Food

Rick Dahms

Essential Baking Company's William Leaman led this year's winning team at the World Baking Cup in France.

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Bread Biology
Local formulas for great bread. By Laura Cassidy

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If you didn't live through it, it's hard to believe that there was a time when handmade, hearth-baked breads just weren't available in Seattle. No crackly crusted loaves of olive bread, no rounds of sour white, not even much in the way of a baguette. Call them the dark days of bread; that's how longtime Seattle food industry folks remember them. We had become a nation whose notion of bread meant bland, gluey white stuff—presliced, prepackaged, mass produced, and meant to stay fresh for weeks. Twenty years ago, if you wanted a freshly baked, hand-shaped European-style country loaf to serve with pasta, well, you probably had to make it yourself.

Fast-forward to the present. We're living in what Gina Piccolino, executive director of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, calls a "hotbed of artisan bread making"—complete with our own world-champion baker: Essential Baking Company's William Leaman, who led this year's winning team at the World Baking Cup in France, beating the French at their own game. As we speak, Leaman is preparing to vie for yet another world title. On July 6 and 7, he and his teammates will compete at the National Pastry Team Championship in Phoenix; if they win, they'll represent the United States at the World Pastry Team Championship.

The rise of bread baking in Seattle tells us something about the city's emergence as a haven for culinary craftspeople and its arrival on the national food scene. The story begins in the late '80s, when a micro-movement of pioneering bread bakers, a teenager with an epiphany, and a climate and culture perfect for baking unwittingly conspired to make the dark days of bread a thing of the past.

Artisan Breads, Not Wells

(Rick Dahms)

When Gwen Bassetti opened Grand Central Bakery in 1989, she and her crew of bakers—then headed by Leslie Mackie, who now owns Macrina Bakery and Cafe—joined a handful of Seattle bakers who were quietly persisting with mostly French-style breads. Although this small faction of bakers was practicing a careful craft, no one called the bread "artisan" at the time. Bassetti remembers that it wasn't until years later at a national meeting of the Bread Bakers Guild—a trade organization that works to promote, support, and educate bakers and bakeries in the United States—that the term was agreed upon. She recalls Julia Child, "who was then entering her dotage," straightening herself up and announcing that in her day, "artisanal" referred to wells drilled into the earth to tap water. At that time, most of the country didn't even know it was missing the breads and cheeses that would eventually be described in this manner.

Italian-born early Microsoftie Ciro Pasciuto knew what he was missing, though. He started La Panzanella the same year that Bassetti opened Grand Central because he couldn't find any bread that reminded him of the thick-crusted, irregularly shaped loaves that were made in virtually every kitchen in his hometown of Gaeta.

A few years earlier, Steve Sullivan had opened Acme Bakery in Berkeley, Calif., after becoming inspired in the kitchen of Alice Waters' seminal Chez Panisse. "What has now been called the bread revolution happened almost universally across the country at the same time," says Bassetti. Although she says she "didn't think [she] had a hold of what would be a big craze," Seattle food lore credits her with the local sea change.

In the beginning, education was as important as baking. Grand Central's first customers complained that the crust was burned, or that the relatively dry texture of the chemical-free loaves tasted stale. Eventually, the local press and then national food industry magazines began to help inform communities about what it was they were eating.

Despite the early learning curve, the market for rustic and old-world breads is now huge. Local baguette and specialty bread baker A la Francaise was purchased by Sara Lee Bakery in 1999; Grand Central bakes as many as 6,000 loaves of bread per day in Seattle alone (and operates in Portland as well); and Fred Meyer and Safeway advertise their own "artisan bread" lines. At Jack in the Box, you can order a cheeseburger on ciabatta. As mass marketed as old-world breads now are, and as much as some of the early pioneers have progressed, it would be easy to lose sight of what it means to say that something is artisanal if Seattle weren't so rich with truly artist-crafted, purely made breads.

Here, loaves are hand-shaped by mindful bakers, from small bakeries like La Boulangerie, now owned and operated by Vietnamese immigrant Xon Danh Luong, where just one man makes every loaf of savory herb campagne bread and each flaky, buttery croissant—and sells almost all of it, too (he employs only part-time counter help on holidays and some weekends)—to Macrina, where the cafe culture is as noteworthy as the supremely tender and earthy rustic potato bread that Leslie Mackie is well known for. Touching the living dough, knowing it like they know any other living, changing, valued thing, and worrying over it—sensing the nuances of each loaf and making minor adjustments—this is the fundamental action of bread makers.