Before going in, you wash and gown up, don shoe-covers and hair-cap. This isn’t an ICU or operating theatre but Bretzel’s state-of-the-art bakery in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. The contrast is striking between breadmaking as an ancient and basic human activity and the precision and science behind baking high-quality artisan bread in quantity.
When engineer William Despard switched careers in December 2000 and bought the historic Bretzel Bakery in Dublin’s Portobello, it started a new era for the business. Bread-making has been taking place there since some time in the late 1800s when a Russian-Jewish immigrant began serving the community in Dublin 8′s Little Jerusalem. Last weekend Bretzel made its latest leap, taking over Arbutus Breads in Cork after Declan and Patsy Ryan of Arbutus retired. Arbutus joining the bigger company has sentimental significance for Declan Ryan and Despard, who have long had a professional and personal relationship, with a shared passion for crafting sourdough and artisanal breads.
Slowly, over 24 years, Despard and the Bretzel team have managed quite a trick, scaling up hugely, while improving the bread. “That’s unique in the food business,” says Despard. “Very few food businesses scale at quality. I think it’s because of my engineering approach. We’re able to take some of the drudgery out of it.”
It was years before he could acquire space to build the Harold’s Cross bakery, investing over €1 million in 2012 to build a world-class bakery. “It doesn’t have draughts, it has a constant temperature. Some bakeries in rural France don’t have that luxury.” By then the original bakery and shop on Lennox Street was “absolutely bursting at the seams”. Inset in the shop’s walls today are the tiny, forged iron doors of the double-decker brick “Scotch” oven that was the cornerstone of the business for over 110 years.
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Bretzel’s managing director Dymphna O’Brien, who joined when the business expanded to Harold’s Cross, leads the way inside. We pass the giant 200-litre fermentation tank with liquid sourdough. The process of making sourdough bread is similar to at home, but originally using 10-litre buckets. When they got to needing 10 of them, Bretzel switched to the fermentation tank, costing €20,000, which stirs it hygienically. Doughs of various sizes are proving, some in custom “baskets”. Head baker Mateusz (Matti) Piwowarczyk takes a tray of baked loaves out of a large gas oven. There are trolleys of loaves of multiple sizes and shapes. It has an appropriately biblical loaves-and-fishes feeling to it, this transformation that makes bread from flour, water, salt – plus time, lots of it.
And time is what it’s all about. Despard, with long greying hair, fierce eyebrows and twinkling eyes, is slightly obsessive about long fermentation. Basically, you have to soak flour in water, allowing it to ferment enough to make the wheat more digestible, by breaking down gluten strands. Like eating seeds whole without soaking, which go straight through you taking their goodness with them, the more you ferment the flour and water, the more digestible wheat is and the more micronutrients it releases.
A lesson: “Before the Egyptians invented bread, there was only gruel. Look at the Flintstones or whatever, they ate a kind of porridge” – flour or seed and water, says Despard. “Whereas with bread, there’s magic involved. It happened by accident. Flour got damp and when they baked it, it was much more palatable and easier to digest.”
Before yeast, to make bread you had to ferment to get a rise, because fermenting allowed wild yeast to develop, leading to the rise, more flavour and ease of digestion. As fermenting improved and with high-protein flour, you trapped little bubbles, the gas the bacteria created, which made lighter bread.
Despard talks about how “the rise is really fragile”. While Real Bread Ireland is debating the merits of establishing our own designation for sourdough, the French standards pertain: bread is described as sourdough if it has less than 0.2 per cent bakers’ yeast (yeast you buy in a block), which is one-fifth of what you’d have in a good quality French baguette (1 per cent yeast). Highly processed bread like sliced pan has about 2 or 3 per cent yeast.
“For all good bakers, the more yeast you use the lazier you are. Yeast is relatively cheap, and it covers a multitude. You should only use the amount of yeast that gets used in the process. Yeast is a catalyst, and it’s not very good for you if it’s left over in the bread. If you make bread properly you’ve no yeast left when you’re finished making it.”
Despard grins. In striving to make bread properly, using time and fermentation, “before I got as scientific as I am now about my bread, I used to give a monthly bonus to our bakers, based on how little yeast was used in the bakery”.
Bretzel’s best breads, such as its pain de maison or Le Levain sourdough, use zero bakers’ yeast.
That pain de maison is an enormous circular loaf. “I admired Poulin, the famous bakery in Paris who popularised these loaves by selling to the Hollywood stars. Theirs has a P on them, and ours has a B. It’s Bretzel’s ‘Boulin’.” It’s a 2kg loaf (“great for parties”), but they also cut it and sell it in halves and quarters, sometimes sliced. “All these little ones at the end go with charcuterie, and the ones in the middle for your weekday sandwiches.”
The reason for minimising yeast, and using long fermentation instead, is “without fermentation, you’re wasting good quality flour. The trace nutrients are locked in and aren’t bioavailable.”
Plus, long fermentation reduces the toxicity of gluten. Gluten is necessary to make nice bread as it traps the bubbles and helps the bread to rise, but it’s a toxin to the body, whether you’re gluten intolerant or not. Fermented bread is not gluten-free – but fermenting removes gluten’s toxicity.
Thus, Despard the evangelist explains, far from bread being unhealthy, it’s a very good quality carbohydrate, and “if it’s properly fermented you’ll have a much better gut health”.
The sourdough taste is just a byproduct of that long fermentation. With baking skill, you can play with tastes. “Rye flour tends to be more acidic. German rye sourdough bread nearly tastes like acid. It’s an acquired taste, like a strong craft-beer. But if you’re used to it you don’t want any of these namby-pamby San Francisco sourdoughs!”
He’s on a mission to educate, to make every ear of wheat count. Anything else is wasteful of the resource that is wheat, and not healthy. On the other hand, plant bakeries that make mass-produced, highly-processed bread add cheap fats to keep the bread soft and “jam in as much yeast as you need, throw in improvers to make sure the yeast interacts with flour, and you get white fluffy bread that has been made really quick”.
The Chorleywood bread process developed in the 1960s involved adding a chemical improver to the dough to ensure the yeast and the flour react quicker. “Instead of bread taking three to four hours minimum to make (and good quality bread always took longer), a sliced pan uses what’s called in the industry ‘no-time dough’. It needs zero time to rest, because of the added chemicals.”
He has visited plant bakeries where “the only manual intervention was adding ice from a huge icemaker to the dough, because the dough mix is so fast it overheats”.
He marvels, and not in a good way, at the ingredient list on one plant bakery’s soft “sourdough”. “They have pasteurised sourdough. But if you pasteurise it, there’s no bacterial action. They’re just getting flavour from it. It’s a sliced pan that just tastes a bit tart. That’s what I think of it as: a tart.”
He admires Andrew Whitley and the UK’s Real Bread Campaign, “doing their best to out what they call faux sourdough”. Sliced pan “is verging on ultra-processed food. I don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush. There are better ones and worse ones, and several brands may come from the one bakery.”
On the other hand, as an artisanal bakery, “we’ve been able to take the best of the French techniques, but then write our own rules” to make quality bread at scale.
Bretzel makes about 30 different doughs every night, for pastries and cakes as well as breads with different tastes and flavours. There are six different sourdoughs with slightly different recipes, from San Francisco white and brown sourdoughs to their Le Levain.
A very long sliced sourdough white loaf is most popular with the catering trade, as it allows more consistent sizes of sandwiches. “Round, boule loaf is useless for making sandwiches.” The San Francisco sourdough is most popular in shops and is the bread that won Bretzel’s first Blas na hÉireann gold medal; in 2020 its pain de maison boule won the Supreme Champion award.
The bakery’s sourdough fermentation averages between 48 and 96 hours. But it’s not all about sourdough. “Even our most humble white sliced bread, what you’d call a Vienna, would have a few hours of fermentation. That’s enough to make it a bit more digestible.”
When Despard bought Bretzel in 2000, all baking was done in the oven installed in Lennox Street in 1900, according to the title deeds. “There was one retired garda sergeant doing half a van-run of deliveries daily to the trade, just slightly more than [sold] in the shop.” These days wholesale, restaurants and sandwich-makers dominate, with the shop, full of baked treats as well as bread for locals, accounting for about 8 per cent of the business.
On a busy night, they bake 10 to 12 metric tons of bread, ranging over different sizes: that translates to the equivalent of about 20,000 boules per night.
Shortly before Covid, another big expansion involved buying Rossa Crowe’s Le Levain bakery. “We kept his processes alive as a separate dough, and respected his tradition, the way he was making bread.” And Bretzel built a third bakery, in Kilcullen, Co Kildare, with solar panels and efficient new gas ovens that recirculate the heat from the gas flue in a heat-recovery system. “It’s like having an A1 Ber rating on your oven.”
Then, wham. Covid was “a major kick in the teeth”. Just after opening it, they had to shut the brand new Kildare factory for over a year. The business managed to ride it out, with government wage subsidies and pirouetting when its trade customers all closed. “We took that large catering sliced sourdough, cut it into two and put it into retail packs”, then sold it in about 100 Dublin SuperValus, plus a sprinkling of Tescos and Dunnes.
Up to that point, “I didn’t want to deal with the multiple supermarkets. They are not pleasant to deal with. They ask for rebates and, unless you’re very strident with them, they only want to pay for what they sell and expect you to deal with their waste,” says Despard. While such retail has reduced since Covid, it has opened a new strand and the chance to “educate a huge amount of Dublin customers about what real bread tastes like”.
This month marks the start of a new era for Bretzel. Last Monday it took over fellow artisan bakery Arbutus Breads in Cork, which transferred as a going concern to Bretzel, when Arbutus’s Declan and Patsy Ryan retired.
Bretzel’s turnover will be over more than €6 million this year, while Arbutus’s is about €1.2 million to €1.4 millon, and Arbutus’s goodwill, trade and staff of 18 “will become part of the Bretzel family”, joining Bretzel’s 65, which includes the shop workers and 25 skilled bakers. Declan and Patsy Ryan took over Arbutus Lodge in 1970, winning Ireland’s first Michelin star in 1974. They sold the restaurant in 1999 and began baking sourdough.
“I’ve known Declan for 23 or 24 years. We’ve been very good friends and business colleagues,” Despard says, adding that Ryan was a bit of a father figure to him when he bought the Bretzel. “He was really generous towards me. We could have open and frank discussions about where the future of bread was going.
“Back in the dark days of the early 2000s it was all about flash brands and BMWs rather than proper sourdough. I learned a lot from him, and got confidence I was doing the right thing, concentrating on artisanal breads with good quality fermentation.”
Despard and managing director Dymphna O’Brien are “doing this with a family ethos” and their immediate plans are “to keep everything as it is in Arbutus”, but they’re confident Bretzel can share its knowledge, and that the Arbutus business and brand name will “grow further, not only in Cork but in the whole southwest of Ireland”.
O’Brien says: “Since I was made operations manager in 2013 in the Bretzel, the one thing I’ve tried to do is build a strong team around us. Now at this point, I have a super team that I’ve mentored to be in the position we’re in, to take on another bakery like Arbutus, and to see the potential.
“It has so many similarities with where Bretzel was back then. That is my thing. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle, and you get the positives and the strengths from people, and just work with them so they’re reaching their potential. That in turn benefits the bakery. That’s across the board, from the current operations manager Wieslaw [Drabik] to the office to the bakers to our head baker Mateusz. I would tap into everybody, and that’s how we make it work. It’s all about getting the best people around you and getting their best potential.”
Over the past two years, since Covid, Bretzel has become “a bona fide medium-sized company, rather than a small company”, says Despard. “That gives us the opportunity to do something like this. We can add our management nous to Arbutus without diluting the quality of their bread. The beauty of Arbutus, their recipes, everything they’re doing is really good. We can help them with the back office, and share some of our bulk techniques that actually improve the quality as well as making it more efficient.”
At the Kilcullen bakery they have developed a bakery school with Kildare and Wicklow Enterprise Board, teaching French and international baking techniques, which Despard sees as “demystifying and spreading the knowledge”. With some circularity, some French bakers join them there for work placement.
Despard is proud. “Unashamedly as an engineer and with good science I have transformed the quality of the bread in the Bretzel since I bought it. If you’ll pardon the terrible pun, it takes an engineering mind to put the culture in place to make a healthy sourdough culture.”
Looking back to the early days, “if I tried to sell the sourdough that is the mainstay of our business now, I couldn’t have sold it. Nobody would have bought it. The Irish customer wasn’t educated. They’d been dumbed down to just want white pan.
“When we first tried to set up an artisan bakers association, there were 12 people interested. In the past six or seven years there’s been about 200 new bakeries in Ireland. When I started doing this, artisan bread, not just sourdough, was probably only 2 per cent of the bread market. Now it’s probably somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent. That’s a five to 10-fold increase since 2000. Bretzel has probably had a 15-fold increase in turnover in that time.”
The Bretzel he took over wasn’t focusing on fermented bread. He describes it as back to the future: “We are baking now what the Bretzel would have been doing in the 1920s.” Whereas the culture in France is that you keep things small, he has expanded. “My passion was making bread from first principles, and to replace the sliced-pan with high-quality bread. We haven’t managed it everywhere but artisan bakeries are 10 per cent along the road, which isn’t bad from a zero start.”
