Nels Leader is the CEO of Bread Alone, an upstate New York bakery founded by his father. Today, the bakery is committed to the idea that everyone should have access to good bread — a goal it tries to achieve by baking 150,000 loaves every week.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough.
00:03 Bread is the type of simple, honest food,
00:13 combining flour, water, and salt,
00:16 and with care, creating this piece of food
00:19 that's nourishing to the world.
00:21 The pursuit a long time ago
00:23 might have been trying to create the perfect loaf.
00:25 The pursuit now is trying to feed a lot of people.
00:29 We think everyone should have access to good bread.
00:32 We bake about 150,000 loaves of sourdough bread each week.
00:35 We've been baking with organic grain
00:46 since our first loaf of bread in 1983,
00:49 and we continue to do so today.
00:51 In my left hand, I have some of our organic wheat flour.
00:56 This does not look white.
00:58 It looks yellow.
00:59 The mills that we source from
01:01 are preserving all of the vitamin-rich germ
01:05 that's in the kernel of wheat.
01:07 So for larger, much more industrial mills,
01:10 you're gonna strip out some of that germ
01:12 to give the product a long shelf life,
01:14 and also to give it the white appearance
01:16 that a lot of folks have come to expect.
01:18 Most of our breads are 100% sourdough,
01:22 which means there's no added yeast to them whatsoever.
01:25 So all of the leavening, all the fermentation
01:27 comes from the sourdough.
01:29 We are managing five different sourdoughs every day
01:33 that then go into tens of thousands
01:36 of loaves of bread every day.
01:37 And it takes the best baking team,
01:40 I'd say in the country, if not the world,
01:41 to do that work every day.
01:43 And at the heart of that baking team
01:45 is our senior production manager, Juan Hernandez.
01:57 We have our whole wheat levain,
02:00 our stiff white levain, our rye sourdough,
02:04 our biga, and then our liquid levain,
02:06 which is sort of our core, workhorse sourdough
02:09 that we use in different combinations
02:10 to create our different sourdough breads.
02:13 (speaking in foreign language)
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03:05 There are naturally occurring enzymes
03:07 on the outside of the wheat
03:08 that when you mix with water and give a warm environment,
03:11 will start fermenting.
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03:21 (upbeat music)
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04:07 Mixing is when we incorporate the liquid ingredients
04:10 into our solid ingredients
04:12 and develop strength in the dough.
04:15 This is our mixing station.
04:16 And right now, Ana is working on a mix
04:19 of our whole wheat sourdough.
04:21 We have wheat flour, whole wheat flour,
04:24 and whole rye flour.
04:26 The first phase, we are combining the flour
04:32 with most, but not all of the water
04:34 in what we call an autolyse.
04:36 And this is a traditional artisan technique.
04:39 We've already incorporated the flour and most of the water,
04:46 and now it's resting while that water hydrates
04:48 into the flour.
04:50 And this dough right now,
04:51 like we would describe this in baking terms
04:53 as a really shaggy dough.
04:54 It will easily pull apart.
04:56 (speaking in foreign language)
05:02 (upbeat music)
05:05 After the 15 minute autolyse,
05:16 we then do what we call a final mix,
05:18 where we're adding sourdough, salt,
05:21 then we add the final dose of water.
05:23 What we wanna do is like push hydration to the very limit,
05:27 and we'll really develop the dough
05:29 and go from what is essentially a paste
05:31 to an extensible, stretchy dough.
05:33 And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough.
05:42 This dough is gonna spend the next number of hours
05:51 in these 25 pound bins.
05:58 If we just let that 800 pound piece of dough
06:02 start fermenting,
06:04 you'd have different fermentation happening in the center.
06:07 That allows them to go through the first bulk phase
06:11 of fermentation evenly.
06:13 Baking bread is the hard work in all the ways.
06:17 We're supported by a team of about 250.
06:20 Every supervisor at every station
06:22 is constantly making adjustments to accommodate the dough.
06:26 Their sensory experience of visually looking
06:29 at the sourdough, smelling the sourdough,
06:31 touching the sourdough, and knowing that it's ready.
06:34 Each piece is cut,
06:39 and then it registers the weight up here.
06:42 And then the chain here, it rolls it into a torpedo.
06:46 We have two people catching.
06:48 We wanna put the seam up,
06:50 so when it gets dumped out at the ovens,
06:53 the seam is on the bottom.
06:55 The loaf shape goes into our fermentation baskets.
07:00 We need this structure for the dough
07:01 to stay in itself over 12 hours.
07:04 We've got three different retarding chambers.
07:07 A lot of bakeries will use these machines
07:10 to speed up the fermentation process, to proof the bread.
07:14 We use these machines to retard the fermentation process.
07:18 We keep all the doughs at a low temperature
07:21 with a high humidity,
07:22 and that allows the dough to very slowly rise,
07:26 and it doesn't dry out with a high humidity.
07:28 You need that long fermentation time period
07:32 to develop the sourdough flavor.
07:34 And then over the course of the night,
07:39 the sourdough digested starch and sugar from the flour,
07:44 and in the fermentation process, gave off carbon dioxide.
07:49 That's what creates the bubbles in the bread.
07:52 And you can see it still has some resilience to the touch,
07:57 and so we know that the dough is still active.
08:00 So right now, the team is what we call scoring the bread.
08:05 It's actually putting relief cuts into the dough
08:08 so that when it expands as it hits the oven,
08:11 the bread expands on those relief points.
08:13 And it's a way that we distinguish
08:14 between the breads at the bakery.
08:16 We have an oven system
08:20 from a German oven manufacturer, Hoift.
08:22 We think they're the best in the world
08:23 at creating artisan baking systems.
08:26 Each loaf of bread is placed by hand
08:28 onto the preloading belt.
08:29 The loading machine goes to one of the 12 decks
08:32 in the oven.
08:34 It's called a thermal oil oven system.
08:36 There's a burner that heats a fluid
08:38 that's then circulated through the base of the oven,
08:43 and that provides us with really even controlled heat
08:46 throughout the whole oven.
08:49 This oven can do 1,200
08:51 of our sliced sourdough breads every hour.
08:55 Each of our roughly 10 sourdoughs
08:59 has a different baking program,
09:00 so we get the profile that we want.
09:03 We're moving the curve of the temperature
09:05 throughout the bake.
09:06 Steam is allowing the product to expand
09:12 before the crust sort of sets.
09:14 All the little pockets that have formed from fermentation,
09:17 all the little pockets of carbon dioxide,
09:19 are being baked into place.
09:21 What we look for when the bread comes out
09:25 is we want even coloration.
09:27 The deep brown and reds that we get in the crust
09:32 are the caramelization of starches
09:33 that form during the fermentation process.
09:36 So as soon as this rack is full,
09:39 it's gonna get moved into one of our
09:41 climate-controlled cooling rooms.
09:47 The bread is in this room for about four hours
09:50 before it's sliced,
09:51 and we maintain a very clean environment in this room,
09:54 and that's one of the ways that we give
09:57 a long shelf life to our bread
09:59 without using mold inhibitors,
10:01 which are on most commercially bought breads.
10:03 Our bread is distributed around the Northeast.
10:10 The furthest point South that you'll find our product
10:12 is in the D.C. area,
10:14 and the furthest point North is in the Boston area.
10:16 And so each and every day,
10:18 we are doing our job of baking, slicing,
10:21 delivering fresh bread.
10:23 We don't want it to be an exclusive good.
10:26 We think everyone should have access to good bread.
10:29 So we just launched, with one of our partners,
10:36 a compostable plastic bag for one of our breads.
10:40 There's more work to do within the supply chain
10:42 to make the compostable bag readily available,
10:44 but we are the first to bring it to market.
10:46 And so this has been years of work to get to this point.
10:49 We've got a QR code here that gives these instructions
10:52 to use this bag as a liner for your compost,
10:56 and then deposit it into New York's
10:57 curbside compost program.
10:59 We make tens of thousands of loaves of sourdough bread
11:03 every day in an effort to help feed the world.
11:07 And now we're gonna go to our original location
11:09 in Boyceville.
11:10 It's very hands-on work,
11:12 where we're making bread in much smaller numbers,
11:15 just doing our part to feed the community.
11:17 My father founded the company 40 years ago in 1983
11:21 in an old, busted-up one-car garage
11:24 on Route 28 in Boyceville, New York.
11:26 At the heart of that business
11:28 are two beautiful wood-fired brick ovens
11:32 that are not just a piece of bread-alone history,
11:35 but I feel like they're a piece of cultural history.
11:38 There are very few active wood-fired ovens of this style
11:45 that are still in use, even in Paris.
11:47 So Andre Lefort, the multi-generation French oven mason,
11:51 when my father convinced him to travel to the US
11:54 to build the oven, said,
11:55 "If I'm gonna travel all the way to the US,
11:58 "I might as well build two."
11:59 We'll get about 24 loaves on the belt,
12:04 so a total of 96 in each side of the oven.
12:08 So you've got the firebox down here.
12:11 This is where we build the fire
12:12 using scrap wood from local lumber yards.
12:16 The flames shoot through this big piece of steel
12:19 called the guillard, and to heat the ovens,
12:21 we rotate the guillard at five different points
12:25 to create even heat.
12:27 Bakeries can play a vital role in a community.
12:35 Even as the business has grown,
12:36 we've sort of doubled down on having a bakery presence
12:39 in our local communities.
12:42 We renovated that original location.
12:45 Torn and everything, except for the original brick ovens,
12:47 we built what we believe
12:48 is the country's first carbon-neutral bakery.
12:52 We electrified not just a few things,
12:55 but everything in the building,
12:58 and then put 600 kilowatts of solar on the property
13:01 to provide net the needs of the building.
13:04 We provide breads, pastries, and foods
13:06 for our three cafes around the Hudson Valley
13:09 in Boyceville, Woodstock, and Rhinebeck.
13:12 - Okay, so Mike's right now
13:13 about to take out the cast-iron guillard.
13:16 It is extremely hot and heavy.
13:19 So we're gonna fill this pot up with water,
13:21 and that'll add some steam to the oven as we're baking.
13:25 So this is our overnight Levant,
13:28 and it has been proofing for 30 hours.
13:31 We're gonna score our bread.
13:38 This is the Miche Boule.
13:40 This is our second overnight bread,
13:42 which has also been fermenting for about 30 hours.
13:45 - The commitment to people and planet
13:48 is a core part of how we believe
13:50 we're gonna be successful as a business.
13:52 Not only do I think that growth
13:54 in a responsible way is possible,
13:56 but for our business, we view the response work
13:59 as foundational to our growth.
14:02 - Man, Mike, these came out real nice.
14:05 - There's a, like, from my life experience,
14:07 there's just a comforting purity to the smell.
14:11 It's something that has always been a part of my life,
14:14 and that just gives me a sense of comfort and pride.
14:18 The experience that I can still viscerally remember
14:21 is taking a warm loaf of bread,
14:24 and then I'd eat the inside out.
14:25 I could just hollow out a loaf of bread.
14:28 No matter where you go in the world,
14:29 there's usually a bakery.
14:31 The sense of humanity is almost intertwined
14:33 with the sense of a bakery,
14:35 because it's something that you find
14:36 everywhere around the world.
14:37 And I can go to any baking culture
14:40 and, like, share a common language,
14:41 even if we're making different bread.
14:44 It's no longer about the perfect loaf.
14:46 It's about bringing this experience to a lot more people.
14:49 (upbeat music)
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