Breaking Bread with Tom Papa - Episode 13 - Ken Forkish

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Let's go to Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland, Oregon and break bread with one of my bread gurus, Ken Forkish. Ken has an amazing story and is the author of the bestselling book, 'Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast'. The breads from Ken's Artisan Bakery became an inspiration across the country and in my kitchen. Passion, bread and pizza!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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nothing else is Reese's. It's time for breaking bread with Papa. Hey! Don't you know? Hey! It's how we go. Hey! It's time for breaking bread.

with Papa. Hey, don't you know? Hey, it's also a show. Hey! Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Breaking Bread with Tom Papa. I am Tom Papa. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited about today's show.

I really highly recommend that you get yourself some bread, maybe some jam, maybe some jellies, maybe some toast with butter, maybe an artisan pizza. Because today, so lucky, we have Ken Forkish on the program with us. Who is Ken Forkish? Ken is one of my bread gurus. He is the author of Flower, Water, Salt, and Yeast, which is one of the best books on bread baking. He, I've been walking around preaching this book and sharing it with people on my YouTube

channel, on the podcast, a whole bunch of places. It's just such a well-written guide on how. how to bake bread. And I was lucky enough when I went up to perform in Portland a couple weeks ago. He is Portland-based. He has Ken's artisan pizzeria, which is the place where we met him, and Ken's bakery. Two great locations, constantly, even now during the strange pandemic times, still cranking out amazing pizza and amazing breads out of this bakery and all these other bake goods. He's just, it was a treat. Look, if you were a musician and you were excited to meet a rock star,

Ken in his flower-covered jeans next to a big firewood oven, that is one of my rock stars. I'm so excited. He was really generous. He let me come and meet him at the pizzeria before hours. He even had some pizza on the side, and it was like this great New York style, but with an artisan twist is the best way to describe it. So good.

I mean, if you're going to start off your day with breakfast and it is pizza, some of the best pizza you've had in years, that's going to make for a really good day. beautiful being in Portland, by the way. Despite what the news tries to paint of the strife within like a two block radius, the rest of Portland was so great. The food trucks, the people, the people wearing masks, being kind to each other, just a nice flow working at Helium Comedy Club for the weekend. It was all so delightful. And it really made me realize how the media can really twist things out of control for political means. This is a great, great community. I love being in that town. It was just humming along. The weather was beautiful. The people were beautiful. And to be able to

spend a little time with Ken and dig into his story. And I hope I didn't geek out too much with some of the specifics about the dough and the bread. Some of it may be a little inside baseball. But for the most part, it's just a really cool. cool story of somebody who finds a passion in their life, follows it, and has great success. So really, really, a big thank you to Ken. And now I get to share it with all of you as we break bread with Ken Forkish. All right, look at us. Oh yeah, you can't see you. You look good. I want to look good. Someday I wanted to look good. You look really good. I bathed this morning. And the mask makes it look like we were, we were.

responsible when we first met. You just got to normalize this shit. Yeah. If you normalize it, then maybe it's not that big a deal anymore. I know. That is the thing. It's like we were saying that yesterday when we traveled up here, it was, we wore it for the first time, like, all day long.

Yeah, why not? Yeah. What's the freaking harm? Right, exactly. Why not? It's so funny that Walmart just the other day was like, yeah, everybody should wear masks. Yeah, what took you so long, damn it? I know, exactly.

And then it makes headlines and now Target. and everybody else it was good. Oh, we'll do it too. But, yeah, first we had a lot of 130,000 people die. Yeah, right. And then we'll actually, maybe, maybe there's something to this. It's so crazy. Well, it's so nice to be here.

This is amazing. I'm a huge, huge fan. Thank you. There is something that happened, you know, I started baking bread when a friend of mine introduced me to what sourdose starter was, just as a science fiction kind of a thing. didn't know it existed. And I told my family about it. And my daughter, for Christmas gave me, got one started in secret. She like fed the flower and the water and got it going. That was my

Christmas present. Nice. Which I always say was my, my, uh, actually the coolest Christmas present, you know, because somebody made it. Nature had to activate. Yeah. It's not just going out and buying something off your list. No, I know. And I'll admit, I had to do some acting and act like this, I was excited to receive a bowl of goo on Christmas morning. I was, this is great. It's kind of like getting a puppy, though, because they have a lifetime responsibility. Right, exactly.

And you know what's weird about it? A friend of mine also gave me some start of the guy who taught me about baking bread from, it was through the La Brea bakery line, like apparently. And that one is pretty active, but hers is so so active and strong. It really, There's something to it.

Do you want to see mine? It's dominant. Yeah, I want to see it. Hey, Franklin. Can you bring one of those buckets of starter over here? I want you to take a whiff. Oh, God, yeah. This was mixed about 24 hours ago.

Yesterday afternoon, anyway. Right. And when it's had the lid on it, as soon as you take the lid off and you take a pop, you're going to get high. This is so cool. It's strongly alcoholic. Yeah, I can imagine. Now, is this how long have it been? had this.

So good. It's kind of sweet smelling. I love it. That's what mine is. This is the one that my daughter gave me. It smells similar. It has that, yeah. The other one, do you use wheat at all?

To start it, but this is all white flour. All white flour. We're using double O flour for the starter here. Yeah, it's for pizza. So I want the flour to be the same as in the final dough. Right. Because my one, I have, the one that my buddy had given me, I feed it with a little bit of wheat and a little bit of white.

That gives it more food for the east. Yeah, it's a lot more active. Yeah, it goes. And if it's just white flour, right? Yeah. And it turns quickly. Like, if I'm leaving it out, it's like you have to stay on top of it or else it really starts to.

Yeah, and then your bread can get a little sour. Right, right. This is going to be a weird interview because I'm just going to ping pong all over the place because I have so many things I want to say. You know, if you just laugh, I'll turn right. All right. So I started doing, that was my little history run. And your book was one of the first books that I grabbed to start going down this rabbit

hole. And I just connected with it. The beginning of your book, when you talk about your journey, which I want to ask you about and tell our listeners about, this is all leading to my first question, which is what is it about this process in baking bread that completely takes over your life? Like you talked about going to France and you would just kind of hang out and look in bakery, windows and check out how people were doing stuff. And I had this similar thing where it just, I don't know what it was about this process

that just completely devoured me. What do you think it is? I don't know, but it speaks deep. For me, originally it wasn't the process. It was the finished result. Right. So this was being in bakeries in Paris, for example, that were completely unlike bakeries here. And it was just this look, this smell, the way the products looked, you could tell that they represented a generational gift that's been going on for hundreds of years.

Right. You know, thousands depending on how you want to extrapolate. Yeah. And you realize it was a fundamental part of the culture in a way that it really isn't in the United States. States. Right. Or maybe wasn't, because now it is in certain pockets. Yeah. But in France, you know, when you find in Paris, you know, bakery on every block kind of. Yeah. Yeah, that's an exaggeration. Were you, was that just a complete new introduction into your life, or did you grow up being around anything remotely? That all sort of happened to me in the 90s. Yeah. I was in my 30s and 40s.

Where did you grow up? Hyattville, Maryland, suburban D.C. Oh, okay. And, you know, then, um, we didn't really have bakeries that we went to. We'd go to the supermarket and buy bread. Right. And every now and then, my grandfather would bring over a cake and a loaf of crusty bread. But, you know, it wasn't the same. No. So, you know, you talk about it just kind of connected with you.

And I get it. At first, I got it just by visiting bakeries. And just my eyes would open. I just wanted to stare at the stuff until they kicked me out. Right. Because I wouldn't buy it. And then as I started making it, I connected in a very different way. Right.

You know, so the cool thing now is as people start, as more people are baking at home, as a result of the coronavirus, really. Yeah. Like, who wants to go to the store unless you really have to? Right. And if you got flour at home, let's figure it out. Yeah. And what do you mean? I don't have to buy yeast.

Yeah. People were like, wait a minute. Yeah. Put a lot of pressure on the book. Yeah. Well, that's so amazing because your book, I just assumed it was on the best-seller. list on its first run because it is like one of my Bibles. And you just told me that it's only due to this pandemic that it rose on.

You know, Fowerwater Salt East published in 2012. And it started out pretty slow. Right. To the point where like it was a little over a year after the book published, Tenspeake came back to me and asked me if I wanted to write another book. And I started laughing because I worked so freaking hard on Farr Writers Salt East that I was like, man, this isn't. worth it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't mean to put myself above it because like everybody wants just to be

published, right? Sure. But there is the amount of work and the amount. I wasn't, yeah, I didn't have a national name when I published that book eight years ago. So right. I think it just, the satisfying thing is that it became popular just on its own merit. Yeah, I know. It's got, At least I like to think that way. I kind of think I'm responsible for it in some way because. I didn't know this. No, yeah. And I'm here to get my commission.

Talk about that later. But I have just been, my mantra is that we haven't been meeting, because I grew up like you did with the supermarkets and what I thought I was giving my children was good bread because it had this country kind of label on it. And it said whole wheat. And I had, and I'm like 35 ingredients. wait a minute. Yeah, and it went from mixed to out of the oven in two hours. Right, exactly.

I'm like, no, flour water, salt and yeast. Flower water, salt and yeast. That has been the thing I've just been beating on. It's crazy. You ever look at the packaging on commercial bread?

I mean, just referenced it. It's insane. The whole idea is so that it'll last on the shelf for a long time. Right. Still be sellable. It's insane. You want to buy bread the day it was baked.

No, I know. It's, I literally have been out there going flower, water, salt, and yeast, flat water, salt, me. So I think there's got to be a couple sales. So you bought the book a couple years in? So I bought the book. Yeah, no, like the first year in. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I just, the story was so great. It just started to connect because I really literally was, what is happening here? I've never had a hobby before. You know, I just do stand up and hang with my family. And that's, and all of a sudden, I mean, quickly, right? I just started getting containers. I just started. Yet I just started buying everything. I went quickly.

When the first loaf came out that was a success, I was just hooked. And all the process of it, and I was writing my first book during the time. And it just fit into the rhythm, like that I could, you know, when you tell people about the process of doing it, they think it's, oh, this is this long, complicated thing. Like a whole lot of work. Yeah, but when you fold it into your life, it's really kind of just hits the rhythm. It has its own rhythm. Yeah.

And there's a lot of elapsed time, but actually very little active time. Right. And that's something that you kind of have to do it to realize, oh, it's really not much work. Right. But then you have this made-it-yourself satisfaction. Oh, wow. And when you pull it out of the oven and you eat it and it's better than what you could buy at the store. Yeah.

Then your satisfaction increases. A hundred percent. I actually think part of the joy doing this is it's very tactile. I don't ask you to use a mixer. Right. All hands. your hand. You fold the dough with your hand. It's all hands. Yeah. And you learn a new skill and it's not hard to learn. Right. And then all of a sudden you've got a new thing that you know how to do

that it'll last you the rest of your life. Oh yeah. It's in there. It's in there deep. Really? It's never going to go away. When you say, when I read that you taught us to use our hands and I was like, oh, this makes sense to me. Is there a other than just the feel of it? Is there a, reason? Like, is there a bacterial element to it? Is there anything that's kind of, or it's just for the process of doing it? Well, first off, it's just easier.

Yeah. Then pulling out your mixer, another thing to clean. Yeah, right. But then secondarily, you very quickly, once you've done it a couple of times, you have a reference point. Yeah. So you know what it's supposed to feel like on your hands. Yeah. And you'll immediately understand if there's not enough water, if it's too stiff or too

dry, or if it's soupy, you know, you screwed something up. Yeah, right, exactly. The measurements. Yeah. And then that was one of the things that, oh, gosh, it was a fight with my publisher, which is, you know, we laugh about it now. But while I was drafting the book, I didn't want volume measurements, cups and tablespins. Right.

I wanted to go strictly by weight. Oh, really? Which to me is a natural because I'm a baker and we weigh everything. Yeah. The scale's not expensive. It's, you know, $20, $25 purchase. Right. And, but it's, if you haven't done it before, it's like anything you.

you've never done. Like, my dog won't go in the basement because he's never gone through that door down the stairs. So every time I go in the basement, he goes upstairs. Right. And I'm like that, too. If I've never, like, there's a problem with my bread oven today. And it was causing me a lot of anxiety.

It's only because I've never taken this particular thing apart that I needed to take apart. Right. And, you know, with breadmaking, if you've, once you've done it, you go, oh, that's no big deal. Yeah. But if you've never done it before, he's like, yeah, I don't want to do this. Right.

Oh God, the first time you try and shape bread that's pretty hydrated, it's a disaster. Because you're like, you're holding it and now it's sticking to your hand. Exactly. It's just, I know. And then, and I literally, when I'm telling my friends how to do it, I was telling teaching my nephew how to do it. I'm like, just keep doing it. It's got this thing that you think is so complicated and sticky, you're going to just, it's going to happen. Yeah.

You're just, it's going to be effortless. And ultimately, your hands just figure out how to touch the dough, how to move, move it, grab it, fold it, shape it. Yeah. Without touching the sticky. parts. Right. Right, exactly. You threw me for a loop actually the other day, like last week, actually. I don't know why I never made the Pond de Campagne. Ponda Campagna. I can't say. My daughter takes French and I can't think so. How do you say it? Well, some places would say compan. Compan. And then other parts, they knew at the end.

Okay. So I'm not totally. So yeah, I'll just say it's regional. But for some reason, way with a lot of stuff that way. Right, exactly. For some reason, someone, I read something that someone said, if you can't pronounce a word, say it loudly. But I had never made that bread before. I don't know why. I've made all the, I made the, you know, the Saturday loaf. It's a really good bread.

And we, I made it, but it was more hydrated. And it was a little, it was like you said, like all of a sudden, there was a little bit of a new wrinkle to this. was more silky and more and a little tough to manipulate and but yeah I always think people should start with the simplest recipe in the book the Saturday bread yeah I intentionally put a less water in the dough so it would be not quite as sticky uh-huh although if you've never touched it before you're going wow this is sticky right so yeah it depends on who's talking yeah but once you've sort of figured out how to do the folds how to shape how to do all the steps then you can go onto the other recipes that are a little stickier, a little wetter. Yeah. And somebody's listening

to this who hasn't baked bread. What are they talking about sticky? I know. I know. Because, you know, your mom or your grandma would have made bread in their kitchen aid mixer. Yeah. And it had this beautiful doughball. It wasn't sticky at all. Not at all. It produced a loaf that everybody liked. But the idea is more water in the dough, which as a baker, I just call it more hydration. Right. It makes it sticky on your hands. Yeah. But the reason for, doing it is you get better flavor. The extra water in the dough encourages more active fermentation, which you could do it in dryer dough.

But you also get a much lighter texture, so it's not dense. You get those nice open holes that are characteristic of artisan bread. Yeah. And it's just the sort of bread I bake. Whether it's a baguette or my country loves, they have a nice light open crumb. They're not dense. Right. Yeah.

It's hard for me to enjoy dense bread. No, I know. Yeah. And once you get used to this. Oh, God. Yeah. Then you become like a bread snob. We'll be out at restaurants and the bread basket will come and I'll take a bite.

And my family, what do you think? No. Don't need it. I could do better. Don't need it. Right. Exactly. But man, that one that we made the other day and then we just had some brie and some grapes and we just ate that.

And it was literally just as a little side thing to the meal. It became the meal. Right. I mean, I've been baking bread for a long time and everyone was like, what did you, what happened today? What is this? Oh. The thing I like about the Pondacombone recipe is it's a hybrid leavening. Right.

So that means it has sourdough, but also has regular commercial yeast at the same time. And I like the flavor. I love the character of sourdough breads. But even at my bakery, at Ken's Artisan Bakery, we put a little bit of yeast in that dough. Right. And it gives the volume and the texture that I like. If it's just pure sourdough, and I've got some recipes for that, the volume of the loaf is not, that doesn't come up quite as high.

Right. It's a little bit more dense. It is funny because I started to look at it as like a badge of honor to not use commercial yeast. I used to think of it that way too. Yeah. If I'm a pure artisan, I don't use yeast. No, I don't use that. And my friend Pete who baked bread in that way, I was like, well, that's cute, but commercial right.

And then that recipe asked for it to use it. And there was a guilty pleasure of walking in to fold it after an hour and seeing how much it had risen. Yeah. I was like, oh, maybe this isn't so bad. I prefer that. The other thing I like about those recipes is I set it up so that you shape your loaf and then you put it in the refrigerator overnight. Right.

And then you bake it right out of the fridge in the morning. I love that. And it's a nice way to start the day. Yeah, because if you don't put it in the refrigerator. I was just going to out for ferment. It'll, it'll... And it's just so loose. Like when certain recipes call for like just an hour in the basket before you throw it in,

I find it hard to move it from that to the Dutch oven. Yeah, yeah, right? It doesn't, like being in the refrigerator. Cold firms it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me ask you, I'm really interested in you as a person, but I have a lot of questions. Commercial yeast, fresh yeast and dry yeast. I found some fresh yeast in this Italian deli, and I brought it home.

And when I made that bread the other day, it was, I used it, but it's kind of confusing because I'm, you know, breaks out like clay. And it's almost so light that it doesn't really weigh. Like it's hard to get a good measurement. And then putting it in a little bit more water. I think this is why it was even more hydrated. Because, you know, you're adding another 10 grams, 15 grams of water just mixing that up. Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, because you're turning the cake of yeast into a slurry. So it'll mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fresh yeast I used to use at my bakery a lot. I would use, we did two mixes in, like four in the morning. One would be baguette and one would be our chabata dough. Okay. And I'd do dry yeast for the chabata and I use fresh yeast for the baguette because

I knew it would just prevent me from mistaking which was which. Right. Because don't underestimate the ability of an early morning mind to screw it out. Yeah, I can imagine. The fresh yeast is not as reliable as dry yeast. it's hard to find. It has a limited shelf life, then it will go moldy. So it's not really practical to put into a cookbook, first of all, because it's really hard to find.

Okay. But you have a much more stability with the dry yeast. Right, okay. And it'll perform more consistently. And I've literally learned this yesterday, that you can throw it in the freezer, and it'll last for like a year, the dry east. Mine's in a bag in the pantry. Yeah. And I was like starting to get suspicious because it's been about six months.

It'll hold for a really long time. Yeah. I keep mine in the fridge. Right. I know the people that keep up in the freezer. Yeah. The fridge works fine. I buy this one pound bags.

Yeah. They cost about $12. They last me a year. Wow. You know, and you don't have to worry about finding used at the store. And I like the one that you ask about because it's, uh, you tell people to buy. Yeah. Because it makes it feel.

It's a red package. I recommend it in my book. It's S-A-F. You can find it on. Yeah. online at the usual places you shop online. If you don't know the King Arthur website, that's a viable alternative to the behemoth up north from here. Right.

I like that, yeah, it makes it look like I'm a little French baker. It's a very French boy. It made me feel good. It's a very French drawing. Yeah, it made me feel good about using it. I was like, oh, well, yeah, that seems, they do it. Do you wear a funny hat? No, but I have been thinking about it.

Do you wear a hat? No. Do you never wear the hat? Well, if I wear a baseball hat, it's not a floppy French chef hat. Not the floppy one, but I like the one that's just kind of like a beanie. I took, when I was learning how to bake, it was 20 years ago. I took a pastry class at the CIA in Napa. And it was great training.

It was a really good class, but you had to wear chef's coat, but you also had to wear a toke. And, you know, those things are just stupid. You know, it's this cylinder you put on your head. And the higher up and the echelon you are, you know, the taller it goes. For real? Yeah. Yeah, so the head chef. Like the Pope?

Like the Pope's got the biggest hat? Exactly. So, you know, the head chef has one that, you know, it's like a stove high that goes away the fuck up there. And then, you know, the peons, they still have one that's, but they're just like, what the hell is it doing? It's hilarious. I know. It's traditional, I know. Yeah.

It's like the dumbest thing to put on your head. I did this bakery for the Food Network in Queens, G.M. Piero, which is a really great spot. If you ever in New York, this guy, old school, all from starter. And he supplies all of these New York restaurants, but this really just old school Italian method and family. And those guys were like the little ones. They were the little Burger King ones. Oh, those are cool. Those are cool.

Yeah. They made them look all right. Yeah. These tough queens bakers, you know. I was like, he was going to argue with him. Right. Exactly. I love those.

And New York has so many. Yeah. And especially in the neighborhoods. Yeah. I know. This guy. Really old school Italian bakeries. Yeah.

And it's so funny because you walk in there as someone that's learning artisan baking. And I'm like, so, you know, you ask them these questions that are so kind of crunchy and, you know, crafty. And they're like, yeah, that's how we do it. Yeah, my mom did it. My grandmother did it. And now I do it. You're not getting a scientific explanation. Yeah.

What's the big deal? You don't want that either. You want the personality explanation. Oh, yeah. This is how we do it. Yeah, right. Exactly. And what's so cool about that spot, too, is that.

They're so proud about their breads. They've got all these amazing breads all made that way. But also, you know, the rainbow cookies and like all that, you know. You know, I have more admiration for people that have been doing like that, especially if it's a generation to generation place. Yeah. Then I do for myself or people like me. It's because they're, I don't know,

because it is generational, because they are doing things that that's just how they learned it. No, I know. They didn't question it. Yeah. They always do it that way, but it works. Yeah. And I don't know why I admire it more. Because it's not you.

Really. Yeah, because you know, you're to be admired too, because it's, it's, it's, there's, this is what I would always, I always tell people. The places that are successful that I found when I would tour around the country were that there was this intense passion. And it either came from the family and every, and they just passed it down, or somebody found it and had a, a lot of times a second act where they were in some other career and this drew them so passionately.

And then there's so much love, both of those, the common denominator is love. They really loved this process, this thing that they're making. And the people that come by. I think I loved it too much. Yeah. Because in my shop, like when things didn't come out right, it just, it tear me up. Yeah. You know, 19 years later, still tear me up with the same intensity.

Really? I always take it as a personal failing. It's not, all right, you Baker, why'd you screw this off? Sometimes he think that. Sure, sure. For me, it's like, why didn't I instruct him how to do, or her? Yeah. How to do that.

Well, that's a, well, yeah. You can't love too much. That's great. That is great. The love is great. Yeah. It has a price to pay. Right, of course, like any great relationship.

You're going to be hurt. For sure. So what happens? You go to France. You're going to meet a. up with a girl, right? Yeah, a girlfriend. And that's what you just start poking around, you're looking at it. When do you make your first, when do you say I'm going to try and make this? It was probably around 98, 97. But how long from when you're looking like a weirdo through

the windows at these people for hours? To opening a bakery. That stretch was about four or five years. Four or five years. And you decided like, I'm going to just go, where did you first learn it? Who was your first teacher? My first was Ian Duffy at the San Francisco Baking Institute. That's really Michelle Suas. Okay. It's his school, and anybody who was teaching was teaching Michelle's method technique. So the very first place I went was it was two weeks of classes at the San Francisco Baking Institute.

It was my introduction to how to make artisan bread at my first day. Wow. I go back to my hotel and go, oh, my God. I don't know. I don't think I can do this. Oh, really? It was intense? it was more that, you know, we just mixed a simple dough that day.

It was some classroom and then some hands-on. And the hands-on stuff, I felt like such a clutz. And my fingers were sticking to a dough that today I would go out. That dough was not wet. Right. Yeah. I was embarrassed and just felt, oh, man, maybe this. Yeah.

I actually wrote this in my book. I said, I thought maybe this wasn't the career for me. But the intensity of that emotion was pretty strong. Were you thinking career when you took that class? Yeah, absolutely. You were. I had already left my career. my last career. Oh, wow. Which was IT, right? Yeah. Yeah, so 19 years in tech. Right. And I really had

just enough money to take like two years off. Oh, so you split before you had the next gig? Correct. Oh. Yeah, I had some, I had some downtime. Got it. Yeah, I went through a lot of stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was just a lot of things happened. I moved from D.C. to Oregon, to Eugene, where my family was. We'd all moved around in our lives and careers. And Eugene had been for a while, the center of gravity. I moved there. And then shortly after I moved there, I had a bad accident and broke my leg. I was going to build a bakery in my backyard that was, you know, there was some bakeries in California that I admired. And they had wood-fired ovens and outbuildings on their property. Right. And they made great, beautiful, rustic country bread, and they delivered it around

town. Oh, wow. And that's really what I wanted to do. And so I bought this house with an outbuilding outside of Eugene and was getting ready to build an oven. I filed for my permits. Right. And there's this big uprising in the community. They didn't want a bakery there. Oh, no, really? And the, you know, land use laws are difficult. And so they argued the smell of baking bread every day would be a problem. Oh. Yeah, just all this other stuff that was not rational. Yeah. I used to like Eugene. rational. Yeah. I used to like going there. Yeah. That's terrible. Boo, the smell of fresh baked bread.

Boo! I mean, it doesn't even seem real when I try to tell the story now. No. I've separated the emotional side so long ago. I'm really happy that I ended up in Portland. What made you choose that? Well, I lost the battle, so I got legally turned my backyard into a bakery. Right. And so I just had to reboot the plan.

I said, well, I got to do this somewhere. Yeah. And I took several months just trying to figure out where in the country because it wasn't going to be Eugene. Yeah. At that point, I'm out here. No, you're not getting my bread. And it was kind of fine because I had enough time, well, I had enough funding I thought

to take my time. Right. And so I looked in places in California where the weather was nice. I looked back east in like Southern Maryland. near where I went to college, and it just wasn't finding the right place. Finally, I was looking at a bakery that was for sale outside of Boston. And before I got on the plane, I bought a Best Place's Portland book. And before landing at Logan Airport, I was saying, you know what, I think Portland's the place.

So the nice thing is I had fully vetted by the time I'd decided on here. And I'm glad it was a good choice. It's a community where I could, there was, you know, the beginning of the farm-to-table movement was going on here with restaurants like Higgins and Pays. this place and some others. It was a good time to be coming into Portland because we, things were cheaper. Yeah. It just was an early point in our evolution as, you know, what's now kind of thought of

as a food city, but it wasn't then. Yeah, that's so great. What great timing. That is perfect. So we opened in almost 19 years ago in 2001. So what was the first, what was the first place like? Like, is it in the same spot? It's the same spot?

Same bread of. Same oven? Yeah. Really? Wow. Where'd you get the oven? It was TMB baking in San Francisco. The same guy, Michelle Suas, who had the San Francisco Baking Institute, also had a company

called TMB baking that sold bakery equipment. And he wasn't finding a commercial oven on the market at that point in time 20 years ago that really met what he thought would be the needs of a good bakery. Right. So he had one built to his specs from a company of Verona in Italy. Wow. And Michelle Suas, without him, the artisan baking world in the United States would not be as capable as it is today. Right.

He had a huge understate, like most people don't know this. Yeah. He had an enormous influence, both in terms of the education and supplying equipment that he would import from France and Italy, actually met the needs of people that wanted to bake French and Italian brides in the U.S. But it was kind of hard to find the equipment or the training or, you know, the support structure that you need. Man. Most people don't know that about Michelle. He won the James Beard Award three years ago, I think, for Alstaining Baker.

Oh, really? It was one of my mentors. Jeez. Where the people of whom I feel, you know, without him, I couldn't have done what I've done in my career. What I, this is why these stories are so great that you met him. Like, you had this idea and this passion, and that's the guy you meet first. right that's a lucky accident totally yeah good fortune yeah he now is owner of bee potisserie in san francisco okay so yeah he's never been there he's an amazing man wow that's amazing

how great is that moment when you get your first oven because oh it was a thrill it was intimidating too yeah it weighs about 15,000 pounds and so this oven it comes in about a thousand parts oh god and they set up Carlos the guy who he's still he puts it together and installs it. Wow. He's a co-owner of the company now, which I think is really cool. Yeah. And the process of building the oven, you need to be able to retain the heat.

You can't let the heat bleed out of the oven. Right. So one of the solutions for this oven design is it has three yards of poured cement. It's a lot of cement. Pored where? So there's papers underneath and in the sides all the way around the oven. Wow. So the funny thing was the local my landlord's.

face. Yeah. When he saw this cement truck, all this wet cement being poured, and all of a sudden this oven is now part of the foundation of the building. Oh my God. So wait, so the oven alone is 15,000 pounds and then add concrete to it. Well, no, that's including the concrete. That's an estimated way.

We didn't put it on. Okay, okay. Anyway, it's a massive beast. It's a great bread oven. Oh, God. Thomas Keller uses it at the Bouchon bakeries. Right. There's a lot of great bakeries in the U.S.

that used this oven. Amazing. It's been around for a long time. Oh, man. I can just imagine the, because, you know, there's so, I have a, I have a good oven. I've got a good Viking oven. And I, you know, I've been pretty successful. How much is yours way?

Probably 750. And, uh, but man, just the limits, like you know that there's a, like, I can't do a real good baguette. There's just, I'm just pulling my hair out. Yeah, you know, there's the steam problem first. God. Yeah. I tried everything.

The, the, the, real. rags, the water on the cooking sheet. Yeah, and the oven vents the steam out right away. Yeah, as soon as you open it. Right. And, you know, the baguettes, how do you get it into the oven in the first place and then score it and all this? So as soon as you build off the steam, you open the door to load the baguette and the steam goes. Yeah. And so the only solution for making good bread in a home oven, whether it's a Viking range or, you know, a crummy apartment oven is a much oven. So you put basically some oven within the oven. And one of the advanced. One of the advantages of having a lot of water in the dough, a wet, sticky dough is that it allows it to create

its own steam while it's inside the Dutch oven. Right, right, exactly. But to do baguettes or any bread outside of a Dutch oven is so hard. It's not going to work out very well. No, I even tried those those metal. You ever see the metal perforated things? I tried those. It still doesn't solve the steam problem. It doesn't solve the steam problem. It doesn't. And also the transfer of it because it's this long thing. Like you could just slide it. Oh, and you, yeah. going sideways. Yeah, the idea of getting a, like a real big boy oven. It must have been so great. Cranking out. Everybody wants me to write a book to a cookbook, you know, with baguette recipes. I can't do it. Yeah. No, it doesn't work out all that. Oh, you're going to take the starter?

There it goes. That starter is going to be pizza dough. Oh, that's amazing. 45 minutes. Yeah, no, you can't do it. Do you know Andy from Bub and Grandma's in L.A.? It's this great baker And he He's now supplying a lot of the L.A. restaurants and stuff And just a great guy and really into it. But he

It was the baguette. He was on the quest for the baguette And couldn't nail it. And he had like a kind of a shitty Just at home oven. And he started putting bricks in the oven. He like,

he was literally, this was a sign he had to go move on because he was, you know what I mean? He wouldn't give it up. No, he wouldn't. give it up and he finally nailed it and was like okay i'm going to have to go get a real oven if we're to go do this i mean the baguette and my bakery at ken's artisan bakery i the baguette is something

our baguettes are good and take a lot of pride in them and yeah um actually right now we're having an up-in problem oh you are my bakery yeah so oh man what's going on there today because my daughter's going to get her first haircut since quarantine like down the road from it oh my god that's going to be awesome yeah i remember mine i was like i was did you have like a giant mop on head. Yeah, I don't look like this normally. No, this is a... Oh, you look fine? Yeah. But is that long for you? This is long for me, yeah. I had this huge mop. Anyway, when I finally got it cut, I was just, I just wanted to go dancing in the space. I know, just so happy. It was so awesome. I know. No, my oven is, the burner's not firing. So, what is periodically off and on, and throughout the last 19 years,

whenever that happened, there's a little burner control box. You push a reset button, or you replace the box. And we've done all the things. things and it's still not. And so I feel really bad for my baker. He gets in at 11 p.m. Right. And he works really hard and the job's hard enough as it is already. But when the burner stops firing, the oven temperature is dropping. And he has to continue to stop what he's doing, push the reset button. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And he's really nice about it. Yeah. I'm like, man, I'm lucky I got you. Yeah. But we think that there's some flour in the wrong place in where the gas flows. Uh, right. And the, in the,

the mechanical works of it. I got a tech over there now. I was in the middle of this and then I was like, I'm sorry, I got to go do an interview with Tom Hopper. Yeah, I'd love to help. Bye, guys.

So here we are. You're welcome. This is part of my brain right now that's like totally stressing out. And it freaked out about the oven. I mean, the bread oven's not working or it has a problem. It's just, oh, man.

Well, let me ask you about that because there's always, that is the, that's the thing. It's like you have this love. You go and you learn how to do it. it, you get a cool oven, you're like, this is great. But man, the one thing, and, you know, my brain like starts going down, like, what if I were to go into this, tip my toe and dip my toe into this as a business or whatever?

But when I meet people that run bakeries, they work harder than anyone I've ever seen. Yeah, you don't want to do this. It's a, no. You know, like, for the opening chapter in flower, water, salt yeast, I wrote my personal story, and part of me wishes I hadn't. No, it was good. Because it's, I don't know, you kind of opening up yourself to the world. Sure.

But at the time, I wanted to get the story out. But, you know, the whole thing about, you know, mechanical problems do happen. Yeah. And failures occur. And we had all kinds of weird-ass problems. You know, like, you need, the oven has steam, so you've got to have a waterline run to the oven. And there's a rubber hose that just kept, like, part of the hose would just inflate and it would burst. In the middle of the bake, there'd be this freaking flood and the water all over the oven.

the floor and you're just trying to get the good bread out. I just want to make bread. Right. And you got to like stop what you're doing. Shut off the waterline. Go grab a knife, you know, cut off the broken part of the hose. Reassemble it, you know, find the tools, all this stuff. And it's like 48 in the morning.

And the dairy guy comes in delivery and needs a signature. And you just like, oh, man. And now you're a plumber. You just want to make bread. Did I see? I'm busy. God. But yeah.

I mean, the hours, the hours. the hours, the troubles, the problem solving, it's a lot. There's a lot of times when you have to problem solve in the middle of stuff going on. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, you get on the phone because he needs some help on the other end. Yeah. You know, somebody's trying to help you, but there's too much noise and you can't hear them. Oh, my God.

Yeah. It's a hard way to make a living. And the hours suck. They, you know, I have to go backwards. So we deliver to three grocery stores in the Portland area, Zoo Pants. And basically, I need my delivery van to be out the gate by around 815 in the morning. Still coming out of Ken's? Yeah.

But you have to like time it backwards. Okay, the van's going to leave at 815. Right. That means everything needs to be loaded in. The bread has to be out of the oven but cooled. Then you have to bag up, you know, four or five hundred loaves. Oh, my God. So you backwards into it.

And you go, yeah, I guess the reg really does need to show up at 11 p.m. At 11 o'clock at night. You know, it starts baking at maybe 3 a.m. Yeah. And it's so funny. When I was doing it, we weren't baking as much as we do today. So this is 2001 to 2006 when I did the early morning shift. Okay.

I'd get in at either 3 or 4 a.m. depending on the day of the week. Right. But I still had to run the business. So, you know, I'd work an 8-hour baker's shift and then do other stuff. Yeah, you have to be. When you sleep, you go down hard. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, you've got to be up during business hours to deal with the business part of it.

But then you're doing a baker's hours. Yeah. It's the most demanding things. So when I was writing that story, part of it is, like, a lot of people thought, oh, I want to be a baker. I want to give up this office job. No. Hey, have you been on your feet for 36 hours straight? It feels awesome.

You would love it. No. Yeah, I quickly learned this is some of the hardest work. You have to love it because there's no other thing that will fuel you through these hours. Yeah. And then I got to the point where I said, I can't do this myself anymore. Yeah. Or some of it was I don't want to.

Right. Some of it was, it was a combination of can't and don't want. Right, yeah. But I still want my hands in it. So I want to come in and roll baguettes or. Yeah. I mean, because you, you also had. I was baking pastry this morning.

You were? Mm-hmm. Wow, what time? Oh, 9 a.m. Oh, yeah, that's nothing. I'm 62 now, so, you know, I leverage my age when I need to. Yeah. But people really take for granted.

I know I did until I started speaking to people like yourself that I would just, I would just roll into a bakery or a coffee shop and there'd be this beautiful display case filled with stuff that was just waiting for me. And it never occurred to me how long, like you said, like doing the math backwards, like how long, when did they start making these croissants so I could just come in and get one without a care in the world?

It's a lot of work. I don't want you to have to worry about that. But if you think about opening a bakery, which occurs to a lot of people. Yeah. You say, well, this looks like magic. It looks beautiful. It looks, you know, all these things.

things that desirable, but they don't really understand how hard the work is. It's so hard. So every now and then, somebody will let somebody come in and just sort of like shadow one of our chefs. I don't do it anymore, but I did it enough. Yeah. It busts a lot of bubbles. Yeah.

Are you more of an, I can't, watching you, reading your book, seeing your success, I couldn't tell, I can't tell, and maybe it's equal parts. Are you more of an artist head or a science head? I like to think that I'm both. Yeah. I definitely have an engineer's point of view. Right. I have to break things down into understandable, replicatable units.

Yeah. And I think that helps the way I explain it. Right. Yeah. So that it's codified. Right. And if it's codified, so there are a number of things that are judgment calls in baking, but it's overstated. If your flour is consistent,

then I can codify everything in the recipe. Uh-huh. Right. So consistency wasn't a problem because you had that science behind it. Yeah. Still. Well, there's always a human factor. You know, you've got a lot of things going on at once.

Right. Or my idea, the perfect baking color is different from someone else's. Yeah, let's talk about that. Well, I had a colorblind baker for a while. No. It didn't come out until about six months in. Oh, actually, oh, psych, I'm colorblind. No.

Don't you see what's wrong with this? No, I don't. I don't see that at all. Those shades of red that I've been looking for? Damn. No, but this is kind of an interesting thing because... So science versus art. Yeah, okay, that's right.

Yeah. You have an artist side to you. Yeah, because I totally feel the aesthetic side of it. Yeah. I think it's a little bit different as the crafts person. that it is as an author. Right. Or as a manager.

Right. It needs to be, here's how we do it. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a, it's a strange combination to have that, that, that, because you have an aesthetic to, you knew exactly what you wanted the bread to look like, what you were, what you were after. And it, and it, it extends to the book. It extends to the shop.

There's like, that current of what your soul was telling you this stuff should be is in everything. And there's some people that are science. It's weird to have that mix. Yeah, I don't think we're all that binary, but there's a lot of people that are, they lean more toward one than, yeah, yeah. So you start baking this bread, and it's such a funny story because you're baking bread that people are saying is burnt.

And you're like, no, this is just great bread. And they're like, no, it's not. It's burnt. and you want to be successful. You've opened up the shop for the first time you got your fancy oven. You want to sell this stuff and move it and have people be into it. But that's not happening at first. No, it wasn't.

The economic pressure was very real. You know, I went from having a nice house and being comfortable to, okay, I didn't have income anymore. And I spent a couple years not working and then hundreds of thousand dollars to build the bakery. Wow. You know, the question is, you know, you had these principles or this bread that you want to bake. And sooner or later, I found my audience. Yeah. So there are still people today that, you know, I think I bake a little pretty dark.

Right. But, you know, I explained it in my book, too. It's for a reason, you know, it's not burnt. No. We do bake it dark for flavor and texture reasons. Yeah. And the flavor of the crust, if you hit a certain point in the baking, and I'm looking for, like dark chestnut color.

Yeah. And it is kind of a fine line. It's a fine line where you can go beyond that and then I go, damn it, we ever baked it. Right, right. But if you hit it right, then the flavor from the crust, it permeates into the crumb. And you've got a bread that's completely unlike anything you would be able to buy it. Well, definitely, you know, most other bakeries are the grocery store. Yeah, yeah.

It's not the way everybody does it. No. It's characteristic of my bread. Yeah. I was looking around, not that you can see me, but, Like my chabata is a really good example. The inside is it's white. It's a white bread with a really,

really dark crust. Right, right. So once you get a, you're looking at a slice of it, it doesn't look dark at all. No. But when you're looking at the entire thing from the outside.

From the outside, it freaked people out. It looks like we're just freaking crazy. Yeah, I know. I actually, I started baking it and then posted it on Instagram and went to do a radio show. And it was like morning,

like pretty brash guys that love to like bus bowl. walls and stuff to begin with. And they went after me for like a half hour. Yeah, I know you make bread and stuff, but it's burned. Look, you're burned. And they just went on this tear about how I burn all my bread and I don't know what I'm doing. Well, then they were having fun being funny. They were. And at that point, it's like, come on guys, really. Yeah. But I could see, I mean, there must have been, you must have been tempted a little bit or not tempted. At least you knew the, if I just lighten this stuff up, maybe I'm selling more of this in the early days.

I didn't have the emotional clarity or certainty that I have now. Right. And I call it emotional. It's experiential, too. So, you know, now I'm comfortable with myself and what I'm doing. Right. And I know it works. Yeah.

But in my first year, too, especially the first year, you know, I started asking other people who had a couple of friends who were French chefs. I was like, hey, Philippe, is this all right? Yeah. They don't depend on which French chef I'm talking to. Right. So, yeah. I get at my proudest moment was, we were about three or four years old, and my friend Pascal's had a restaurant called Caraf, Pascal Sotan.

And he had a dinner for Master French, the Cuisineer Association of French Chefs. Oh, wow. I can't rattle off the name. Yeah. Say it loudly. Bad-ass French chefs, lots of them. And they had a dinner at his restaurant. and someone starts shouting, who bake the bread?

Who bake the bread? They're all like pounding lower tables. Who bake the bread? Wow. No way. I just got up and I yelled, I did. Oh, man. Oh, man.

And that Brad was dark. Yeah. It was moments like that, though, that gave me confidence. Because, you know, I was a brand new baker. I'd never done this before. I was under the gun to make it work financially. Right. So, you know, I have the confidence now, but I didn't then.

So it was hard. That's hard. That's hard. I'm pretty much stuck to my guns, though. Yeah, no, I mean, that's, I see that in comedy, too. It's like, I had one of the, one of the weirdest comics in my, in the beginning of my career, he was odd and people didn't get him. And it was just, he would make these funny voices. And it was Jim Gaffigan.

And he's one of the biggest comedians of the day. And he just, he could have just sold out and not done what he was doing and just give him the people what they wanted at that time. But he just stayed true to himself and had doubts and stuff, and it all worked out. Because there's something about that. What's that Ralph Waldo Emerson quote? Every heart vibrates to that iron string. Trust yourself. Yeah.

Man, that's hard to do sometimes. It is hard. It is hard, especially when you got bills to pay. Yeah, exactly. Thank God I wasn't married because I doubt that would have survived. Yeah, I know, exactly. Just don't burn all your bread. She's yelling at you.

Honey, it's easy. I want to go on. Would it kill you to just not burn your bread? Well, at least you had this experience. You got your balls busted about it too. Yeah, right, exactly. So one of the things that I have, that I haven't really mastered from,

can I make good pizza in my oven? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm struggling. So are you using my book? I am using your book. So what's the struggle? The struggle is, I, well, the dough, the dough, I haven't nailed the dough. I think it's the dough. I don't know why it's a struggle. But, um, and I also feel like when I do get the dough, I mean, we're using the double O flour. And I, I haven't really, I haven't really done too much of it. But, uh, at first it was, at first it was stretching, it was stretching too, um, too fine and bleeding through and stuff. And then when I would put it in the, in the oven and we'd

come out, the top would be kind of baked and they would be kind of raw underneath. Are you using a pizza steel? Yeah. So, and you're preheating the steel? Yeah, well, one cracked. One was an old... So that's a stone, but a steel one cracked. Oh, I'm using a stone.

I'm not using a steel. You know, I recommended a pizza stone in my first book. And then when I was working on the elements of pizza, pizza steels were out there on the marketplace. Oh. And it kind of started with... Nathan Mirvald's modernist cuisine. He mentioned that steel will basically allow heat to energize or heat to come off of the surface more

energetically than it will on a stone. And you can buy them now. They're not super cheap, but they're less than $100. Oh, yeah? But basically it transmits heat more energetically into the crust than a pizza stone. And it will never break. Wow. That's not in that book.

Yes, it is. It's in flower water? No, it's in the elements of pizza. Oh, that's Ellen's pizza. Oh, I'm going by the old. I cracked it. I was like, oh, man, this, maybe I just can't make pizza here. Yeah, the steel works better and it will last several lifetimes, I'm sure.

Wow. All right, so talk to me about the dough for pizza and how it differs from your bread doughs. I use the Italian way for mixing it, so I don't use the auto lease method, which, if you don't know, is you just mix flour and water and you let it rest for 20 minutes. Yeah. It's a standard technique for good bread baking, but you don't use to do that for pizza. They're different. Right. And I, uh, the way they do it in Naples is flour, salt, yeast, and then flour. Water, salt, yeast, and then flour. Yeah. So you pour your water in a bucket. Right. You add salt, you dissolve it just with you, you know, swish it around with your hand. Right. You add the yeast, um, and then you add the flour and then you mix it up. Okay. Um, uh, the hydration

different. It's not as wet as the bread dose are. And if it's too wet, then it doesn't hold the ingredients well. Right. So it's so loaded to dry. So how hydrated is it? I do 70% for the home recipes. It's still pretty. Here, my pizzeria, we do 61%. Okay. So the difference is the oven temperature. At home, if you've got a 500 degree oven, right. You want more water in the dough because it's going to take longer to bake. Got it. It'll take about seven minutes. Right.

Oh, really? Here, our pizza is baking about two minutes. Right. And what happens in a wood-fired oven is you load the pizza into the oven and the part of the pie that is close to the fire, close to the embers, you know, 30, 45 seconds in, you need to turn it. Yeah. And if the dough is too soft, your peel when you go to turn it is going to puncture, it's going to put a hole in the dough.

Right. So it needs to be stiff enough so that you can turn it early on. on into the bake. Right. That's the primary reason for doing that. Is that the double O? Is it more pliable? What's the difference?

Double O flour is just, it's good for pizza. Yeah. It has, I don't really know how to explain it. I should know it's better for pizza. Oh, do I? It has the right physical characteristics. Right, right. So it stretches out.

I think one of the biggest problems people have with making pizza at home is they try to stretch out the dough ball before it's ready. Uh-huh. So it's too elastic or it takes. It's just not ready to be stretched out. That's what we've done. And Americans are not known for being patient. Nope.

Which is why we still have this coronavirus problem. Right, exactly. I also, I don't want to, I won't say the brand, but somebody sent me this little high propane pizza oven, that you can crank up to like 900 degrees, but it's very small. Yeah, it's like Rockbox. shit was on fire.

Things were on fire. The problem is if you make your dough that works for your regular home oven and you buy something like a blah, blah, box. Yeah, right. Just realize. Then it's not going to work as well. Yeah. So I didn't really write much about wood-fired oven baking or high-temp baking in either of my books. Ultimately, you need a little bit less water in the dough.

60 to 65% hydration for those who know what I'm talking about. Right. is good. But the flip side is it needs more time to ferment. Uh-huh. So as you reduce the hydration in a dough, if everything else is the same, right. It takes longer for it to relax.

Uh-oh. Okay. It also takes longer to, you know, just ferment to, you know, get the good flavors in there that you want. Right, right. So it's a different game. So Naples is your, is the, is the pizza inspiration? Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. So when I started writing the elements of pizza, and that published four years ago, Okay. First thing, even though I'd owned this pizzeria for many years, it's like nine years at that point. Right. I was like, I'm going to start at the beginning. And because I know that, I knew enough to know that there was a lot I didn't know about pizza. Oh, really?

I had a successful pizzeria, and I'd been making pizza for at that point nine years. Wow. And so I went to Naples and, you know, just arranged some meetings with some of the top pizza guys in Naples. And then I also went to Caputo, the flour. Yeah. Family. Yeah. I visited a mozzarella to Bufela Farm, which is, oh, so cool.

I've ever seen water buffalo? No. They're really cool. Oh, really? They're really cool. They're really curious. They're like behind a gate, you know? Uh-huh.

But, like, all of a sudden, a hunter water buffalo walk up and start staring at me. Oh, that's amazing. They're docile, but they're curious. Yeah. And the cheese, anyway, that was super cool. Was that cheese insane? It was insanely good. It was fresh when it had been made from milk that had been milk the day before.

Oh, my God. Yeah, it's awesome. That had been amazing. Nothing like it. Yeah. Nothing like it. But yeah, I kind of got my ass handed to me because he was this guy. Everybody I meet, you know, a lot of guys that were in their 50s, so they've been doing this for 40 years.

Yeah. And everybody I met was like third generation. Uh-huh. So it's like, I've been making pizza my whole life. My father made a pizza his whole life. My grandfather made pizzas. So every time I'm talking to these people, I'm talking to 100 years of pizza history. Jeez.

And Inwalks this American. working guy who's... I've been doing it for nine years. Yeah, what we call... We're co-opting their food culture, right? Right. Yeah, I'm one of them. Sorry, I like pizza, though.

Yeah. And I just wanted to, like, go back to the source, you know? And so they just told me, okay, we'll be nice. We'll tell you how we do it. And they did. And they did, like, okay, I'm going to throw away everything I did working on this book, and I'm going to start over. Was it a big change from what they were telling you?

It was, kind of. Yeah? Yeah, because at the end of it, I feel like I'm a dough guy. I really get dough. I understand it. And my first book was all about how to make dough that makes great bread or makes good pizza. Yeah. And I had started working on new recipes for dough and stuff for the pizza book.

And that's where I got home from Naples. I just tossed it all and started over. Right. Because I felt like, what's the point of doing this if I'm just going to like give it a little bit of hearsay but not really apply the principles? Yeah. And that's what made it a good book. Did it really change your product here? that took a while because here I had a chef who was not me back then now this is all my piece all my food

right but I didn't really have the the cultural I'm responsible for it but I didn't have a team that was as into doing it right making the changes that I wanted to make secret message received they had a system that worked and yeah the hard thing for me was I got a really successful pizzeria we got people in a line every night of the week yeah why do I want to change anything. Right. And then, you know, part of me is saying, you know, it's that devil voice in the other ear, right? Yeah. Like, because, you know, you can make it better. Right. I'm like, okay, that's a good reason. I need a new chef. He's going to be really mad at me. It's just not to, I'm not dissing anybody that's worked here. No, of course not. But it's the

challenge of management when the boss wants to change something you've been doing successfully for a long time. Oh, yeah. It's a frustration. Yeah. So finally, I just had to do it at a point in time when we were between kitchen leaders. Right, right. So now, you know, now we're using Levan in our pizza dough and the baking time. We're baking in much higher temperature and we mixed differently. There was no Levan in the dough before? Nope.

Oh, interesting. I just started that a year ago. Not even a year ago this past year. Right. Man, I really feel like that's such a powerful, like, secret ingredient. Like, we're from New York and we live in L.A., and we just can't find good bagels. and I just started making bagels with the starter. You're boiling or baking?

Yeah, boiling them and baking them. And they were great. And I think it all just comes down to that we're using the Levan. You're sure, I'll completely change the character. Yeah. Here I used it because we still use commercial yeast too. Right. So sort of, you know, kind of like the bread that gives me the texture I want, but the flavor I want.

Right. So I'm using all the tools in the kit. Why not? Yeah, right, of course. pizza here has never been as good as it is now. It's super proud. And the kitchen team is like really enthusiastic about it. That's great. Whereas I've had other kitchen teams that, you know, the, they had something that worked and

they didn't really want to change it. Yeah, well, they probably took it personally too because they're making it. They're doing it. It's successful. Yeah, and here I am on the boss. I'm not here every day. Right, right. And not every boss is like that, but.

Yeah. This time last year, I had four restaurants, 110 employees. Now I've got here. I've got 13 employees. Right. Two places open, one place is still shut. Right. And it's a completely different world for me.

Oh, God, yeah. But it translates to having smaller, tighter teams. Was that because of the virus, or is that just? Yeah. Yeah. Well, different. My biggest restaurant, Trifecta Tavern, I sold. Oh, you didn't?

And we closed December 31st. Whoa. Good timing. I feel really bad for the new buyers. I know. They were open for a week. Yeah, that's tough. I feel terrible for them.

Yeah. Personally, this just lets me go concentrate all my energy, all my love, bread and pizza. So, I mean, you're really successful, really well known nationally. Is there temptation to sell out and put Ken's bread all across the supermarkets in the country? You have an opportunity if you want it to be bigger. I wouldn't know how to do that. Yeah. Nobody's come to me with, hey, we'd love to put your name on something.

Take your national. Yeah. Or even scale it down a little bit. You could have six places around. I like the way I sleep right now. Uh-huh. I like being small. Yeah.

I'm winding down. I'm near the end of my career. Uh-huh. So it's not, I don't have any more ambition to do things I haven't done yet. Right. This is a different way to phrase your question. I don't like the idea of going national because that would turn me into the kind of person

I don't want to be. Right. That's good. See, the artist comes back in. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Just keep these places and crank out really great stuff. And then go to Naples and get bigger ideas and come back and piss off these guys.

I just go to hang out. Right, exactly. I don't go anywhere and hang out now. We're stuck. Yeah. We're definitely stuck. Yeah. But it seems like you're kind of finding your way through this.

I mean, you know, we talk to a lot of people in food service that are, you know, trying to do it the right way. We're just, I feel really fortunate. Bakery and pizza adapt really well to a takeout environment. Yeah. It doesn't work for restaurants to do this partial seating thing. Yeah. The margins don't really support it. Right, right.

And it's like, how do you deliver the experience that you want to deliver? How do you deliver hospitality when you're wearing a mask? I know. And it doesn't mean I want to have a restaurant with servers that are not acting safe. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be a server in a restaurant right now, even if I was a mask. Yeah. And so my goal was I reopened Ken's Artisan Bakery and Ken's Artisan Pizza with very, the smallest

possible staffs. We keep our windows open. We keep airflow going. Right. And I intentionally am not going to grow because I don't want to bring any more people into the space. Yeah. We already had, we had one COVID scare, my bakery, our second week after being open.

My morning baker, his girlfriend's. sister and all his husband. So it was like two degrees of separation, but there was face-to-face contact. And like, right. So we shut him off for a week and he got tested and he, he was okay. Right. So we brought him back. But I've already had one scare. The more people I bring in, the higher the likelihood is. So yeah, we came back with a model of really thin staff, but also really tight teams. Yeah, that's great. It's running really well. And I'm really proud of the people. And so good. It's working. Yeah, good job. Good on you. Well, I, I can't tell you how happy I really thank you for spending some time and to sit with me.

I was totally stuck just to meet you and have you come in here. Yeah, I mean, so great. I know. The only thing is I'd love to give you a big hug, but I'll wait until next time. Yeah, though I have to wait until next time. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man.

Appreciate it.