Mon 6 Oct 2008
BAKING: One of Germany’s last great culinary secrets is slowly leaking out to Irish foodies, writes Derek Scally
ASK A GERMAN WHAT they miss most about home and the answer is always the same: their daily bread. German bread runs the gamut from moist, nutty Vollkorn to the dark, chewy Pumpernickel. With more than 300 varieties to choose from, you could enjoy a different kind of bread for almost every day of the year.
With that kind of choice, it’s little wonder the average German polishes off their own weight or more in bread each year, around 90kg per head.
Little is known about Germany’s centuries-old tradition of crusty goodness beyond its borders.But, like German Christmas markets and German wine, Germany’s last great secret is slowly leaking out to Irish foodies.
Small wonder: we may pride ourselves on our baking tradition, but after our batch loaf, brown soda bread and white soda bread with raisins, the list of traditional Irish bread crumbles to a halt.
For decades, the average Irish family has been stuffing themselves with what could best be described as an industrially produced bread substitute. One prominent Irish baker describes his colleagues in the trade as “not bakers but industrial engineers”.
But around the country, young food lovers are turning their backs on the bake mix and chemical “improver” and setting up their own bakeries. The National Bakery School, founded in 1935 and now part of the DIT, runs highly popular courses in bread and cake baking: for the current autumn courses, it received 600 applications for 200 places.
Leading the fightback against mediocre bread in Ireland is the head of the bakery school, Derek O’Brien. “We’re very unfortunate in Ireland because of our historical association with the British, who make the worst bread in the world,” he says.
Our early adoption of the supermarket, combined with rising city centre rents added to the pressures, he says, made it impossible for small- and medium-sized bakeries to survive.
“Irish people don’t know good bread because of what we’ve been eating since mid-1960s, and because we’ve become used to it.”
Bread has always been part of O’Brien’s life: after growing up in a family of bakers, he studied baking in Britain and Germany and now even has his own micro-bakery in his back garden.
As well as running classes in Dublin, the school sends 25 Irish students several times a year for intensive courses at a master bakery school near Heidelberg in southern Germany.
The contrast between Germany and Ireland is stark: while there are around 22,000 bakeries in Germany, around 47 per 100,000 population, Ireland has just 7 per 100,000.
The German bakeries range in size from small family-run outlets with the shop in the front and the bake house out back, to industrial bakers delivering to supermarkets.
What they share, and what Ireland lacks, are strict quality controls from the German bakers’ federation. Bakers go through strict training to earn their Meisterbrief or master craftsman diploma. Only then can they call their premises a bakery.
But, as in France and Italy, German bakeries have come under attack in recent years from “bake shops”, chain stores that take deliveries of frozen dough and heat it up with in-store ovens.
The chains launched a vicious price war and drove many traditional bakers out of business, after a lifetime of getting up at 3am to serve their customers.
But now, after years of decline, there are signs that the traditional bakeries are making a comeback. One of the younger generation is Peter Klann, owner and master-baker of the Soluna food store in Berlin.
The store, in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood, has become a place of pilgrimage where visitors are greeted with the foodies’ equivalent of incense: warm air carrying the smell of heated flour and baking bread.
Like all good bakers, Klann is passionate about his trade. His philosophy: after decades of industrial production, people are looking once more for authentic food experiences.
“For me, baking bread is alchemy: earth, fire and air,” he says. “Others play guitar or paint. With me, it’s the alchemy of food. I don’t want to just bake bread, I’m making art.”
A taste of the breads on offer shows that he isn’t kidding. Unlike Irish wheat-based breads, many of the most popular breads here are hearty rye-based varieties, baked with Sauerteig or sour-dough.
This distinctive dough is made with special wild yeast that produces lactic acid, giving the bread its distinctive sour taste.
Klann shuns chemical catalysts now prevalent in the industry and produces his sourdough the old-fashioned way, leaving it to rise for 24 hours before sliding it into the clay oven.
The true sign of quality in Klann’s breads is, as with all real German breads, they need time to mature after baking, and often taste much better a week after they have left the oven. That has helped him set up a thriving mail-order business for homesick Germans around Europe.
Like many of Germany’s new generation of bakers, he decided to go the slow-food route after becoming convinced that the very industrial production meant to save the industry in an era of rising costs, was actually turning people off bread.
“The mistake most bakers make is that they take the soul from the bread,” says Klann. “When you do that, people notice it and you can’t be too surprised when the bread is no longer in the limelight but just a support player, a carpet for cheese or whatever.”
Klann is a man on a mission, a passionate believer in bread. Derek Quinn shares his convictions and says that, even in tighter economic times, Irish people can be turned on to the health benefits of good quality bread.
“We need to educate the public that there is such a thing as good bread,” he says, “but they have to ask for it.”
© 2008 The Irish Times
This is what he looks like now