- And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough.
Bread is the type of simple, honest food
combining flour, water, and salt.
And with care, creating this
piece of food that's nourishing
to the world.
The pursuit a long time ago might've been
trying to create the perfect loaf.
The pursuit now is trying to feed a lot of people.
We think everyone should have access to good bread.
We bake about 150,000 loaves of sourdough bread each week.
We've been baking with organic grain since our first loaf
of bread in 1983, and we continue to do so today.
In my left hand, I have some of our organic wheat flour.
This does not look white, it looks yellow.
The mills that we source from are preserving all
of the vitamin rich germ that's in the kernel of wheat.
So for larger, much more industrial mills,
you're gonna strip out some of that germ
to give the product a long shelf life.
And also to give it the white appearance that a lot
of folks have come to expect.
Most of our breads are 100% sourdough,
which means there's no added yeast to them whatsoever.
So all of the leavening, all the fermentation,
comes from the sourdough.
We are managing five different sourdoughs every day
that then go into tens of thousands of loaves
of bread every day
and it takes the best baking team, I'd say in the country,
if not the world, to do that work every day.
And at the heart of that baking team is our senior
production manager, Juan Hernandez.
We have our whole wheat levain, our stiff white levain,
our rye sourdough, our biga,
and then our liquid levain, which is sort
of our core workhorse sourdough
that we use in different combinations
to create our different sourdough breads.
- There are naturally occurring
enzymes on the outside
of the wheat that when you mix with water
and give a warm environment, will start fermenting.
Mixing is when you incorporate the liquid
ingredients and the solid ingredients
and develop strength in the dough.
This is our mixing station
and right now Anna is working on a mix
of our whole wheat sourdough.
We have wheat flour,
whole wheat flour,
and whole rye flour.
The first phase, we are combining the flour with most,
but not all, of the water in what we call an autolyse.
And this is a traditional artisan technique.
We've already incorporated the flour and most of the water,
and now it's resting while
that water hydrates into the flour.
And this dough right now,
like we would describe this in baking terms
as a really shaggy dough, it will easily pull apart
- After the 15 minute autolyse, we then do
what we call a final mix where we're adding sourdough, salt,
then we add the final dose of water.
What we wanna do is push hydration to the very limit
and we'll really develop the dough
and go from what is essentially a paste
to an extensible, stretchy dough.
And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough.
This dough is gonna spend the next number of hours
in these 25 pound bins.
If we just let that 800 pound piece
of dough start fermenting, you'd have
different fermentation happening in the center.
That allows them to go through the first bulk phase
of fermentation evenly.
Baking bread is the hard work in all the ways.
We're supported by a team of about 250.
Every supervisor at every station
is constantly making adjustments
to accommodate the dough.
Their sensory experience of
visually looking at the sourdough,
smelling the sourdough,
touching the sourdough, and knowing it's ready.
- Each piece is cut and then
it registers the weight up here.
Then the chain here, it rolls it into a torpedo.
- We have two people catching.
We wanna put the seam up
so when it gets dumped out at the ovens,
the seam is on the bottom.
- The loaf shape goes into our fermentation baskets.
We need the structure for the dough to sustain itself
over 12 hours.
We've got three
different retarding chambers.
A lot of bakeries will use these machines
to speed up the fermentation process to proof the bread.
We use these machines to retard
the fermentation process.
We keep all the doughs at a low temperature
with a high humidity,
and that allows the dough to very slowly rise
and it doesn't dry out with a high humidity.
You need that long fermentation time period
to develop the sourdough flavor.
And then over the course of the night,
the sourdough digested starch and sugar from the flour and,
in the fermentation process,
gave off carbon dioxide.
That's what creates the bubbles in the bread.
And you can see it still has some
resilience to the touch.
And so we know that the, the dough is still active.
So right now the team is what we call "scoring" the bread,
essentially putting relief cuts into the dough so
that when it expands as it hits the oven,
the bread expands on those relief points.
And it's a way that we distinguish
between the breads at the bakery.
We have an oven system from a German oven manufacturer,
Heuft. We think they're the best
in the world at creating
artisan baking systems.
Each loaf of bread is placed,
by hand, onto the pre-loading belt.
The loading machine goes to one
of the 12 decks in the oven.
It's called a thermal oil oven system.
There's a burner that heats a
fluid that's then circulated
through the base of the oven.
And that provides us
with really even, controlled heat
throughout the whole oven.
This oven can do 1,200
of our sliced sourdough breads every hour.
Each of our roughly 10 sourdoughs
has a different baking program
so we get the profile that we want.
We're moving the curve
of the temperature throughout the bake.
The steam is allowing the product to expand
before the crust sort of sets all the little pockets
that have formed from fermentation.
All the little pockets of carbon dioxide are
being baked into place.
What we look for when the bread comes out is we
want even coloration.
The deep brown and reds
that we get in the crust are the caramelization of starches
that form during the fermentation process.
So as soon as this rack is full,
it's gonna get moved into one
of our climate controlled cooling rooms.
The bread is in this room for about four hours
before it's sliced,
and we maintain a very clean environment in this room,
and that's one of the ways that we give a long shelf life
to our bread without using mold inhibitors,
which are in most commercially bought breads.
Our bread is distributed around the northeast.
The furthest point south that you'll find
our product is in the D.C. area
and the furthest point north is in the Boston area.
And so each and every day we are doing our job of baking,
slicing, delivering fresh bread.
We don't want it to be an exclusive good.
We think everyone should have access to good bread.
So we just launched, with one of our partners,
a compostable plastic bag for one of our breads.
There's more work to do within the supply chain
to make the compostable bag readily available,
but we are the first to bring it to market.
And so this has been years of work to get to this point.
We've got a QR code here that gives these instructions
to use this bag as a liner for your compost
and then deposit it into New York's
curbside compost program.
We make tens of thousands of loaves
of sourdough bread every day in an effort
to help feed the world.
And now we're gonna go to our original location
in Boiceville.
It's very hands-on work
where we're making bread in much smaller numbers,
just doing our part to feed the community.
My father founded the company 40 years ago in 1983 in an
old busted up one car garage on Route 28
in Boiceville, New York.
At the heart of that business are two beautiful
wood-fired brick ovens that are not just a piece
of bread alone history, but I feel like they're a piece
of cultural history.
There are very few active wood-fired ovens of this style
that are still in use, even in Paris.
So Andre LeFort,
the multi-generation French oven Mason,
when my father convinced him to travel to the US
to build the oven, said, "If I'm gonna travel all the way
to the US, I might as well build two."
We'll get about 24 loaves on the belt, so a total
of 96 in each side of the oven.
So you've got the fire box down here.
This is where we build the fire using scrap wood from
local lumber yards.
The flames shoot through this big piece
of steel called the gueulard.
And to heat the ovens,
we rotate the gueulard at five different points
to create even heat.
Bakeries can play a vital role in a community.
Even as the business has grown, we've sort
of doubled down on having a bakery presence in our
local communities.
We renovated that original location.
Tore down everything except for
the original brick ovens.
We built, what we believe, is the country's first carbon
neutral bakery.
We electrified not just a few things,
but everything in the building
and then put 600 kilowatts of solar on the property
to provide net the needs of the building.
We provide breads, pastries,
and foods for our three cafes around the Hudson Valley
in Boiceville, Woodstock, and Rhinebeck.
- Okay, so Mike's right now about
to take out the cast iron gueulard.
It is extremely hot and heavy.
So we're gonna fill this pot up with water
and that'll add some steam to the oven as we're baking.
So this is our overnight levain
and it has been proofing for 30 hours.
We're gonna score our bread.
This is the Miche Boule.
This is our second overnight bread,
which has also been fermenting for about 30 hours.
- The commitment to people and planet is a core part of
how we believe we're gonna be successful as a business.
But not only do I think
that growth in a responsible way is possible,
but for our business we view the responsible work
as foundational to our growth.
- Man, Mike, these came out real nice.
- There's a, like, from my life experience,
there's just a like a
comforting purity to the smell.
It's something that has been always been a part of my life
and that just gives me a sense of comfort and pride.
The experience that I can still viscerally remember
is taking a warm loaf of bread
and then I'd eat the inside out.
I could just, like, hollow out a loaf of bread.
No matter where you go in the world,
there is usually a bakery.
The sense of humanity is almost like intertwined
with the sense of a bakery
because it's something that you find
everywhere around the world.
And I can go to any baking culture
and share a common language,
even if we're making different bread.
It's no longer about the perfect loaf.
It's about bringing this experience to
a lot more people.