- [Evrim] We bake pastries and breads at the same time
in the double-decker wood-fired oven.
It's kind of a unique situation.
(percussive music)
- The pear ricotta croissant is one of our specials.
We take our croissant dough and we sheet it out
and shape it into what we call a diamond shape.
And after we shape it into the diamond shape
we put some ricotta cheese that we make in-house.
The ricotta cheese has honey, a little bit of salt,
and orange zest in it.
The pear is prepared by peeling all the skin off,
coring it, slicing it in half, making a dry caramel.
- This is kind of a traditional tarte tatin,
but it's just a way to stack them
in a sense that we're going to get both sides coated
and they're going to bake nice and evenly.
We've tried doing it with one person,
the extra pair of hands is actually helpful.
The pear juice starts to seep
down into the caramel and actually reduces it.
So that's the pear-a-mel.
- [Evin] And after you make the dry caramel,
bake them in the wood-fired oven
with a piece of foil on top.
- And so this is just a little egg wash.
So this is kind of like adding
a nice little natural shellac.
Okay, I'm going to pull those pears out.
Now, they've been baking in the cast iron
for nearly half an hour.
So you see how the bottom half is fully caramelized
and the top half isn't?
So we just want it to be cooked like that
all the way through.
We're going to call this pear-a-mel.
We're going to keep cooking the caramel that mixed
with the pear juice and then that'll become the glaze.
Everybody gets half a pear. (laughs)
It's pretty intense.
It's super exciting for me to see a croissant go
from the raw ingredients that we've cared for.
And so now we're just finishing them,
putting them in the oven.
And also as a baker, it's a lot
of pressure on you because this is the final stage
before it reaches the people.
Pear juice and caramel, and that's what we glaze it with.
One of my favorite seasonal croissants.
(fire crackling)
So now we're going to fire the oven.
This is all hardwoods.
Probably, you know, you'll see a lot of oak,
some cherry, some lot of different like poplars.
This is really just for soaking in the heat
in the masonry oven.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single
wood-fired retail bakery.
There's plenty that bake just their bread.
There's some that bake pastry and bread
but they're usually wholesale.
We're extremely unique.
Yeah, perhaps the only in North America that is baking
both pastries and bread out of a double-decker wood-fired
oven and open to the public.
This is our masonry wood oven built one on top of the other.
The bricks you see here, they're large tiles,
really thick and they're medium density,
meaning that they grade the brick according
to how many times you can essentially fire it
and then dunk it in cold water before it starts to dissolve.
I do top-down fires.
Top-down style is having it
so that the bottom is your heaviest wood.
Then you go medium-sized then smaller wood on top,
kindling very last.
It burns hot on top
and then creates like a convective force.
The bottom deck obviously affects the top deck
and the way you fire the bottom affects the way
the top will act.
That's right with one little match,
we have a host of delicious things.
Now that we have the fires going, they'll burn
for the next one to three hours pretty hot like this.
Then they'll break down to coals
and burn for another couple hours like that
before we close everything up,
close all the flues and let it sit like that overnight.
That'll be the baker's heat for tomorrow.
(metal door clanging)
All of our breads are 100% stone-ground flour
that we mill in house.
Since we opened 10 years ago, we've been milling.
So having fresh flour that is sourced directly
from regional farms has always been the heart of what we do
in our mission.
We got started milling because we wanted
that direct connection.
It was like, let's take the most basic ingredient
and be able to access the grains directly from farmers.
Like that is elevating the craft of baking.
So this is a variety called New East.
It kind of looks like a soft red wheat, but it's actually
a hard red wheat and it's grown in Powhatan, Virginia
by Pete Sisti, Greater Richmond Grains.
We're just loading the grain, pouring it in.
We have this nice wheel that allows us to raise
and lower the stone.
So obviously the closer the stones are together,
the finer the flour.
This is mimicking the speed of the stone.
So right now the, the grain is going through the stones
and then it's flowing into here.
And it's being separated into different fineness.
- This is the finest screen, medium,
and then the coarsest screen.
It takes about 25 minutes to mill 50 pounds.
- After the flour's done milling, we just kind of clean
out these compartments and then we'll mix
the first two compartments together.
When you smell and eat the bread of a freshly milled flour,
it's a different experience.
It really speaks to the essence of what a bread is,
'cause you know, if you're going to make a good bread
you can't hide behind much,
especially if you're only going to have three ingredients.
- So I'm just going to start our mixer.
It's an old mixer from the 1960s.
It's an Italian mixer called a diving arm mixer.
It's pretty gentle with the dough.
A lot of mixers really beat up the dough
but this one you can just tell when you're looking
at the way it's handling the dough, it's almost
as if a human being was taking their arms and mixing it.
So I really like that.
It's a very highly hydrated bread.
In the bread world, a lot of bakeries would do like 60, 70%
but we get all the way up to 90% here
and I think that's what the water does.
I mean I really do think it creates the moist interior
and then that like hard kind of crispy crust.
We do two to three mixes a day
and our batch sizes yield about 40 loaves.
So we make about 80 to a hundred loaves a day.
So it's a very small-scale bread operation.
All right, I'm pulling the dough out of the mixer.
This is definitely the most workout I'll get today.
It's the most backbreaking 'cause you're leaning over
and like pulling dough out 10 times in a row.
So it's good for your core and your back.
Pinch it.
We do shy away from saying sourdough even
though it technically is, just because a lot of people
associate sourdough with the San Francisco sourdough bread.
But we prefer a little bit less of a sour taste
and a little bit more of like a nutty taste.
We tend to just say naturally leavened.
This is our classic dough.
I'm dividing it into one-pound, four-ounce pieces,
for our flat breads, which are the first breads
we bake in the morning.
I want to create a nice round ball.
Like if I were to just put it like this
it would just kind of lay flat
and as they proof it would just be a big blob.
I pull some of the dough from the bottom
to the top and then I kind of create a little packet.
I take this side, fold it over this side
fold it over, take the top, fold it over
and then I just take the two corners.
I do that again and then I flip it
and after I divide 42 pieces of dough for the flat breads,
I'll start dividing larger-sized loaves for the loaf breads.
But our classics, we don't use an actual pan to proof it in.
We use the baskets, we just put one linen on
so we can maximize the number of baskets we put on a tray.
I pull the dough from the bottom, the sides,
I make a little packet.
But instead of taking the corners, a stitch, I do one stitch
two stitches, three stitches, and then I flip the bread over
so that the seam is running down the middle.
- So this is what the oven looks like
in the mornings, though.
It's just empty and then I'm cleaning it.
The first thing that we have to do is clear all this ash
out of the oven and get the hearth totally clean
before we start the bake.
'Cause this is yesterday's fire, today's bread.
All right, let's load some breads now.
Steam is really necessary for bread.
Basically for them to fully bake and caramelize
you need to have a moist environment.
For us, we use sheet trays with towels.
This is our whole wheat bread.
This is really the soul of the bakery
as my sister likes to say.
That's how we got started.
We didn't have any pastries or anything like that.
We were just a small bread bakery
with a subscription service called Sub Rosa.
It's called scoring the bread.
You're not just marking it for aesthetic purposes,
you're marking it so that it expands evenly in the oven.
This is the, the last step is just to bake these breads off.
They just bake in a few minutes,
like seven or eight minutes.
It's just sesame, nigella seed, and olive oil.
And then we do another one
with fresh rosemary and sea salt.
They're like freeform focaccia almost.
They're pretty common bread in Turkey
although usually they're like longer in Turkey
and they'll pull them out, stretch them out like this
and then they'll dock them with their fingernails,
like kind of in a line like that.
Something like that.
They'll make a diamond.
We don't do that, but that's, it's called tirnak pide,
it means fingernail. (laughs)
Fingernail bread, that does doesn't sound really great
to the Americans.
So we just call it pide flatbread.
- We spent many summers in Turkey
and we had grandparents stay with us
for extended periods of time.
And even though they weren't bakers by trade
there was always something on the stove top or in the oven.
And visiting Turkey and going to bakeries
or having people bring baked goods for tea time.
Tea time is a big deal in Turkey.
I definitely think that played a role.
We might not have realized it, but it helped create some
of the items on the menu and also just I think inspired us
to want to make and eat delicious food and baked goods.
- This is the fresh rosemary and sea salt
on the same dough cooked pretty much in the same way
but a little bit more of a a Spanish twist.
So this is our bread coming out.
These baked for 34 minutes.
Part of the flavor that you're getting is actually
like you're roasting grain.
If you think of baking that way,
you're looking for caramelization.
And the caramelization is where you get sweetness.
This is my favorite bread at the bakery.
There is something in a retained-heat oven like this.
There is like a character of the bread
that is different, and there is something about the way
the masonry soaks in the heat
and then the way the bread bakes in that soaked heat.
I would say it's more textural though.
It's more like the actual overall experience of the bread.
It's not like applewood-smoked barbecue,
you know where it's like a direct - it's the effect
of the whole.
Bread was the catalyst for the whole business,
- Yeah.
- and therefore the soul of the business.
But we knew that it was croissants that was going
to bring people in the door
and make for a profitable business.
- This is our sheeter, and we're going to bring it down
into the thickness that we desire.
We're going to take that and sit it, place a layer
inside the middle of this dough.
So we try to make sure to keep it very square
and even, that just helps with the final shape
of the actual paton itself.
So once you have one even layer of butter in there
we're going to take that over to the sheeter.
At the sheeter, we're basically going to open
up each side of the dough.
This allows the butter to spread more evenly and once we get
to our desired width, we're basically going to fold over.
So we're creating layers of butter here.
So each one of these has one layer
and when we fold it over, we're completing multiples.
So on this first turn we're going to have
three layers of butter and then we're going to triple that
on the second turn.
Again we do three total turns
of this dough to create all the layers that we have.
It's about, I think about 27 layers of butter itself.
And then once it reaches its desired thickness
we're basically going to cut this to the width that we want.
So we always start with the clean edge on top.
So here we have one of our patons that have been
sheeted out and cut into triangles.
This is for our plain shape.
We do multiple different types of shapes here.
This dough was made yesterday, but we're actually
going to be shaping it today and it'll be baked tomorrow.
So it's going to be a three-day process.
Anytime we're working with croissant dough,
we want to try to keep the dough as cold as possible
'cause it gets cut down to such thin pieces.
It'll start warming and proofing quickly,
and if it gets too warm, you'll actually start
to destroy the layers inside of the dough.
So inside of here there's like 27 different layers
of butter and so you wanna just try to protect those
and that's what creates the flakiness at the end of the day.
- [Evrim] Croissant is the main dough or the main item
on our menu.
But then we can take that
and do a multitude of things with it.
Because it's such a versatile dough.
We can have ham and cheese.
We can have salami and cheese, we have fig jam and cheese.
Just the amount of things you can do with the dough.
Really it's up to your imagination to create a shape
that makes sense for it.
So you'll see a lot of doing a lot of different shapes.
So the dough in every single one of the pastries
that you see right here is all croissant dough.
So you're used to seeing a croissant look like this perhaps.
Our classic croissant.
But we kind of came up with these other shapes
based on the ingredients.
For example, we used to do the ham and cheese
in a croissant that looked just like this.
But then we couldn't taste the ham and cheese.
It felt like too dense in the middle.
So we decided to go for this kind
of elongated shape and now you can kind of eat the croissant
and have ham and cheese throughout.
We're working on getting all of this
and all of this in as fast as we can
because we're opening in like 10 minutes.
Why you got to move real quick.
We try to have the croissants out
by the time we're opening.
So we don't open without having the croissants out,
first thing.
The fact that if you come in late and the croissants
are still proofing you can't force them to go faster.
You can kind of see how the croissant has this
nice little lively bounce to it,
which means it's nearing the end of its journey.
We just work hard to get everything out
as early as possible.
Now these croissants are out, we're ready to open.
(light pop music)
- [Evin] We want Sub Rosa to be a community gathering place
where people meet up with friends, family.
Where people go alone and enjoy a coffee and a book.
We want it to be a place where excellent food
and coffee is served.
I think we really wanted to create the feeling
of old world cafes, like the kind that we might come
across in Turkey or in Europe.
Slow down.
Like we want people to go into Sub Rosa
and feel like they're in a different world
for a short period of time.
(percussion music outro)