The sun is just rising and head baker Rhys Jones has been at work for several hours already.
I think I went to bed at about 10 o'clock last night and woke up at around 1.30 this
morning.
The guys get here at 2 in the morning we have three separate departments we've got the mixer,
the bread oven and the pastry oven.
The pastry oven I just finished this morning and the bread guy is almost finished
we can go watch him make some baguettes and the mixer is actually preparing the doughs
for the next day.
Not sure where he is at this point but he should almost finished as well. We start at
2am and hopefully we can get out early, that's kind of the plan here
The smell of fresh bread wafts through the bakery, but Rhys says he can't smell it anymore.
He's been working with Daily bread since it opened in 2017 and is one of the only original
staff left.
Rhys showed us what a typical early morning looks like.
And In here is our mixing team - who have their own radio - this is Ewen and Chris,
they're almost done for the day so they're starting to clean up and yea last job will
be shaping the bread for tomorrow, which we'll come back at 2 am to do. This is our mixing
machine. So 320 kilos of dough at a time maximum automatically lifts, so this bread is not
quite ready it's when what is called an autolease so we just mix it partially and then he will
put in the salt and yeast to this dough. it's allowing the flour to absorb all the water
possible so we get a good dough and it's nice and strong when it comes to shaping it.
So nothing is premixes everything is done here from scratch but we use a sourdough process
which takes about 48 hours to make one of our loaves, sourdough starter is like a it's
kind of like a pet that you feed every single day and that acts as wild yeast for our bread
to rise. Our sourdough starter here is about 6 hundred years old, it's probably the oldest
in New Zealand it's my bosses family over in germany he brought it over here, and yea
we've making some amazing bread out of it ever since.
Daily Bread in Point Chevalier used to be a bank, and they decided to keep some of the
original features.
What we did with our safe fridge is we turned it into our walk in retarder. Retarding is
the process of slowly fermenting bread overnight. So we kept the old safe door which is a real
hassle because it's super heavy. it's empty now but in a couple of hours every shelf in
this room will be loaded with about 12 loaves of bread per tray all one kilo loaves so it's
a lot of work getting this in and out.
Next we move onto the ovens.
Michael over here, he's been on the oven today it's been a big job, he's just baking some
baguettes at the moment so those ill go in at 240 degrees steam for a few minutes and
they'll come out in 18 to 20 minutes depending on where they're placed in the oven.
These are steam injected ovens we will just press on the side how many litres we want
to put on. And it's also a stone oven so stone is the best thing you want to bake on. It
just gives it a nice lift.
Rhys finished all the pastry baking earlier this morning before we arrived but he has
one kiwi favourite to throw into the oven...
We have our vegetarian chilli bean pie, our mince and cheese equivalent is a bolognese
and cheese. And then we have a roasted lamb and mint pie.
So we'll bake those for about 20-25 minutes, maybe longer just depending on how many there
are in the oven and then we'll chuck them in our pie warmer for customers, hopefully
by 7am.
Rhys says that Daily Bread in Pt Chev sell out most days, and anything that doesn't sell
gets sent to charities to feed other people.
The store opens at 7am, the smell of fresh bread and pastry luring customers in from
the street..
I asked Rhys about what it's like to wake up so early every morning...
Well now I don't have to get up at 2am as often as I used to, most of my guys still
do. On the weekend we'll actually start at midnight it's a bit rough and you never get
used to it, but as long as you have an alarm it's no worries and you learn to operate on
a bit less sleep and the thing about starting early is that you have the rest of the afternoon
to do whatever you want.
For First up Ella Stewart.