Scéal in Greystones, Co Wicklow is a tale of two bakers.
Charlotte Leonard-Kane and Shane Palmer, are the self-described “steely and stubborn” people who had a dream of opening a neighbourhood bakery and managed to build one from humble beginnings first as a market stall and then from a pandemic-born hatch in Dublin 8‘s The Fumbally cafe.
Their story and ethos – slow baking processes, seasonal locally sourced produce, no shortcuts – is at the heart of their beautiful new cookbook simply called Scéal.
So what’s their Scéal? They met in culinary college in 2010 in Dublin, seated side by side in their first kitchen class, thanks to their alphabetically adjacent surnames.
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They are telling me their origin story over lunch in the dog-friendly bakery on the marina in Greystones. The impromptu meal has been hastily thrown together by Palmer from the tomatoes Leonard-Kane picked up that morning in McNally’s Farm. He serves them with Scéal’s griddled sourdough, olive oil and basil.
Leonard-Kane loves Fridays. That’s when she picks up produce from McNally’s or James Malone Berry farm, local seasonal produce that goes into their bakes, from sourdough loaves (their sesame miso loaf is a wonder) to danish pastries and kimchi claw bears, the stories of which are sprinkled through the cookbook.
The day they met in Cathal Brugha Street, Shane was chopping a brunoise of carrots and talking a mile a minute about growing up on his uncle’s carrot farm in Co Laois.
“And then he cut his finger,” laughs Leonard-Kane who grew up in Dublin learning baking from Mimi, her adored childminder. “And I made a big deal about it so Charlotte would help me,” Palmer counters with a cheeky grin. “We were best friends from day one,” his wife says.
Later, their lecturer would tell them of two jobs that were going in now closed Dublin restaurant Rustic Stone. Soon they were spending 40 hours a week in college together and another 40 working together in that restaurant’s basement kitchen.
By the time Christmas came, Leonard-Kane had confided in a friend that she was “madly in love” with Palmer who asked her out a couple of months later. They’ve barely been apart since.
In the summer of third year in college, they both travelled to England for internships. She worked at the restaurant at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, London and he had his eyes opened at famed River Cottage in Dorset.
After picking up the “life changing” Tartine cookbook in college, Palmer in particular had become obsessed with bread-making. It was inevitable that the couple would head to the sourdough mecca of San Francisco.
Shane even travelled with his sourdough starter or “mother” dried out and stored in a zip lock bag. (It’s called Geraldine after his own mother. The Tartine book advised naming the starter, or levain as they refer to it in their book, after someone you are very fond of “so you keep it alive”.)
In San Francisco, Shane landed his dream job with former head baker at Tartine, Nathan Yanko of M.H. Bread and Butter, while dessert-nerd Leonard Kane honed her pastry skills at Craftsman and Wolves. “There were farmers markets in every area,” she recalls.
“All the restaurants had these deep connections with growers and producers, and when the van came back on a Saturday from the market at the Ferry Plaza, it was just the best moment of the week. We’d never seen anything like it.”
Back home they were determined to create their own seasonally guided, locally-sourced creations selling Leonard-Kane’s Christmas puddings at markets to fund the deposit on their first tiny kitchen in Elmhurst Cottage Farm in Glasnevin.
Years selling at markets from a bigger commercial kitchen followed, then came the pandemic hatch in Fumbally when Scéal became a celebrated brand until they found their own bricks and mortar bakery site in Co Wicklow.
November 2023 was an auspicious month. Leonard-Kane gave birth to the couple’s first child, signed the book contract and the couple moved into the new premises in Greystones. They opened a few months later as she began working on the book and embracing new motherhood while he grappled with the challenges of building a bespoke bakery in what used to be retail and office space.
Leonard-Kane is pregnant with their second baby now and hoping for a less hectic maternity leave this time around.
While hiring is a challenge - good bakers are in demand like never before thanks to the nationwide resurgence of artisan bakeries - their 30 strong team is well established. Scéal has started selling wholesale and doing Friday night pizzas. Their first child Robin Mimi (named for Mimi who died suddenly a few years ago) will turn two on November 18th, the day their second baby is due.
Their book is the antithesis of all those cookbooks promising easy 30 minute recipes. In it, the couple lay out careful instructions for processes for laminated pastries and sourdough loaves that can take two or three days. “We want to explain the processes for people and also give an understanding of exactly what is involved in what’s produced at all the bakeries people are visiting now. It’s pretty much a three-day process across the board. That’s not unique to Scéal.”
The book opens as it means to go on, not shirking from the trickier aspects of baking. The first chapter is all about making croissants. And as the couple say, “there is no hiding behind a croissant”.
Viennoiserie production, they warn in the book, is famously tricky, repetitive and monotonous. At every turn, they are on a mission to demystify what to some of us can appear impossible. “Anything spread out over multiple days can be intimidating,” says Palmer. ”It does take intuition, it requires repetition and practice. It’s a hard thing to do, and I’m honest about that in the book,” says Leonard-Kane.
“It is really hard to make them at home but it’s also incredibly rewarding and nothing beats the smell of a buttery croissant coming out of the oven”.
Palmer takes up the point: “What I try to drive home in the baking workshops we do is that mistakes help you to understand the process, you learn more from your mistakes than the successes.
“And I like the life lessons of making bread, it’s a metaphor for accepting things and enjoying the process as much as the end product.”
Here are the final instructions on day three of a recipe which will yield six to eight croissants: “Decide what time you would like to enjoy your pastries, as they will need to prove first. If they are for breakfast at 8am, then set an alarm to get up at 5.30am. Remove the pastries from the refrigerator, brush lightly with egg wash and place in the oven (turned off) for the allotted prove time. This varies from pastry to pastry.”
If this paragraph rang your own internal alarm bells then this book is not for you. Meanwhile, the growing and vibrant online and IRL army of people who have woken up to the joys of slow fermentation and delayed gratification when it comes to baking - Taylor Swift is a sourdough enthusiast now - will eat it up.
Many other recipes are simpler and will not require a whole weekend to produce. Mimi’s Best Ever Bakewell Tart, for example. The Co Meath woman came to live with Leonard–Kane’s family when her brother Ben was a baby and only left when he turned 19. “She is the reason I became a pastry chef. From a very young age, she taught me to bake and cook.”
Another recipe, Granny’s home made bread, is an homage to Palmer’s Granny Mary in Co Laois who had 17 children. “She always had a giant pot of spuds on the go which she washed in this massive plastic basin stirring with a broom stick handle and then she’d empty that out and make brown bread in it using her hand like a set of measuring tools. She’d have six loaves on the go every day.”
There are cookies that take half an hour and a stunning pavlova topped with marshmallow meringue and of course Leonard-Kane’s Christmas pudding recipe passed down from a nun at Mimi’s convent school. There is a helpful section about the equipment you’ll need and step by step visual instructions to make the complex processes as straightforward as possible.
“Accepting that you might fail is a part of making something,” says Palmer. “Keep trying. Keep practising. The success is that you’re learning something, but also that you’re getting that little bit better each time.”
Recipe: Chocolate Chip and Sea Salt Cookies
Scéal by Charlotte Leonard-Kane and Shane Palmer is published by Quadrille
