Time at The Open Bakery: 20 years
Magic ingredient: air
Secret element in the mix: Salt
Jo greets me with a warm, laughing smile. Her white hair peeps out from beneath a blue and white striped head wrap. We are in the biscuit kitchen, below the workshop floor, in what is like a corridor crowded with a collection of fridges, freezers and chrome worktops. Her eyes are clear blue and seem to see beyond me and the confines of this space.
I’ve had lots of different roles here. Now my role is actually called Jo’s kitchen. I make jams, chutneys, piccalilli, granola. Lots of different biscuits – and it changes seasonally. Also Eccles cakes. I try and use up leftovers as well, so that we minimise our waste.
I used to work in the Real Patisserie at the Trafalgar Street branch.
When Justin (the owner) decided to set up his own shop, I came here with a pastry chef from the Western Road branch. And I did everything…the sandwiches, the quiches, the pies the salads and the soups. It was horrendous the first couple of weeks, it really was! And it was quite entertaining, because we would even slice the bread by hand. My daughter was working in the shop. It was mad. Justin was there and there were literally four of us most of the time in total, doing everything.”
Justin’s brother went to learn in France. He went to school in France and married a French woman. And he came back and opened a tiny little shop in Trafalgar Street. Tiny. And lived upstairs. Where they had two children. Now he sells to a lot of the restaurants. But we’re an offshoot… of that. We became independent because we wanted to do different products. They were consolidating the products, and we were thinking ‘we want to have the creative freedom to bring other things in.’ We opened just before Justin’s oldest daughter was born and she is going to be 15 in October.
The truth is, I’m really a savoury chef.
I’ve worked in restaurants, that’s my thing. So, weighing and measuring is not easy for me. But it’s fun experimenting with recipes and seeing what people like, and it’s fun working out what to make for people.Everyone says, ‘Jo makes the macarons. I do now, but I’m finding it very hard – it’s so different from savoury. You can rescue just about anything in savoury, and you can hardly rescue anything in patisserie. It’s totally unforgiving. If you make a mistake, you mostly have to throw it away. It’s really exacting because it’s science. Whereas savoury food is more emotional- it’s about sustaining people. This is academic…. Anything with sugar is kind of academic. It’s following a very precise formula , and if you deviate from that formula, it will fail…. But the whole pastry kitchen is pretty much like that. If you deviate, if you get the temperature wrong,.. and with macaroons, the weather’s wet they won’t work. So you have you have to be aware of what the weather is doing. As well as the phase of the moon. They’re a bit more lively in a full moon. They rise more.It’s a hidden language. And you have to learn it. And you really only learn it through experience… And also you have to have the will. You really have to be involved and you have to mind. You can feel it in the product.
I think you can feel in our products that we really mind.
I mean, we’ve been open for 15 years – products haven’t dropped in quality. They have always been the same. It’s very rare, but we don’t have the same staff. I’m still here, but I’ve worked in all the different departments. I think that’s why we’ve got this good product. It’s because we all actually mind. Yes, we make the same thing every day, but each day we’re making it with the same level of interest and a sense of discovery and wonder. Every single time we make it we’re making it properly. Because in a way it’s sort of meditation for us. It means a lot to us to do that.
It’s alchemy. Because if you look at it – if you put all the ingrediants
for a croissant down on the table, you could never understand that you could make something so… extraordinary. Because actually the one ingredient you can’t see, is air – and that’s a vital part of it. That’s the magical part, isn’t it? You’re bringing in different elements, but air is quite an important part of what we do.
I do spend a spend a sad amount of time researching and I have a very ridiculous amount of cookery books.
I’ve culled them and I still have at least 200. I love to read cookery books. I never follow them, that’s why I’ve had so much trouble here, I have to follow them. But I look at them for inspiration. It is inspiring. So you know what goes together but also, after a while …you can taste things in your mind. So you don’t you don’t need to experiment by putting things together, you just think about them and you know what they are going to taste like, though there are some skills involved. It’s more than intuition, it’s quite calculated.
I used to work with Amanda Powley she’s founder of Terre a Terre. I worked with her a lot and she’s an incredibly intuitive cook. So it was really inspiring working with her. I trained on the job… Most of us do. I’ve also I’ve worked with some fairly spectacular chefs here and there, who’ve inspired. There was a guy called Barney Hall from years and years ago. He went off and set up the whole organic scene in food scene in Bristol. It was wonderful to work with him. We worked in a kitchen where we were training teenage children who are excluded from school. It was a wonderful building. They worked in the kitchen, did wood work, mechanics, painting. All sorts of creative things. They had counselling sessions, including drama. It was wonderful, working with Barney. And I had to pretend I knew how to cook. I had no idea. I was very bad at it. But I do come from a family of cooks, not professional, but highly competitive domestic cooks. Yorkshire ladies.- Sorry. I spend so much time on my own in the kitchen, if anybody comes within orbit, I bore them. – It would be interesting to know why there are many people who enjoy cooking and cook well. I think there’s always something from their childhood that’s been put in there, even if it’s only a memory of a grandmother who cooked. I think there’s always something, somebody who’s done something.
It’s a huge honour actually, to work in a bakery, because people will maybe go to bed on a Friday night going ‘mmm, maybe I’ll go to the bakery in the morning’. It’s a real honour to have that as part of what you do. You know, people have got dressed on a Saturday morning to come to the bakery. They’ve got a little bubble of excitement, that is really special. And in Trafalgar Street years ago, Saturday morning used to be the dance club. Loads of men used to come in with their kids. And that made me happy to think that the mothers were being left alone at home to enjoy their tea or whatever, or have a moment.”
A bakery just brings joy, and it starts with the smell.
The smell goes right down the street. It’s wonderful. Right from the Co-op corner. It must be awful living in the flats above, though especially Easter time. That is the best smell of the whole year – the hot cross buns. It’s really difficult to describe. It’s got so much emotion in it, that’s why. It’s got the feeling of springtime, memories, of being a child at Easter, all of that is embedded in that smell. It’s powerful. It’s magical, really. The smell is so special, because that’s where the sense is carried. Although one morning – our whole fire alarm system is joined with flats upstairs, down the road and here actually. And I used to work in the pastry kitchen. I opened the oven door and all this cinnamon smoke came out from cooking cinnamon swirls and set off the smoke alarm. And I didn’t know how to get into the flats to switch it off. I had to wake up Bethan and by the time I got into the flats to turn off the alarm everybody who lived in the flats were clustered in the hallway, including a screaming baby, sobbing in somebody’s arms. It was just such a horrible thing to have done – the opposite, you know, to waking people up with enticing smells. It was 3am. I’ve done it twice. After I would put plastic glove over the sensor before I opened the door. And then I’d open the door with my heart pumping, so terrified of waking up those poor people. They got some cinnamon buns as compensation. The mum with the baby had cinnamon buns and coffee for a few days.
I think the joy of a little bakery on the corner is that you are in touch with your customers. Even down here, you know. Sometimes we see them going past with a bag. Every time I see somebody on the street with the with the bag it’s just like it’s a great feeling.. Also we try and make everything real. It’s real food there’s nothing added, nothing nasty.. That’s where the name real patisserie came from. Somebody said to me I don’t understand the new name. Open Bakery is not a real name, is it? And I said, well, nor is real patisserie, is it? You start to associate with it over time.
It’s hilarious of some of the people that we’ve had in the shop actually.
Steve Coogan. ..Dave Dimbleby used to come in a lot…We had a big table. In the middle.
He was sitting at the table and there were lots of other people around the table. He was kind of talking to everybody in that confident way that he has. And there was a queue going out of the door. There was a guy leaning on the door jam. He was obviously really annoyed, standing like that. Then he looked at the table and saw David Dimbleby and just went like that (she shrugs). And he was fine about it. Oh, I don’t miss the table. It was hard work… because it was in the way. The shop’s too small..
I’m sure the staff think I’m pretty grumpy kind of difficult person, really.
‘Cause I’m always noticing things, there’s nothing I don’t notice. I like it when it comes together. When you’ve created something that works. That’s a very satisfying feeling. Yeah the whole thing. The technique has to be it. But I think it’s ’cause I used to work at Terre a Terre, which is the strictest kitchen ever. We really quite strict about a lot of things, because you can’t make mistakes when it comes to hygiene, or when it comes to allergens.
And because I’m the old one, I guess. You can’t have a business where everyone’s the same age. It doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work if everyone is the same sex or the same sexuality. Or the same nationality. It just doesn’t work. People end up getting carried away in their sort of their niche. They just get deeper and deeper.
So that’s another important thing – that we’re all different here.
We’re all different people and we’ve all got room for each other. Justin’s pretty on to that. I mean, it should be hard working for your son-in-law. Or it’s probably harder having your mother-in-law working for you. But we seem to cope. We don’t talk about the business outside of work. We’re quite strict about that. It mustn’t consume you. It has to be part of your life, not all of it.
If you were a flavour in the mix of this place, what would you be?
“Salt” she says without hesitation. I can see why.
With that, our time is up… I climb up the metal stairs to the cookery school floor, where they are prepping golden quiches sausage rolls. I step out into the sun, back into the world of pavements and bicycles and looking out for cars swerving the corners, still caught in the buttery scent of air-filled layers of pastry.