no. 116: really sharp pencils

An interview with the folks at Balthazar

Last week’s interview with Jeffrey Hamelman was half of a pair. This is its mate, a conversation with Paula Oland and B. Young of Balthazar Bakery, also from April 2019. Back to new material next issue, but these read better together.

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The Balthazar bakery is located in Englewood, New Jersey. It’s 10 miles from midtown Manhattan, and 13 miles from its original home in a basement underneath the Balthazar bistro on Spring Street. Today they are one of the largest artisanal bakeries in New York, if not the United States, supplying hundreds of restaurants and cafes, as well as supermarkets throughout NYC. As A.J. Liebling would have said, they are better than anyone bigger, and bigger than anyone better. Paula Oland and B. Young, the head bakers, have been with the bakery since 1997 and 2000 respectively. I spoke to them about the role of machines in an artisan profession, carbohydrates at breakfast, and buying flour by the tanker-load.

Except for the captions, this whole piece is essentially direct quotes from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and coherence.

We started in the basement under Balthazar bistro in 1997, and moved to this facility in 2000. We had one four-deck oven, one spiral mixer, one small sheeter, and no proofer, so so the bread was just proofing at whatever temperature the basement was at, and of course the more pressure we put on that room the hotter it got. When we moved, we were maybe 30 people, now we’re 180. In terms of the amount we produce, we’re at least 20 times the size we were then, because there’s more mechanization and more economies of scale. We were doing wholesale almost from the get-go. Dean & DeLuca wanted to sell the bread, Jean-Georges wanted to serve the bread, and then Keith opened Pastis, so we had a lot of bread going to Pastis…

We run 15 delivery routes at night, but only one in the daytime, because it’s just so hard to get around. The daytime route just delivers fresh bread to restaurants for dinner service — Balthazar Bistro, of course, and also the places that only do dinner and therefore don’t need early deliveries. We’re doing maybe 650-700 deliveries every night between 1am and 6am, mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but we also have trucks going up to Westchester and down the Jersey shore. And when I say this it sounds like a lot, but even just in New York, you have places that are a lot bigger. Tom Cat is bigger for sure, and Fresh Direct probably has a bakery that makes this one look tiny. There’s scale and there’s scale.

Even at our size, there are really only 2 mills we can buy our main white flours from, because we get them by the tanker-load. That immediately excludes all the small, mom and pop mills, and limits you to dealing with someone like General Mills or ConAgra. But one thing I like about the aesthetic here is that we don’t feel limited to those two white flours, we bake with I think 6 other white flours in addition to the two main ones. We get 3 or 4 whole wheat flours, 3 or 4 rye flours, probably half a dozen heirloom varieties that aren’t milled at massive scale… It really enriches our menu to be able to offer those different textures, but for the backbone of our production we need to get something that we know is reliable. One of those flours, when we bought it in 50 pound bags it behaved exactly the same as when we get it now in 50,000-pound tankers. That mill in Martin’s Creek in Pennsylvania handles enough grain that they can really blend to a standard, so our mixers don’t have to reinvent their process every week based on what’s coming in. We have to adjust seasonally, and you can usually tell when the new harvest comes in, but it’s not a train wreck where one week you’ve got flat bread because you’re getting used to the new flour.

Jose and Ramiro shifting dough into bulk bins for proofing. The big tank with the sign on it is a starter tank - essentially a fermentation vessel that keeps a rather lot of starter in an optimal state of ripeness. The pipes carry flour down from a sifter, one feeding the starter tank and the other used to load the giant mixing bowls directly. You can just about see one of these bowls behind the mixer and the bulk bin. I’ve been in smaller hot tubs.

The other piece is cost. When we buy from Maine Grains we’re willing to pay double what we might pay another supplier for what she’s offering, but it would be very difficult to pass that cost along in a general way to wholesale customers. Cost is a huge part of wholesale, even restaurants that charge $2-300 a head are working with really sharp pencils when it comes to bread. When we work with flours produced at smaller scale and heirloom grains, we’re doing it primarily for retail, where we get a better margin and direct response, people coming in and asking specifically for the loaves made with Red Fife, for instance.

This is their pastry production for a normal Tuesday. The left hand columns are planned counts, the right hand column is pieces actually shaped.

When we started the business was really focused on bread, but we’ve seen such growth in the viennoiserie business it’s more like 50/50 now. I think it’s partly that people are just more willing to eat carbs at breakfast. You know, even people who’ve stopped eating bread at the dinner table, when they wake up in the morning, they still just really want that hit of carbohydrates at breakfast.

There’s a ton of handwork that goes into it, and we’re well beyond the scale where mechanizing all this would make sense, but we’re doing it by hand anyway. The sheeters, you can actually program them, tell them the product and set the number of passes and the resting time between passes and the final thickness you want, and they will just go. There are machines that will do the shaping,  but we couldn’t fit one in here. I mean, there are machines where you put butter and flour in at one end and get croissants out the other, but then this wouldn’t be a bakery anymore.

Salvador and his team and some of the 2100 almond croissants they’ll be shaping today. Below, Carlos packs the last of the day’s apple braids, and rolls of croissant dough, fresh off the sheeter and about to be cut.

When we add equipment, we’re really doing it to relieve the physical stress on the bakers’ bodies, or add things that make the product better somehow.

These dividers came from a company in Japan. They make these dough dividers that are meant to handle literally any kind of dough you can make — bread, noodles, you name it. We thought long and hard about these. They’re not as gentle as when you work really carefully by hand, but with the amount we were doing, people were really going at the dough hard and just flinging it down the line at the shapers because we had to put out so much bread. The shapers also had to start with a differently shaped portion for every loaf and that slowed them down, and eventually we just realized that this was actually better for the dough.

One of the two Rheon dough dividers, seen from the far end of the shaping table - the blue stripe of the conveyor belt leads up to it. Dough goes in the hopper at the top and emerges where the shapers are waiting, and then on to where other shapers load the shaped loaves into baskets. The grey gantry in the background, to the right of the divider, is an electric lift that dumps full bulk bins of dough (probably a good 40 pounds or so) into the hopper.

We changed our ovens out two years ago. We used to have three four-deck gas-fired ovens in here, and we replaced them with this one, a single 12-deck oven that’s heated with thermal oil from a remote heat exchanger.

The new oven and loader. Santiago is placing a loaf on the edge of a conveyor belt which will ferry the loaf onto a loader. The loader is the big gantry with “HEUFT” printed on the top right. It’s the same size as the deck of the oven, so that it can load or unload an entire deck at once. It takes up the entire space between the oven and the grating, which is there because you don’t want people walking under this thing. Santiago, in turn, is standing about 5’ in front of the grating. The oven itself is the thing with the numbered doors.

When we had the old gas-fired ovens, it was just so beautiful to watch the bakers working in here. Everything was loaded with a setter and unloaded with a hand peel, and these guys would just be moving around each other with such purpose and grace. Now we have this thing. It loads and unloads an entire deck at once, and we don’t touch the oven anymore. And the beauty of this oven is that baking is so much safer now, and so much more inclusive. Baking was just so hard on the bakers’ bodies. You couldn’t work in here unless you were young and tall and male. The wear and tear and repetition were a real concern, and one baker tore his rotator cuff. When we got an extern from the CIA who was a 90 pound woman, or someone my age, there was no way for us to put them in here. They just wouldn’t be able to do the work safely if they could do it at all. Melvin there, he couldn’t reach deck 4, and he was in here and he worked as the horse, the guy who got on top of the setter, and he was going to fall on his back one day, but we literally couldn’t do without someone doing that job. Now these guys can keep baking into their 50s if they want to.  

That’s Melvin. He’s about 5’2”. He’s stencilling loaves with flour before scoring them, and they’ll come out like this. Behind him is the staging area where they store finished bread and pastry until it’s loaded into the vans. It’s the size of a basketball court, and when they’re done with the day’s bake, every square inch of it will be covered 6’ deep in bread.

And that’s important to us because we’re all getting older. We have a lot of people who’ve been here ten or fifteen years. They bring their siblings or spouses in, and we have a few parents working here with their adult children. We want people to be able to continue baking here as long as they want to.

What the machines take out of the process is individuality and variation and flexibility. Every baker has their own preferences about how to bake, and you could see this in the bread, just subtly. You’d have batches baked by someone who liked their baguettes really dark at the tips, batches where someone wanted them in the oven for a minute less, baguettes baked “Pedro style” or “Armando style”. From the perspective of consistency this is just amazing and invaluable, but is there less of the baker in the process now?

And thinking about something one of us said earlier about introducing more automation… "then it wouldn't be a bakery anymore." Obviously what we meant is a bakery we would recognize and understand how to move around in. We have a lot of automation, compared to the King Arthur Flour bakery, or some of the smaller places Jeffrey Hamelman was talking about, but I think if he came here he would still basically know what was going on, he would still know how to move around in here, how to make bread here. We still shape everything by hand like he was doing... So maybe the difference between a bakery and whatever you call that place with the machine where you put in butter and flour and get croissants — maybe the difference has to do with the how flexible your production team is in time. In bigger bakeries things have to happen at a certain time because that's when they need to happen. The fermentation is plotted on this inexorable curve and you need to stick to the schedule for dough A because doughs B and C are marching right behind it. We're still operating at a scale in which all the timing decisions are made by humans, and we don't need to do everything in the same order every day. As the seasons change, the mixers adjust their water temperatures to get the desired dough temperature, and it always takes a couple days to adjust to the weather. So some doughs start going faster or slower than normal, but if one dough is slow in rising because it was mixed a little cold, we divide and shape another dough first, if there's one ready, or take a coffee break. That decision is still made by the baker on the floor - it’s called calling the proof - not a production schedule. Maybe it's the decision-making, as much as the hand-work, that defines an artisan?

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The strangest bread tradition I’ve come across: Roti Buaya, Betawi crocodile bread.

And if you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!