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
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