“I think that the Spanish bakery has seen more changes in the last five or ten years than in the last sixty,” says the baker and owner of Panes Creativos, Daniel Jordà, in his book Panes. The magic of Daniel Jordà (Larousse, 2023). The visibility of a trade that occurs when everyone sleeps thanks to the RRSS have given value to the effort and quality behind artisan bread. The pandemic only accentuated a trend that had already manifested itself in the hospitality industry: many restaurants choose to make their own bread.
Despite the fact that artisan workshops continue to grow to offer good bread that at one point seemed to have practically become extinct, different restaurants have decided to put in the effort that is required on a daily basis to take care of their sourdoughs, knead and bake their own bread.
“Berbena bread is sexy bread: it leaves its mark, it is tasty and healthy,” says Carlos Pérez de Rozas, chef and owner of the Berbena restaurant (Barcelona). He tells that making bread served them to offer the differential point they wanted. “It was a successful bet, because there are very few restaurants in Barcelona that make their own bread, despite the fact that it was complicated within our structure and our small premises. I remember a great anecdote with one of my best friends, former chef at Mugaritz, telling me that what we were proposing was impossible”. Nothing further: “not only was it possible, but we have been a banner of bread in restaurants in Barcelona. In part, it has been because Berbena is built like a Maslow pyramid, because from the most basic needs you can reach the peak of total pleasure, and that goes through bread, wine, coffee and cheese. The rest comes by inertia, with the music, the point of creativity, the gastronomy, the service”.
Another motivation was to break with the establishment. After working in haute cuisine restaurants where a lot of emphasis was placed on creativity, techniques, concepts, large menus and wineries and so on, Pérez de Rozas saw that both bread and coffee were relegated to ostracism. “They are the most basic food in a Mediterranean country like ours. The bread was from workshops, the coffee from capsules, and that made us lose connection with our tradition”. In this way, they insisted on vindicating the basics, with success.
They make two types of bread: a white farmhouse bread, in the style of Tartine, by baker Chad Robertson, who once again gave place to sourdough and baking techniques that have recovered their value today. “We rest in a cold room for slow fermentation, which affects its flavor and helps us in terms of organization. At 4:30 p.m. when we start work, a dough is waiting for us in the fridge to be baked for the night shift. And he is already waiting for the one that will be baked tomorrow”. In Berbena they bet on the crunchy, caramelized and toasted, which give flavor to the loaf, and that serves to dip in sauces. His other bread is rye, with seeds, more digestible, nutritious and caloric. “We call it ‘Danish bread’ and it serves as a counterpoint. It has up to seven types of seed, also made with sourdough and 100% rye flour.”
“Bread plays an essential role in Ramon’s life,” they explain from the Ramon Freixa restaurant. “He grew up with the smell of freshly baked bread from his grandparents’ bakery, in Castellfollit de Riubregós, a small town in the province of Barcelona. Later it would be his father, Josep Maria, a chef with a Michelin star, who embraced the secrets of bread and who for years, until his retirement, was in charge of making the restaurant’s bread and sending it out every day”. These same recipes are the ones that Ramon Freixa’s team prepares today in his restaurant in Madrid so that the client can savor homemade bread. In addition, bread occupies an important space in its tasting menu, since they serve a variety of breads, such as puff pastry with butter, tomato and thyme, with Mediterranean flavors and a crunchy texture.
Laura Jurado and Txisku Nuévalos (living room and kitchen, respectively), owners of the Forastera Restaurant (Valencia) began to make their own bread during the quarantine. “We decided that we weren’t that bad at it and that it could give our restaurant an identity, just like the homemade drinks, pickles and vermouth that we were already making at that time.” Daily, they prepare a focaccia with herbs, olive oil and seawater, and a loaf with bran flour, and both start with a sourdough. These homemade breads are the only ones available to the restaurant, unless some setback happens that forces them to buy. “By not using chemical yeast, the breads vary a little each day, depending on the temperature and humidity there is.” Jurado indicates that her breads have been changing when discovering a format or flour that has interested them. “For example, when we go to the Basque Country, we always bring txakinarto cornmeal so that we can make bread with it for a while.”
Ausias Signes, pastry chef at the Tatau restaurant (Huesca), literally got into flour during the months of quarantine. “I bought 3 25kg sacks of flour from the Catalan flour company Roca and made bread with them day after day, to learn”, he says. It was not the first time: working in Valencia, he had learned from a colleague and, in Madrid, before starting his shift at the restaurant, he worked for a time at the Panic bakery. “Upon arriving in Tatau, I was not convinced by the bread that was bought. They had tried to make bread, but it did not fit into their daily lives and in terms of production. As it was, I brought some of my loaves and convinced them that they were much better than what they had. And I got it! One day they told me: ‘from today, you will make bread every day’.
This brought some enmity to the pastry chef with several bakers from Huesca, who lost a customer, but it also brought more success than expected. “The bread that he made was brutally accepted and customers even began to ask for it to take home. I started making 20 kg of bread a day, which is not much compared to what an oven makes, but it is very significant in the operation of a restaurant. We had to stop making that extra bread to take away, because it was unsustainable to continue at that rate.” To this day, Tatau continues to make two types of bread for the customer who comes to the restaurant and, according to Signes, they have evolved a lot. “Above all, those adapted to the season of the year and to the day in particular, since the temperature influences the dough and we do not have a proofer.”
“On the other hand, we have gone looking for an increasingly tasty bread, with a moist crumb but not too hydration, since the large alveoli are not good for dipping in sauces.” His way of making them has also changed as he has learned more, reading books and attending talks where he knows other ways to, for example, manage sourdough and its acidification. “This knowledge helps me to make a small change every week,” says Signes, who affirms that she is clear about her client’s bread preference: “normal wheat bread, made from very good flour. Although nutritionally and in terms of baking other flours, such as rye or spelt, are very interesting, this continues to be the main choice of the majority”.
For the chef of the restaurant La Tèxtil (Barcelona), Pablo Lagrange, making his own bread is a matter of passion. “I decided to make our own bread because I am passionate about putting food on the table that has been with us throughout our lives: in them I see true luxury and that is how I understand haute cuisine, as the result of putting craftsmanship into production processes of everyday or undervalued products, such as wheat and potatoes”, he comments. In addition, he affirms that he emphasizes both the process and the product and the creativity necessary to understand them and put them on the plate.
La Tèxtil’s bread uses sourdough to make what they call ‘country bread’, with smoked cow fat and cooked at the moment the diner enters the restaurant, over a wood fire. “It is the result of accompanying my mother to the farm [la huerta], and of the fact that the people who worked in the fields shared a mate and a piece of bread made over a bonfire. Remembering that gesture, of not having much and eating that bread with bovine fat with some of its parts burned, after long days of working the fruit and the land, keep my values ??burning in the restaurant, where I can share them and share my story. And that does me good. Cooking makes us better people.
Although the number of restaurants that make their own bread does not compete with that of those who buy it, more and more chefs are deciding to take part in the recipe for the bread they will serve. This is the case of Julen Bergantiños, who orders the bread for his restaurant Islares from the Russian baker Anna, from Pan de Sábado, in Bilbao. “I can unscrupulously say that it is one of the best breads in Spain,” says the cook, who provides him with old recipes to inspire some of the breads he buys from him, such as a cider-based bread. They work with her to recover Bizkaia’s own seeds and grains for baking. Likewise, Nado (A Coruña), by Iván Domínguez, turned to Panadería Divina with an idea: to make bread with seawater. No sooner said than done, he had his ‘seafood’ bread for his restaurant. The same bakery provided O Camiño Do Inglés (Ferrol) with the bread they wanted.
