Time at The Open Bakery: 7 years
Most versatile ingredient: sugar
Secret element in the mix: Lemon
It’s just after 7am when I meet Airam in their knotted red headscarf and blue-grey apron. A large smile stretches across their face and their cheeks have a cherry bloom. They have just arrived on shift. Normally cycling in, they tell me, but today they took the bus and the roads were jammed. We’re in the kitchen below the shop floor at the Open Bakery. I’m struck by the number of fridges in such a small space and the expanse of clear chrome surfaces. While we talk, Leigh who’s been on the night shift since 3am, is piping smooth crème pat into pastry cases, ready for the plump fresh raspberries and blueberries that have just arrived from a local greengrocer.
I like to work with food. I like to work with people, and this is a small place. We do everything here. I come from a restaurant background in pastry. Even if it’s the same volume of work it’s a different pace of work here. You’re not chasing service. You’re not doing everything for the job on the day. You have prep shift; you can do preparations in advance. Today I’m doing croissants. It’s going to be croissants for the week – well, not the whole week, probably just the next two or three days.
Some people know they want to do straight away. I took the long way. I studied Media in Spain, then life happened, and I ended up in Brighton. I always worked in kitchens whilst I was studying, because I do like this… I mean really, to get some raw things, then suddenly you have a meal and then someone eats it and they’re happy. That’s nice. If people enjoy the food, that’s an enjoyment – feeding people what they like.
My first job was in a restaurant. They were looking for a pastry chef and I said, “Well I don’t have the skills, but I can learn. I’m a quick learner.” So I learned on the job. I was very lucky; we had a French sous-chef at the time. And he knew a lot of pastry. He was high-end, and he taught me a lot. We did really fancy and creative things. So I learned on the spot a lot of techniques which some people take forever to even get to see. We did a lot of molecular kitchen, – when you deconstruct something – and jellification. It was fun to learn. It’s completely different to here, which is more organic. You’re enhancing the ingredients through the presentation.
My day usually starts by 7. I book in and get a coffee, because it’s early and I need a bit of fuel. I check the order book, to see what is coming through for the week. We have a book upstairs with the special orders for things like cakes. I check that to see if someone is asking for something I need to be aware of, so that I can organise what I’m prepping. This week there is a lot of chocolate cake, so I need more chocolate for all the orders. Then, it depends who’s working on the day – so I get a prep list and check what we have around, what we’re short of and what needs to be done. We have things we do on certain days; it makes it easier to organise. If I start at 7, I normally finish at 3, 3.30pm – it depends on the day and if someone’s on holiday. There can be 4-5 staff on, but we’re not usually all here together at the same time, because of the shifts. Normally the kitchen is empty between 6pm and 3am. Upstairs, the bakers start earlier, I think at 12 midnight. On Friday and Saturday, they start at 9pm, because it’s busy. Every other day it’s midnight. It’s a weird week.
Tuesdays is croissants and pain aux raisins day. Today we’re doing 28 kilos of croissants. No, it’s more than that. (They get out a calculator.) It’s 43kg flour, actually. If it was only croissants, it would be about 400-430 croissants, enough for 3 days. We supply our shop in Queen’s Park. We have a van in some markets. One Saturday a month is Arundel, then we have Henfield on Fridays and markets in East Grinstead and Goring. So that’s work!
Today we put all the croissants and pain aux raisins into prove, so they grow. Come 3am, they start baking. You prep in the daytime, and it gets baked at night. Croissants are really satisfying to make. There are more processes. It takes 1 ½ days from the start to you eating it in the morning.
I like when it’s a change of season, because we change products, and we start playing with new things. At the moment we are doing some experimentation with rhubarb. We have a seasonal schedule, made over the years, but we also make some modifications, just to keep it interesting. We’re working on a different cheesecake now, too. Also, because it’s a seasonal thing, we do éclairs. Next month, we’ll probably, start to do the gourmandise again – it’s like an éclair with patisserie, and fresh fruit and whipped cream. When it’s wintertime we do Paris Brest – it’s like hazelnuts and praline and sugar – it’s richer, more filling, more wintery. We do sticky buns in winter as well and pumpkin pie in the Autumn. I like to teach people – we have someone who started in July, so every season now is new for him.
We have many different types of patisseries: Croissants, almond croissants, almond pain au chocolat, pain aux raisins, pain au chocolat, cinnamon rolls, Danishes, bretons, (delicious, a kind of croissant and a bomb at the same time!) A croissant dough that is also laminated with sugar – there’s a lot of sugar and butter in that pecan roll that you buy – that’s what makes it delicious! We do cheese straws. We have cakes – chocolate croquant, raspberry and passionfruit mousse, tiramisu, hazelnut squares, fruit tarts, almond bites – they are like fragipan. Now we have the banana, chocolate and pecan ones. That was the idea of one of our co-workers. He said, it would be delicious to do this. We said, yes, it would. We did a trial – and we said, yes, we like it, we’re going to start doing it.
What’s the most challenging part of baking? – they repeat the question, pondering. In the store I had been mesmerised by the layered mousse slices. Oh, I can make them in half an hour. It’s the croissants that take longer – there are more processes. One of the challenges is – because we make so many things – being aware of what you actually need. Because there are a lot of components. If you are doing certain things – like the mousse-based cakes – there are steps you have to go through. You need to make the sponge, and the sponge needs to rise. And you need something else. Lemon tarts… Pastry cases…It’s a lot of organisation. Mostly the hardest bit is starting, because you are on a time schedule, the shop opens at 7. Not everything needs to be on at 7, but certain things do. And certain things require preparation, so they need to be ready, we have prep them on time.
The simple things are the hardest. Things like the caramel tarts need to have a height, they need to have a thickness. If you’ve never done pastry at all, it’s hard to get them right. Consistency is one of the things we try to achieve. You don’t want someone to get the best one!
Nothing is more versatile than sugar. It’s really funny how you can mix the same
ingredients and get something different. You have 4 ingredients for something like a bread or a pastry: water, flour, yeast and salt. But you play with it and can create so many different varieties. You add sugar and then you have croissants. You can add sugar to so many things and it changes. We have so many glazes – we have the chocolate mirror glaze for the croquant, we have the fruit glaze for the raspberry and passionfruit, we have raspberry glaze for the framboise bavarois. We have a blueberry glaze for the blueberry bavarois, we have fondants – we have a chocolate and a coffee éclair, with a coffee and a chocolate glaze… then we have a clear glaze, that’s just sugar and pectin.
We are wizards that play with alchemy. I like to learn how things react. “Oh, this is causing that… so it’s not going to be as good”. You use the same flour and suddenly you have a batch that was harvested at a different time of year, and that affects the quality of the flour, and then your croissants aren’t right, so then you have to play around. I know for some things it has to be a chemical process – why some things do the things they do – others you cannot know.
I never watch ‘Bake Off’ – I can’t. I love films in restaurants – I like to see how they picture food in movies. But it has to be something that is nice and relaxing. I watched a Spanish series called The Bear that triggered me. It was so realistic and so stressful. All the time I worked in a restaurant I was under stress. There is a movie about cooking I really like, because it’s not really about cooking, it’s about what happens when people cook. It’s called ‘Chef’. It’s about a chef who gets a food truck and does all the food prep and has his son around – it’s nice, and at the same time, you see the food and you see them cook.
Some people in the industry think about food all the time. It’s my passion, but I don’t think about it all the time. It’s a job I like, and I do it to the best of my capacity. I like playing with things – alchemy –, that’s what I teach “this is a way and there are more ways”. I think cooking is the only time you can say ‘play with your food’.
If I was a flavour in the mix at The Open Bakery, I’d be a lemon. Yes, I think – sunny, with a zest for life, unassuming, essential.
We have chatted for about 40 minutes. Airam has started a to do list for the day. Two new pâtissiers have arrived and aproned up. More dough is being taken out of the overnight storage and transformed into cinnamon filled swirls. It’s time to leave them all to their magic.