I talked about this idea with Jeffrey Hamelman, a rye aficionado who worked in Germany early in his career. He suggested that I talk with a woman who had taken some baking classes from him, and who did a stint at a bakery in Berlin. Through a few e-mails and phone calls, I got the name of Weichardt Bakery, which specialized in whole grain breads made from freshly milled flour. Relying on Google Translate and the generosity of a German-speaking friend, I composed an e-mail and sent it. Luckily, the bakery manager spoke English and wrote that they were game to have me. We arranged a date—after their holiday rush. So, one chilly day in January 2011, I flew to Berlin, to learn how to make rye bread.
• • •
While I was excited about the trip, a part of me was uneasy. After all, I was visiting Germany to connect with Jewish bread—bread that came out of an eastern European culture, the Jewish portion of which was annihilated. My father had also fought in World War II (in the Pacific, not Europe), and I have friends whose relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps. While contemporary Germany is more closely associated with images such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and all-night youth techno raves, for me, having never visited before, it dredged up much darker associations. For a long time, I had never had a desire to visit Germany, and I still know people who avoid the country. So, when I did decide to go, I flew a couple of days early, because I wanted to be sure to take in a few sites and memorials. One of the first stops would be the Jewish Museum.
Now, winter is a terrific time to travel. It’s inexpensive, and the hotels and museums are relatively empty. On the transatlantic flight, you might even get a row of seats to yourself in economy. It might be gray most of the time, and the wind might bite, but it feels appropriate if you’re making the rounds of all the Holocaust-related memorials in Berlin—and there are quite a few. Taking the Berlin subway, the U-Bahn, from my hotel, I got off at Kochstraße, or Checkpoint Charlie, which is now just a gatehouse in the middle of the road. There’s no hint of the former wall at this spot. From there, I walked the several blocks down to the Jewish Museum, which is housed in a grand old mansion in the former East Berlin.
While I had planned to visit the museum for a couple of hours, I ended up spending the entire morning, making my way through the multifloor exhibit that painstakingly detailed the vast scope of the Jewish experience in Germany, which for centuries vacillated between assimilation and exclusion and led to mass extermination. One particular print from the twelfth century stood out—an illustration from the Middle Ages of Jewish bakers burning Christian babies in an oven. It was the kind of myth that caused Jews to be ousted or killed, and was ironic, considering how history turned mythology on its head. But the exhibit interestingly did not dwell on the Holocaust, which almost seemed like an exclamation point in this long historical slog.
In the modern wing of the museum, the Holocaust Tower designed by Daniel Libeskind depicts this moment architecturally. It is eerily effective—a thick door through which one enters a small angular cement room that went up and up, a window of light at the top of the unheated structure. I stood there for a few moments in the cold, the silence echoing through the narrow room, and then I pushed reassuringly through the door to reenter the museum.
After completing the tour of the exhibit and eating a pleasant lunch in the cafeteria, I walked several blocks through the neighborhood—filled with socialist-era apartment blocks, stunning pop-art wall murals—to the Typography of Terror Documentation Center, housed in the former headquarters of the Gestapo. Although revisiting this history was exhausting, I felt like I had made some peace. What was so fascinating was how ubiquitous this history was in Berlin. The memorials seemed to be everywhere. There was no escaping the past.
• • •
The next morning, I rose early, had breakfast at the hotel’s buffet, where the whole grain rye wasn’t half bad, then walked the several blocks to Weichardt Brot. It was located in Wilmersdorf just off Berliner Straße, past a school, kabob take-out joint, café, supermarket, grand apartment buildings, and all the things you’d expect in a residential neighborhood. I turned off the main street and walked up to the bakery, which occupied two shops—one where customers were already lining up for their bread and a storefront next door where stone mills ground the whole rye and wheat into flour.
Heinz Weichardt, who trained as a pastry chef, founded the bakery with his wife, Mucke, in the early 1980s. He runs the business from a tiny, cramped office at the back of the shop. The couple were passionate about whole grain baking and biodynamic farming, a subset of organic agriculture founded in Germany which is much more prevalent in Europe than in the United States. Now, there are mystical aspects to biodynamic farming—which involves planting by lunar cycles and preparing nutrient sprays for fields and compost piles—but the upshot was that the grains they bought were of high quality. Since they viewed the rye and wheat as vital and nutritious, they believed the flour should be ground on the stone mills the same day the loaves were baked.
This is a debatable point among bakers, since white flour, at least, benefits from oxidation that occurs during aging, helping gluten to strengthen. But Weichardt and other bakers I’ve come across argued that freshly ground whole grains were the richest nutritionally, a point which is borne out by the science. Also, given the breads they were making, gluten strength wasn’t an issue. Freshly milled flour also has an unmistakable taste and smell, reminiscent of a field of freshly cut hay, which you’d notice if you ever walked through Weichardt’s milling room. Most of their breads were also naturally leavened, risen with Backferment, a sourdough culture popular in Germany and produced with biodynamic ingredients.
Stone mills at Weichardt Bakery
Dirk Eimer, the English-speaking manager of the bakery, had told me to come at 8:30 A.M., after the second shift of the day had started. The store had row upon row of wooden shelves bursting with the day’s bread, all of them dark whole grain loaves, some covered with sesame, sunflower, or caraway seeds. I approached the harried woman working the counter, but at the last minute, forgot the German phrases I had practiced. The poor woman was at a loss to understand what I wanted, especially with other customers waiting in line. So, I left and returned to the hotel, where I looked up the phrases I needed, and came back. With my remedial German, I was finally able to tell her why I was there. She immediately showed me into a floury baking room where Karl, Freddy, and Klaus, with whom I would spend the next several days, were busy shaping loaves. Eimer, who looked to be in his thirties and was the only one dressed in street clothes, walked in and said, “You’re late!” When I explained what had happened, he laughed and said, “Ah, you need to learn German.”
Indeed. One of the repeated challenges of this project was learning, observing, and absorbing lessons without the benefit of a common language. The Weichardts, for example, spoke hardly a word of English, so I was dependent on Dirk to translate for me. But, as I’ve observed before, bakers are not the most voluble or expressive characters I’ve met, nor does a spoken explanation really match the lesson you get by observing and then plunging in with your hands.
After I changed into my baker’s whites, I watched the three work quietly. The rye dough was dark and grainy, nothing like wheat flour. Freddy, a young woman just out of baking school, turned to me and said, “Here, do you want to try?” and she flung a piece of dough to me across the counter. The technique worked like this: Freddy would spread a generous amount of whole grain flour across the butcher block work surface and then pick up a piece of dough that Klaus had weighed on a scale. Using her left hand as a guide, she rolled it around with her right hand, so that it barely touched the counter. Every now and again she swept her hand through the coarse flour, so that the loaf wouldn’t stick. When the dough formed into a ball, she placed both palms on top, gave it a roll, back and forth, so that it turned into a fat log. Then she picked it up and placed it in one of the steel loaf pans on a shelf. It took maybe fifteen seconds.
Trying to mimi
c the movements, I picked up the dough she had thrown my way, but the shaping technique was so unfamiliar I was immediately in over my head. The loaf stuck to the counter, my hands became full of dough, and the impossibly loose, gooey, grainy mass was doing anything but forming into a neat ball.
Freddy stopped and watched me.
“What, you do not know how to do this?”
“Well, that’s why I came . . . to learn.”
She didn’t roll her eyes, but then, she didn’t have to. She just went back to work.
I sat out a few rounds as they dumped more and more dough on the counter. Karl, who was in his late fifties, worked with an economy of motion, as if he had been doing this a long time, and shaped two loaves at a time, one in each hand. He also spoke perfect English. So, while I was standing around watching, he pulled me aside and asked me to brush the bread pans with melted butter, “but not too much.” All I could think was, “This is why I flew to Berlin, to grease bread pans?” But then, I wasn’t doing anything else.
With that task done, the bakers quickly filled the pans with the rye dough, covered them with a thin sheet of plastic, left them to rise, and then went on to make more. Now Karl had me jump back into the fray, and working quite slowly, he showed me how to manipulate the dough. After several tries, I got it. The loose mass formed into a ball and I kept enough coarse flour underneath to keep it from sticking. The key was constant movement. If you stopped for a second, or if you were deliberate and considered, it wouldn’t work. The dough would stick. You had to work quickly. Plus, I had to leave behind everything I had ever learned about shaping, since it all applied to wheat dough, not rye.
Three types of rye loaves
The loaves I formed that day weren’t perfect, but Karl reassured me that they were okay. The dough would spread out and fill the pan as it rose, doubling in size, and all the imperfections would be gone by the time they were ready for the oven. He was right. Thirty minutes later, this incredibly fast-rising dough reached just under the brim of the bread pans and we loaded them—four pans welded together, so that they weighed twenty pounds or more—into the hot oven, dousing them with steam. They baked at a relatively high temperature of 550˚F (290˚C) for about twenty minutes, then Karl removed them with thick oven gloves and shoved them onto another level of the deck oven where it was 390˚F (200˚C), where they continued baking for another forty minutes or so. When they were dark and toasty smelling, he took them out of the ovens and dumped the loaves out of the bread pans. Then he grabbed a long steel wand off the wall and blasted the top of the loaves with hot steam, causing the crust to shine and toppings, like cumin, sunflower or sesame seeds, to better adhere to the surface. Putting on a pair of thick gloves, I helped move the loaves to a wooden drying rack.
This went on all morning until the six-foot-tall bread rack was full. There was Roggenweizenbrot, which was a favorite of mine and literally translates as rye-wheat-bread; Ganzkornbrot, a whole grain loaf with Schrot, or cracked rye; Kräuterbrot, a rye with cumin, fennel, coriander, and nettle; Kümmelbrot, which was plastered with caraway seeds; Vierkornbrot, with rye, wheat, oats, and barley; and many other loaves. One of the last ryes we made was a giant 2 kilogram (4.4 pound) Weichardt “Special,” with rye and wheat, which was hand-formed rather than risen in a loaf pan and included flour made from leftover bread. This day-old bread was cut up, dried in a low oven for an hour or more, ground up and then mixed into the dough. (Jewish bakers used a similar technique, known as altrus, soaking the leftover bread in water for the next day’s dough because “nothing was wasted,” according to Inside the Jewish Bakery.) This adds a deeply satisfying rich taste to an incredibly dark loaf, which is why it was called the Special.
At the end of the morning, we had finished baking the pan loaves, but we were still steaming ahead. We moved on to enriched doughs made with butter that we braided into Zöpfe, which look similar to challah. I hadn’t done much braiding previously, so Karl taught me a three-strand braid made into a kind of cone-shaped loaf, and then a six-strand braided loaf. After a couple of days braiding dozens of loaves, the work felt automatic, as if my hands were leading me along. If I thought too much about it, though, I would inevitably screw up (which is what happened, of course, once I got home). Finally, we shaped this same dough into hundreds of Kinderbröten, or small rolls which the bakery gave away to children visiting the shop after school.
Despite all you hear about Europeans and their relaxed working hours, I found the pace just shy of brutal. After the first day, I started to arrive at 6:30 A.M. and hit the ground running. No one in the bakery even took a lunch break, though at one point Karl sliced up a rye, showing me the under-counter refrigerator where I could find a bit of cheese or sausage. There wasn’t even a place to sit down (which made me painfully aware of how accustomed I was to sitting all day) so I just grazed while standing up. When one task was done, we moved on to another, and that went on until the day was over. No wonder most of the bakers were in their twenties or thirties. The work was grueling, especially for someone who usually baked, at most, a few loaves a day, not hundreds.
“It’s really hard,” Karl admitted. “I can’t do it every day, or if I did I wouldn’t have time for anything else.” In the evening, he played jazz bass, so he worked the last shift of the day which began at 8:30 A.M. But that meant he also had the main task of cleaning up after everyone else. At fifty-seven, he was on his knees with a hand broom carefully sweeping flour out of every crack and crevice. I swept, too, with a broom, but it was clear I wasn’t getting every crumb off the floor. So later, I also got down on my hands and knees. It was kind of humbling, this sweeping and scraping of hardened bits of dough off the floor. But then, I’d said I wanted to work in a bakery. This came with the territory.
Karl, with sweeping silver hair and a warm smile, told me he grew up in Austria and never wanted to be a baker, but his stepmother pushed him to do it because that way he would always have something to eat. “Given what she’d known during the war, it seemed like the best choice,” he said. He didn’t like the work as a young man—he couldn’t go out with friends at night—but it offered a way to leave home, since bakers would give him a room, often board, too. So he apprenticed around Austria and Germany, ending up in Berlin in the 1970s, which then, as now, had a vibrant youth culture. He’d take months off from work and hitchhike through Turkey and Afghanistan, a popular path at the time, which often led to the ashrams in India. “Afghanistan was a beautiful place then,” he said wistfully. “And the hashish was very good.” He finally met up with Heinz and Mucke Weichardt a few years after they opened their bakery and has been with them ever since.
Heinz Weichardt (left) and Karl Steffelbauer in front of the oven
In a photo I took, Heinz and Karl are sitting in front of the oven, staring straight into the camera. “My old friend!” Karl said, when I showed him the picture. For Karl, it seemed, baking was second nature; just one part of his life.
• • •
One afternoon, I stayed a bit later than usual because Karl was mixing up the Backferment for the night shift, which would arrive around midnight. They made new batches of this starter from a package of granules about once every six months, then fed the sourdough twice a day. Sekowa, the German company that makes Backferment, mixes together organic wheat, corn, chickpeas, and honey, ferments the substance, and then dries the leaven in granules and sells it in packages. It favors mild-tasting lactic acid and is quite popular among German bakers of organic breads. Home bakers can also buy it in natural food stores.
At Weichardt, the starter was incredibly active, though that might have been due to the freshly ground rye, which has an excess of both fermentable sugars (rye exceeds wheat in this regard) and amylase enzymes (which you’ll recall convert starch into sugar). In fact, I’ve found that freshly ground whole grain flour is like high-octane fuel for sourdough, which is why I add it to my starter when it appears a little weak. The stuff perks right up. In any case, when Karl m
ixed up the starter in the afternoon for the coming night shift, he dumped two premeasured bags of freshly ground whole grain rye and wheat into the mixer, perhaps ten kilos (twenty-two pounds) in total, added three big buckets of water, and then a small pitcher of starter. I was skeptical this small amount of starter would ferment such a large batch of flour, but he assured me it was enough. The ingredients were mixed together, covered with a loose plastic sheet, and then left to ferment in the giant steel mixing trough for about eight hours, for the bakers who worked through the night.
The night crew then baked breads with this leaven and mixed more Backferment for the morning shift, which I got to see when I arrived. The rye-wheat mixture was thick and full of porous holes, like a sponge. It also had a sweet, grassy aroma, not at all acidic or alcoholic. We added more rye flour and wheat to the leaven to make the final dough, though in this case the word “flour” might be a bit misleading. Much of it was quite grainy, so that it appeared more like coarse whole grain breakfast cereal. We added water and salt and then turned on the mixer. This was a single-arm mixer, with the steel arm bent at the elbow. The arm would sweep down into the dough, grabbing some of mixture as it rose up, then letting it fall and flop over on itself. Compared with the most mixers I’ve seen, it was incredibly slow. If you took a spatula, or your hand, and slowly mixed a batter by raising and lowering your arm, the result would be much the same.
Weichardt Bakery’s recipe book
Seeing this process was an important lesson, for I realized that the mixer was very gently incorporating the ingredients, rather than developing gluten strength, as with wheat flour. The porridge-like dough slowly combined into a loose, grainy mass with hardly any springy elasticity. After twenty minutes or so in the mixer, the dough held together in a cohesive mass, but really didn’t look too different from the way it began. I realized I had to stop thinking about gluten when working with rye. Yet the curious thing about rye is that it does turn into bread. It does rise and it does get holes, even if small ones. The question I had was, how?
In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey Page 19