Weaver Street Bread Bakers

Hillsborough, NC

We often hear about customers who stumble into Weaver Street Market—maybe visiting family or recently moved to town—and are shocked at the quality and variety of breads sold.  They say, “Do you know how unusual this is?” or “This bread’s as good as the stuff I got in New York (San Francisco, Paris, etc)!”  Only a handful of small bakeries in the United States have committed to making artisan bread.  Although there are few ingredients—flour, water, salt and sometimes yeast—the more critical ingredients are time, talent, and hard work.

What follows is an abbreviated summary of what goes on before you buy your baguette on Saturday morning:

Around 7 AM Thursday, Mauricio fills the flour hopper with ten 50-pound bags of King Arthur organic flour (locally milled at Lindley Mills to King Arthur specifications).  That afternoon, Brian measures 13.12 kilograms of this flour (about 30 pounds) into two 10-gallon buckets, with a few grams of yeast each, and leaves them in a prominent spot so the Friday bakers cannot ignore them.

Friday at 2 AM, Jose weighs out 13.12 kilograms of water at the correct temperature, adds it to the flour, and mixes each bucket by hand because this preferment (called a “poolish”) is too wet for a standard mixer.  The poolish sits out for 10 to 12 hours, until doubled in size and vivacious enough to serve as the backbone for a dough.  Friday afternoon Brian is back, and he mixes the final baguette dough by adding additional flour, water, salt and yeast.  He calculates the correct water temperature to ensure that the final dough temperature is very close to 68 degrees.  He lifts the final dough out of the mixer and portions it into tubs in amounts equal to the weight of 24 baguettes.  The dough then relaxes overnight at about 60 degrees.

Saturday morning at 2 AM, Jose and Rob divide the dough and pre-shape each loaf: a couple of quick folds to form a short cylinder.  These pre-shapes rest and warm up for 1½ hours.  Final French shaping is an “all hands on deck” activity that involves 4 to 5 people.  After shaping, each loaf is placed on a “couche” (a sheet of linen that holds the dough while it proofs).  By 5:30 AM, the loaves are ready for the oven.  With a helper transferring them from their couches, Pablo scores each baguette with a razor and loads the baguettes into a 4-level Italian deck oven with steam tube circulation, reinforced cement decks and electronic controls (list price, only $72,000!).

By 6:30 AM the loaves are baked and cool enough to pack.  John tracks the number of baguettes delivered to each location, using a daily production printout.  One hundred baguettes go to the three Weaver Street Markets stores, Panzanella Restaurant and two wholesale accounts.  Our driver, Alex, loads the stacks of lugs and delivers them between 7:00 AM and 7:30 AM, just before the stores open.  Later on Saturday, a second batch of French is mixed, scaled, shaped and baked—including about 100 more baguettes.  But that’s another story.