Articles and Broadcasts
On The Bread Line
American-born Ron Uhrig’s love of medieval history brought him often to Europe, and he and his British wife decided to make Britain their home in 2001. After two years in different Sussex bakeries, it was time to branch out on his own and the search for the right location began. Historic Arundel provided the answer and in June 2003, Ron took over a minuscule disused bakery and shop, tucked away at the end of a first-floor passageway in a shopping arcade. Less than nine months later, he has established a second retail outlet in nearby Barnham and a burgeoning catering business, while his small fleet of vans is dashing around the area, delivering sandwiches, hot quiches and sausage rolls, cakes and pastries to local offices, nurseries and industrial estates, and supplying restaurants, delicatessens, pubs, factory canteens and farmshops with his artisan, hand-made bread and baked goods.
Having trained as a chef in the United States, Ron had been cooking in restaurant kitchens for six years before his passion for bread finally came to the fore and changed his life. He was based in South Florida at the time, running the pâtisserie section of a gourmet restaurant chain. The bread was bought in, and he became increasingly frustrated by its mediocre quality. He felt that it should be made in-house, but the restaurant kitchens were too small. The solution: if the company were to set up its own bakery, it could supply both its own and other restaurants direct. His employers loved the idea, and although his original culinary training had included baking, he was urged to go on a paid sabbatical and undertake a specialist course. His research led him to Daniel Leadert in the beautiful Catskills mountains outside New York, and he spent the next two years enjoying the company of elks and bears and studying the art of baking with the artisan bread moghul and renowned author of “Bread Alone”. Dan became his mentor and it was natural that, when Ron finally established his own bakery, he should christen it “Bread Alone”, after Dan’s book.
Unusually for a bakery, Bread Alone does not come alive until 9am when Ron and his team arrive, turn on the ovens and get going. This baker does not believe in overnight baking and the traditionally unsociable hours of his trade, with the working day starting virtually in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, his own working day is long, hot and arduous; but it is also creative, gregarious and fun: the little shop in Arundel is a personal, interactive environment, with a steady stream of customers throughout the day and well into the evening. Anybody calling in to pick up a warm loaf of fragrant, new bread can also watch the next batch getting under way: the bakers are in full view, separated from the shop by nothing more than a small partition, happily chatting and waiting on the clientèle, describing the breads and pastries, offering advice and tastings, slicing a loaf to order, and boogieing to the sound of Elvis Presley and Dave Brubeck!
The “production sheet” which Ron posts on the board every morning lists the baking for the day. It changes regularly, with daily specials reflecting the seasons, the weather and, more particularly, the baker’s fancy. The first task is to get the pâtisserie under way, while the bread which has been proving overnight goes into the oven. There might be ethereally light and flaky cheese straws, 20cms long; croissants, cream doughnuts, scones, gingerbread men and American brownies. The triple chocolate cake is beautifully moist, with a fudgy crust, while the white chocolate and raspberry cake, made with Belgian white chocolate, has a light and creamy texture. Lemon drizzle cake, cherry and walnut cake, marble cake, winter blueberry cake all star in turn. On a particularly cold morning recently, the bakers felt that something warming and cheering was called for, and experimented with a combination of chili and chocolate: the result was chocolate chili muffins – palate-tingling, comforting, and guaranteed to produce an internal glow!
It is usually late morning before the seven or eight basic bread doughs are put together and mixed; some will be used to produce the daily organic wholemeal, white and granary; the rest will be flavoured in different ways on different days – sun-dried tomato, olive and rosemary, jalapeño pepper and Cheddar cheese, walnut and raisin, or whatever Ron has thought up; it is then shaped by hand into cobs and crowns, rolls and loaves.
But Ron’s great favourite is his pain levain, an ancient, naturally leavened bread which takes three days to make and keeps for a week. It is chewy and crusty, rustic and satisfying, with a delicious mellow tang: this comes from the sourdough starter, a dynamic, living organism, requiring tender loving care and careful feeding – Ron laughingly calls it an ‘eating machine’, gobbling up proteins and sugars, water and oxygen. Capricious and strong-willed, pain levain refuses to be hurried and will only perform in its own good time. If the weather is cold, the dough may be sluggish and slow to rise. In warmer weather, it needs to be curbed, controlled and reined in. Whatever the conditions, it will never be quite the same twice – each batch will have its own particular character.
It was the historic origins of bread which first kindled Ron’s interest and passion. His research revealed that bread had changed little over the millennia: traditional breadmaking had always relied on fermentation, on a culture of wild yeasts and microorganisms as a leaven, and therefore climate, environment and seasons all influenced the final flavour and character of a local bread. Bakers were intuitive artisans, who understood their starter and dough and were deeply in tune with them. Everything changed with the arrival of commercial yeast, refined flour and factory-made bread. The old traditions were discarded in favour of modernisation and mass-production, of uniform loaves which had little taste and texture but rose identically and reliably. However, determined artisan bakers like Ron Uhrig are reviving timeless baking methods and offering us real bread to nourish body and soul.
So what does the future hold? Increasing health awareness is leading to a more knowledgeable and discerning public, and here Ron is in his element as he has spent considerable time studying the relationship between our health and what we eat. His flours are organic, his goods totally natural and free from additives, chemicals, preservatives and any other horrors which often lurk in commercial breads. The growing market for wheat/gluten-free and diabetic bread and pastries has encouraged him to experiment and develop his own specialty line for customers who visit his bakery looking for an answer to their allergies and health challenges. At the same time, the small domestic-sized kitchen upstairs is under pressure: it is already used to cook roast beef, pork and chicken for the 250 sandwiches which the bakery makes every weekday (no pre-packed, sliced supermarket stuff here!) and it is now more and more in demand for the small outside catering business which provides affordable, imaginative food for weddings, buffet lunches, office functions and private parties. Will he expand and establish more retail outlets? Perhaps, but his fear is that the bigger the operation becomes, the less personal, dynamic and unique it will be, and the bread will suffer. He is first and foremost a craftsman and a baker, producing hand-made, hand-shaped artisan bread which, once tasted, is never forgotten.
