Strong-backed millenials
Biddeford is a small town in Maine, one up the coast from Kennebunkport. Like Kennebunkport, it has a fractal New England coastline and acres of beaches with sand as fine as bolted flour. The coast of Maine is the 1% to the 99% of the interior, and Kennebunkport is the 1% of the 1%, but Biddeford has never quite shared its neighbor’s stardust.
The town grew around some mills on the Saco river, and like most New England mill towns it emptied out as the mills closed. In 2009, a developer turned one of the mills into a campus of industrial chic lofts, housing artists’ studios, a microbrewery, and an ice cream place that pasteurises its own milk; an industrial engine of the new economy. That was the beginning of Biddeford’s second act as a vacation town, a younger, hipper version of its next door neighbor. The transformation is ongoing. When we visited on the first warm weekend of summer, the beaches were full and there were queues for the restaurants amidst the empty storefronts. The riverfront is a work in progress, but beach houses now sell for over a million dollars.
We came to visit our friends Kim Chaurette and Alec Rutter, who make a thousand bagels a day at Rover Bagel. Kim and Alec met at a bakery in Boston. They did their first pop-up in 2015, borrowing oven space from their employer to make pizza after hours. The pizza sold well, but it was clear that they wouldn’t be able to start a bakery in metro Boston. Living cost too much, space cost too much, the horizon felt very crowded and too close.
So they headed for the frontier.
Kim packing chili-garlic cream cheese. “It’s embarrassingly easy to guess how we make this.”
Initially they moved in with Kim’s family in Salem and shared space with a Neapolitan pizzeria, using the wood-fired oven to bake bagels in the morning while the pizzeria opened at night. Their bagels sold even better than their pizza, but Salem is effectively an outer suburb of Boston, and starting up there felt equally forbidding. Alec grew up near Biddeford, and his family, still in the area, told them there was space they could afford. The town smelled of new growth and opportunity, so they moved up from Salem in 2017.
Alec Rutter, human dough divider.
Rover Bagel now occupies a former gas station in the middle of town, on a sliver of ground where two streets merge. The metal siding is freshly painted royal blue, the color deep and plush against the tarmac. When you walk in, the first thing you see is the glass doors of the old beverage cooler, which now serves as their walk-in. Most of the doors are covered with brown paper but one remains uncovered, revealing a display of orange juice and chocolate milk, behind which are cases of butter and cream cheese, and the next day’s bagels proofing. You are undeniably in a gas station convenience store, a fossil fuel dispensary turned into a bakery that runs mostly on sweat and wood.
Tools. Basically all the tools. Bins of dough for tomorrow.
The oven would dominate the room if it weren’t tucked demurely in a corner. It came from Maine Wood Heat in Skowhegan, two hours to the north. Including installation it cost almost $40,000. The core was imported from Le Panyol in France, assembled in Skowhegan, and encased in a hulking steel shell. The steel is patinated, with the depth and color of rich earth. It feels ageless. The oven wasn’t installed so much as grafted on to the space — they had to take down a wall and rebuild the floor beneath it, so the kitchen now has an air of being built around something that wasn’t originally there.
The bagels that emerge from the massive dome are clearly inspired by Montreal’s wood-fired bagels, but are so different in character that you couldn’t say they’re the same product.* Some would argue that they’re too bread-like, but that happens to be a style I favor (accusations of heresy and apostasy may be directed to my agent). They have an open crumb and a full, complex flavor from the high-yield flour, sourdough leaven, and long fermentation.
These bagels have an airy crumb with an elastic chew, not the dense resistance of the New York classics, nor the close, soft crumb of their Montreal cousins. The crust is remarkable. With a dense dough, the boiling and baking process develops a solid crust that shatters a little when fresh. It resists till it breaks. The other bready bagels I’ve had have thin crusts with significant tensile strength, which have to be torn rather than bitten through. In both cases the crust, unlike with a loaf of good bread, doesn’t caramelize enough to have a substantially different flavor from the crumb. Rover’s bagels have thin, charred, and blistered crusts. I can bite clean through, and the experience is reminiscent of a good cornicione on Neapolitan pizza, assertive charring balanced by a dough with real presence. In case it’s not clear, I find them delicious.
Totemic pest control (actually very effective).
The char comes from the live fire — a pile of burning logs banked behind a rolled steel shield on one side of the oven. Even with the shield between the bagels and the direct radiance of the fire, the heat is uneven and the bagels require constant turning and repositioning. The oven holds 45 bagels, which bake through in about 3 minutes and ought to be moved at least twice in that time. Keeping the oven full and the bagels moving is all-consuming, acrobatic work, entirely unlike the quiet hum of the automated oven at Balthazar, with its robotic loader and the bakers standing 20’ away from the oven door.
It’s partly for this reason that Kim and Alec still do most of the actual baking. The one baker who works with them isn’t yet skilled enough to keep it running at full capacity. In a year and a half, they have not found anyone else to train. In a sense, they are privileged to work this way, and they know it. They touch every single bagel. The fire and the oven feel like close friends.
On the other hand, in the busy season Rover could sell twice or thrice as much as they now make. The Sunday we visited, it closed 90 minutes early because they sold out. Kim and Alec worry about becoming “that place where people never go because they always sell out so early.” The makeshift character that lends the space charm also makes it difficult for them to grow. Their exhaust hood is unequal to their demands, so baking fills the space with so much steam that they cannot bake when they’re open. There is only one counter. It doubles as the display for the baked goods, and all the mixing and shaping have to happen after they close. They work 12 to 14 hours a day, and when they cannot work, Rover is closed.
Working this way is beautifully honest, and claustrophobic. As much as the work might be a joy, the idea of doing this for the next twenty or thirty years, that this might be their whole future, terrifies Kim. They need to grow in order to keep what they have now, and growth feels very far out of reach.Bravery and drive got them to Biddeford, their own oven, and a thousand bagels a day, but to go further takes capital they do not have, for which no amount of hard work and ingenuity will substitute.
So our conversation steered clear of the future and all the questions it poses, to which there seem to be no good answers. Instead, we talked about the winding road that led them here, and how grateful they are for these short years of grace.
* The classic Montreal bagel is made with bleached white flour and a very slightly sweetened dough — really the only thing they have in common with Rover’s is the use of a wood-fired oven for baking, and even then most Montreal bakeries use a different style of wood-fired oven, with more separation between the fire and the baking hearth.
Bagel bakeries were a hotbed of labor militancy in the mid-20th century.
Bagel bakers renegotiated their contracts every year. And if they didn’t get what they wanted, they went on strike, plunging the city into what the Times called “bagel famine.” In December 1951, 32 out of 34 bagel bakeries closed, leaving shelves bare and sending lox sales shooting down by as much as 50 percent.
What ultimately ended the bagel baker’s union was the invention, in California(!), of a “bagel machine” — the dense dough had previously foiled attempts at mechanized handling. So when you eat a bagel, remember: you’re dancing on the grave of the last old-school foodservice union in the United States.*
* I originally wrote “the last effective foodservice union” but corrected myself because there are modern unions of hospitality and foodservice workers, some of which are undeniably doing good work, although they continue to be hamstrung by modern labor laws and internal corruption.
Vaughn pointed out that there is one really famous co-op restaurant, and it has a long history.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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