, bottom row: Tony from Dench, Chaminda Silva at Daley at Chimmy's, Daniel Chirico from Baker D. Chirico.
It was after one of my regular trips to Melbourne, promoting my book The Handmade Loaf, teaching classes and meeting local bakers. To be truthful, I returned rather depressed about the plateau we’d reached in the UK – some fine baking here, but little that’s remarkable. We must raise our game, and of course we will. I hear the rumblings from many talented British bakers desperate to break out and ‘be extraordinary’, and leave all this crumb-conditioned crap behind. But it’s taking a long time.
Here’s an essay, originally written for Allan Campion and Michele Curtis, for their website which promotes all that’s great and good in Victorian food. Or, if you browse the Features/Travel section here, you’ll find interviews with some of the bakers I met there, and more photos.
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I’ve been trying to think “just why is the bread so good in Victoria?”, and that epicentre of a good crust, Melbourne. When I grew up in the eastern suburbs in the 60s and 70s, bread was simply hot and white – and if you ate it while it was steaming in the bag it tasted fine. Now I look around the state and see so many world class bakeries. Even the bouncy-soft bread chains like Baker’s Delight still produce far better loaves than similar multiples in the UK. New bakers like Tony Dench producing baguettes as good as those in Paris, without even a flying visit by him to compare. We’re just across the Channel, with access to the same ingredients and, damn it, even to the same bakers, and we still can’t get it right. The rich earthy taste of Phillippa and Andrew’s spelt sourdough would beat all of the competition at a Soil Association “Best” event in England.
above, travelling further afield, Jason Warwick's award-winning sourdough in Sydney
The bakers I met in Victoria try hard to get the very best out their local ingredients, still driven to succeed at producing loaves that meet their own high standards. This occurs even where there are problems caused by the characteristics of those same local ingredients. Their way is just to accept those characteristics – and then get on with the work. Even aiming to accentuate those characteristics rather than mask them. Here in Britain, so many bakers leap from mill to mill, from supplier to supplier, always with an air of dissatisfaction with the ingredients at hand, and always sure it will all come right when they find their perfect mill and the perfect flour. Here we have a choice of so many excellent flours, yet still find it difficult to craft one single, world-class loaf. Scarcity can, and I would argue “usually does”, beget excellence.
In Victoria, bakers share information freely with one another, they help each other out, and (on the quiet) they compete with one another. Here in Britain they’ll compete for customers, compete for a buck, compete to be the biggest and most lucrative bakery in the region. But they won’t compete to produce the best bread. That’s the only competition the customer has a chance of gaining from, since the supermarkets will always be able to provide the cheapest bread in town. Even there, Victorian customers still win. At Piedimonte’s supermarket in North Fitzroy, the pane di rosetta (those hollow crunchy crisp rolls perfect for scooping up a thick, pesto-stirred bean soup) are as good as I’d find in any bakery in Milan, and this is in a supermarket in-store bakery. If only we had a Piedimonte’s here in London….
above, a dark and thick crusted rye sourdough from the old Gertrude Street Bakery, in Fitzroy
Someone said to me today, “But the trouble is, here in Britain we don’t really love food.”. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps for many customers in the UK bread is just chunky, tasteless, soft and stodgy carbohydrate. An outspoken Australian will have no hesitation in telling the shop staff when they’ve got it right, and wrong. I can still recall my mother telling shopkeepers what their problem is. It matters to the customer because the reward for emigrating was always to have a better quality of life. And when that’s missing, the Australian customer complains.
Immigration will have played a part in defining the character of the Australian daily bread. I spent a morning with my partner David visiting Melbourne’s Immigration Museum, where the moving and harrowing stories of early immigrant life are on display. This reminded me of the difficulties faced by Italian, German, and Arab chefs and bakers in Melbourne, trying to recreate the foods they remembered from home, simply working the local flour to get it to behave like the milled grain in Europe. The wholefood movement in Victoria kept hold in pockets around the state, sometimes where Steiner communities were located. Much of the greatness in Melbourne’s artisan baking stems from bakers who spent time at Natural Tucker in Nicholson Street, one of the early wholefood bakeries in Melbourne. And with them they took a passion for wholegrain baking, with no fear of sprouted seeds and natural leaven. Woodfired ovens are also embraced, many designed by Victorian Alan Scott, a guru to the natural bakers in the USA.
I was overwhelmed by the many bakers who came to see whether I knew anything that could help their work, or make their bread better. Not that the bakers felt that there was a problem, but just the chance that there could be improvement. No-one knew whether I had anything useful to add, but they came anyway – even though there was the big possibility that they might come back without learning anything new. That risk is the key to learning, taking the journey just for the possibility of a droplet of knowledge, and I’m sure that approach contributes to their excellence.
Compared to Victoria, Britain is still in artisan baking infancy. So I’m hoping that, with a little encouragement from bakers overseas who have transformed their own communities, that Britain too can become a destination for good bread lovers the world over. We’re getting there here, with some great budding bakers that will soon excite people, but we still have a way to go to match the excellence I saw in Victoria.
a baguette from Dench, 109 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy, VIC 3065
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