Bourke Street Bakery The Ultimate Baking Companion

348 Pages·2009·26.72 MB·English

by  Paul Allam

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cover
also available
title
the birth of a bakery
about this book
before you begin
breads
basics & techniques
starters
sourdough
derivative breads
yeasted breads
olive oil breads
sweet pastries & tarts
basics & techniques
croissants & danishes
sweet pies
tarts
savoury pastries & pies
basics & techniques
pies & sausage rolls
tarts
cakes & biscuits
cakes & biscuits
desserts
ingredients
equipment
index
acknowledgments
copyright
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Bourke Street Bakery evolved in a beaten-up old car. Two friends talking about their
dreams and aspirations makes for a long drive. David and I spent six months driving
around Sydney looking for the perfect site. Somewhere between hours on the road
punctuated by ‘eating research breaks’, we began testing recipes. We discovered we
had similar ideas, tastes and opinions.
Our vision of the perfect bakery was small, rustic, homely and timeless; we wanted to create a bakery
people would feel comfortable in and make food that people wanted to buy every day. Most
importantly, it had to appeal to the whole community. We kept the focus on the quality of ingredients
rather than the aesthetic. We were both former chefs who had dabbled in bread and pastry. David had
more experience in pastry and I had more in bread, so the demarcation of duties was obvious.
After many false starts, we finally found the site at 633 Bourke Street in Surry Hills, Sydney.
Bourke Street Bakery is blessed with incalculable charm and character, which is only enhanced by its
positioning close to the local methadone clinic and housing commission high-rise butting up against
restaurants, artists and gentrified streets. It was the perfect site and we owe a debt to its previous
inhabitants, Crissy and J.C., for selling their space to us and allowing us to live our dream.
Our first sale was a pan au raisin and a bear claw. It was just past 7 am on Tuesday 5 July 2004.
We were not yet tired, although that would come; we just felt the fear and excitement of the unknown
and the inevitable responsibility of starting a new business. As it turned out, this was the only day we
could recall of that first six months. And so started the ‘big blur’.
David and I worked from 4 am to 9 pm every day. In the few hours we spent with our respective
partners each week, we fought constantly. Selfishly, it seemed not to matter. Each day was better than
the last, but even so it was a vicious cycle. We wanted the bakery to be a success, yet every extra sale
placed a strain to produce more. We were too paranoid to let just anyone make the product and were
also distrustful of our success. We were scared to put on more staff and pay wages, so we raged
ahead with what seemed to be a social experiment to test whether two men can happily co-exist in a
bakery seventeen hours a day.
We made it through the tough times, but one year on we were running out of space and David took
his pastry production elsewhere. So was born Bourke Street Bakery on Broadway. We produced and
swapped bread and pastry early in the morning for about a year. Both shops were booming and we
started looking for a third, bigger and more sustainable, space where we could reunite our products.
This happened in Alexandria; bread and pastry happily co-existed for two years. Then, predictably,
arguments started to occur over the mixer, scales and bench. Space in the coolroom was hot property
and rather than descend into some sort of primordial chaos, we realised it was once again time for
pastry to leave. In the summer of 2008, pastry marched out to Marrickville. The valuable extra space
allowed us to extend our range.
The growth of Bourke Street Bakery has been totally organic. We had no grand plan on that first
day. We took our time. We did it well. We stayed true to our product. We have never had marketing
or PR people involved. We have always felt that we needed to turn each person who walks through
the door into a PR machine. And to do that, we make sure the product is damn good. Simple really.
When we go to round up the people who helped us in those first days, weeks and months, it’s the
usual suspects of family and friends who deserve the most thanks. The success of Bourke Street
Bakery and the culmination of all our wonderful recipes in this book would not have been possible
without our chef friends who worked the odd day, Dave’s brother who did the carpentry work, my
sister who chose our infamous brown exterior, our wives who served and washed and smiled at us
like we were lost, our good friend Dan, who offered counsel and coffee in equal measures. My in-
laws, who probably represented half the takings on any given day, and also my parents, who made the
shelves and cushions for the shop, and would have made anything really, I only had to ask.
And, most importantly, a big thank you to all of our customers who continue to support us at Bourke
Street and beyond.
Thank you

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Baking is part science, part stoneground milling and part river-running romance. But
it’s not the romance that will keep your baking consistently good, it’s the science.
That’s not to say you should not feel a deep connection to the earth. At Bourke Street
Bakery we buy organic flour directly from a stoneground mill. If you take out our
electric deck oven and mixer from the production process, you are not far away from
how bakeries would have operated in the 16th century.
Hopefully, with good-quality ingredients and a little technique, the rest of the baking process will
take care of itself. A good pair of scales and an electric mixer are indispensable when baking. We
have tested and retested these recipes but allowances still have to be made for the equipment and
experience of each baker — not every mixer is the same; climate is a large variable in any
commercial bakery, let alone a domestic kitchen; and the oven, or more to the point, its thermostat,
can vary greatly.
If your first attempt doesn’t look exactly like the pictures in this book, don’t give up. Think about why
it didn’t turn out and you’ll have a greater chance of fixing the problem next time and becoming a
better baker. When you think you have isolated the problem, just change that one component. Try not
to change too many things at once so that ultimately you can understand the process and learn from
your mistakes. This can be a slow but necessary part of becoming a good baker and as you will
quickly discover, the results make the effort well worthwhile.