Baking has no definite end point

An interview with Jeffrey Hamelman

Jeffrey Hamelman started baking in 1976, and is still baking today. Our phone call took place in two parts, separated by a break he took to divide a batch of bread he was making with flour he'd milled in his basement. He is a certified master baker and led the US team for the 1996 Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie. He established the bakery for the King Arthur Flour Company in 1999, and was the bakery director and instructor of the professional classes in the King Arthur Baking Education Center until his retirement in 2017. His book "Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes", won the Julia Child award for Best First Cookbook when it was published in 2004, and remains one of the best books available on the subject today.

I edited this transcript for clarity.

You've been baking for a long time. How have you seen the profession evolve since you started?

I guess I've been lucky because baking has no definite end point, it's fluid, and you can keep learning. Otherwise I might not have continued in this craft as long as I have.  

I started out working for a German woman, Susanne Naegele, at Naegele Bakery in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was really very skilled and had deep, deep knowledge of her food culture. It was certainly one of the better bakeries in the country back then, simply because there were so few. Probably Acme was up and running by then, and there was Baldwin Hill in Massachusetts, but there wasn't much happening. The evolution in the last 40 years has been pretty profound.

We've come to the point in the United States where we excel, more or less, at making the kinds of breads that originated in France and Germany. In some ways, we've actually become leaders in baking because we have the freedom to pick and choose among all these different traditions, and we have so much freedom to explore. At the same time, this means we run into a lot of dead ends, experiments that don't go anywhere. So there's this mix of really excellent work that draws from a couple of specific traditions, and this creative energy that hasn't really settled out into something coherent yet.

For instance, in the last few years, there's been this almost obsessive fascination with ancient grains. I know a lot of farmers and I know wheat breeders and it's pretty clear that if you take something like Emmer the yield can be as little as 10% of wheat. Well, I don't want to be doing something that's disadvantageous to farmers. Why would I want to bake with Emmer if the farmer really has to make sacrifices so I can work with it? People say that the farmer can charge more for Emmer and that's true, but then we're making bread that's eight or ten dollars a loaf and selling bread only to people who can afford to pay that. That just seems like a direction I don't want. We should be asking how can we make really first class bread that's available to everyone, not just people who have the means to pay really quite a lot of money for it.

I think bread today is a food that's often really disconnected from its origin. We have bakeries and factories delivering bread a hundred, hundred and fifty miles away. The farmers who grow the wheat never see where their grain goes, never eat bread made from it. And the people eating the bread never meet the bakers or the farmers.

I guess in my career I made a choice that I never wanted to work at one of those kinds of places. I wanted to work in small places, places where you knew the people who were buying the bread, and they knew the baker, because I believe, I really believe, that kind of connection should exist. And I feel lucky that baking here has evolved in such a direction that I've been able to do that and have a good career.

Did you have that kind of connection at the King Arthur bakery? Can you say a bit about how that came about?

The last owners in the family, Frank Sands and his wife Brinna (King Arthur had 5 generations of family ownership), moved the company from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Vermont in the 1970s. When they began to think about retirement, and their kids didn't want to take over, they chose to sell the company to the employees, which happened in 1996. So as part of that transition there was this swell of change, and the bakery was part of that. There had never been a bakery before, it was just a flour company with a small retail store. I came along to start the bakery in 1999. I was adamant when I came on that I didn't want to be delivering bread a hundred miles away, I wanted something small. But it also had to be a complete bakery, doing everything, because of where it was and because it was part of King Arthur. So by day one, when we opened, it was ready to make a diverse array of bread, more than a dozen types, several hundred loaves and a couple thousand rolls a day. For pastry we could do 400-500 croissants and danishes a day, cakes, cookies, tarts, chocolates - right from the beginning.

By the time I left, we had 20 full time bakers - all the bakers were full time, because they were all employee-owners, and the benefits were great. Everyone got 5 weeks of paid vacation their first year, and of course you need to plan for that in scheduling. I always left a slot for student externs, because I knew how hard it was for those kids coming out of the culinary schools to find externships.

When we first started, I wanted to make sure everyone could do both pastry and bread. That didn't last –most of the bakers really didn't like it, they wanted to do either bread or pastry but not both. It's not the choice I would have made - I personally have probably spent more hours in pastry than in bread over the course of my career, even though I'm more known for bread. But even now the bakers on bread work at least one shift in each station each week, so everyone has at least one day mixing, one day shaping, and one day on the ovens. In a lot of other bakeries, you wind up doing just one thing, five shifts a week. The best baker is always on the ovens, the best shaper always shapes, and so on. It's a natural way to organize a bakery but it's also kind of lamentable in my eyes, because what good is a cog in the wheel? I don't think that's good either for the person or the bakery. The work itself should be enriching to us, even as we are enriching to the community.

For me there's something really joyous about the process of baking, where you do so much with your hands, and I think it's really important that we not lose that. Baking is very different when it's mostly being done by machine. Certain machines are better at what they do than any human can be. Mixers, sheeters, and of course the oven is essential. We got to a point where we couldn't divide by hand anymore, because we were baking so much the doughs couldn't fit on the table, so we got a hydraulic divider. But there's something sad about growing to the point where you can't shape by hand anymore - that's a line I've never crossed. We would be making hundreds and hundreds of loaves a day, and we would put four or five people around a table and have that table where the bakers can see the customers coming and buying their bread and eating. They can shape a batch of dough in 20, 30 minutes and move on to the next one and the whole time they're talking to each other and laughing. The work feels varied and everyone is working with their hands and there is a sense of connection to each other and to the customers. There is something deeply human about this whole process.

You built a bakery for one of America’s best known flour companies. Has the baker’s relationship with flour changed since you started baking?

In the last maybe 5 years, there's been a steady increase in the number of small or medium bakeries that are doing in-house milling. That's certainly the biggest change I’ve seen.

There are small mills starting around the country too. There's a cluster in Northern Washington state for instance - they're not making pure white flour, they have a couple of sifters but I think Type 65 is the whitest flour they make. Carolina Ground is doing good work. There is a wonderful and important group in Vermont called the Northern Grain Growers Association. I was the first baker member - they had farmers and grain breeders, but you need bakers to close the loop.

I remember some farmers in the group wanted to start testing different varieties of wheat, and we'd get the flour to make bread with. Some of it came in with unbelievably low protein, we were getting samples of whole wheat that had 10 or 11% protein and we didn't think you could make bread with it, but we managed it. It required skill and understanding, but we were making very good breads with grains that were low in protein but high in flavor. Wheat has not been bred for flavor for a hundred years - industrial testing is all about gluten strength and the ability to make a loaf with good volume, so these varieties that the Northern Grain Growers were interested in, they would have been called failed experiments if skilled artisan bakers didn't get involved, bakers who were able to work with flours that I would call challenging. That's what I mean by needing bakers to close the loop.

The other thing about these small regional mills is that they can control the distribution, and they know who they're selling to, whether they have the skill and sensitivity to deal with variation between batches of flour, or flours that may be harder to work with. This is important because at that level of production, they will see variation in their flour, but then they can go to the baker and say, "this batch is a little higher in ash content, you might need to adjust the dough a little." ConAgra and General Mills are selling nationwide, selling to factories, and they can't do that, so they have to produce something that is really uniform, really commoditized.

Would you prefer to see a world where smaller mills and more local distribution of grain is the norm?

I don't know that I think it's desirable. There is a dividing line between industrial bakeries and small bakeries, and when you get to be a certain size you can't easily change the process to adjust to your flour, so the flour needs to be consistent.

What we really need is a decoupling of farming and the financial market. What's happened with wheat is shameful, because the farmer doesn't see the destination for their grain. It's going across the country, or overseas, people in 3 piece suits are pricing it as a commodity. But it's inherently wrong for people unconnected with farming or baking, people who don’t actually work with grain, to dictate its price, as happened in 2008. A lot of bakeries went out of business in '08 - I guess really it was a couple of years later, maybe 2011, when wheat prices doubled and gas prices doubled at the same time, and there was really no reason for it. We didn't have a drought or failed harvests or something else happening on the farms that led to that.

No small bakery could sustain that. When you make bread, those are the main things you pay for. A lot of bakeries that were just ramping up to do wholesale business at the time and suddenly not only was their flour twice the price, the delivery cost twice as much, and it was costing more to get every ingredient in because everyone needs gas to run their delivery trucks. And if they weren't big enough to absorb that shock yet, that was often it.

Do you think there's such a thing as an ideal scale for a bakery? You started out by saying that you made a principled decision never to work in a bakery of above a certain size, yet you seem quite accepting of the fact that we have a lot of bread made in factories. After 40 years, do you find yourself wishing the baking industry was a different shape?

This is a really hard question because there are so many different models of what a bakery looks like. There are some strong-backed millennials I know who run bakeries on a subscription model. You know, a place with one or two people working there and they know exactly how many loaves of bread they need on Wednesday and bake just that and that's great. And then there are the factories and then there's everything in between, and many of these places produce really great bread.

I think the trap is getting attached to growth for growth's sake. I do believe that you need to grow simply to keep up with inflation, you need to replace equipment, you need to give your staff benefits and raises, so there are good reasons to want to grow, to need to grow, but I think a lot of people get seduced by that. When I was running my own bakery in Vermont, I would sometimes go to these conferences organized by the Bread Baker's Guild of America. I would go to the bakery and get 8 hours of work done in 6 hours, then get on a plane and land where ever the conference was and there would be a bunch of bakers in the hotel lobby or the bar, and I would look around and think, well, "I don't think he was baking today, or that guy either, or that guy" and I would start wondering who the “artisan bakers” in America were. But it's really hard to resist that pressure, to decide what you want to be, how you want to make bread, and stick with it.