The bakery was only about children earning a bit of pocket money, so we called it the Pocket Bakery. That was three years ago, and the bakery has grown from two children selling a few loaves from our kitchen door in south London to a blossoming business with a place on the shelves of the city’s oldest and most famous food hall. Yet this is not just a success story, it is also about how the bakery unexpectedly transformed the life of one child, turning it around from disappointment to triumph.
The bakery became a place of apprenticeship for my son, Jack. This element was unexpected, because the beginnings of the bakery were so minuscule. We first talked about it in the summer of 2010. It came out of one of those conversations about money, not without its heated moments. With Jack then aged 14 and his sister, Lara, 11, my husband Dominic and I were only at the beginning of the era of being a familial cash machine. Attempts to make pocket money a reward for help in the house always failed, no matter how many duty rotas I stuck to the fridge door. As it was, my heart was not really in paying the children to do things I thought they should do unasked. The more I thought about them using a skill to make a little cash, the more sense it made. ‘Why not bake bread to sell to the neighbours?’ I said. ‘We don’t know how to make bread,’ they said. In truth, neither did I – at least, not the kind of traditional sourdough breads I thought would be marketable. The only thing I had going for the plan was a large gas oven in my kitchen, built for catering, that could take five loaves at a time.
Deciding the children’s response to the idea was not exactly a ‘no’, I held on to the thought that we would do it one day. It was six months before we made a single loaf and it happened because I met the person we like to call the ‘father of the bakery’, Giuseppe Mascoli. Giuseppe not only gave us the first vital bread-making lesson, he gave us a very special ingredient, the ‘mother’, or sourdough starter, that would leaven the bread.
I explained to the children that to make delicious, great-textured, long-lasting bread you do not use fast-action yeast but instead add a small amount of previously fermented dough, called the ‘mother’ or sourdough starter, to the mix. You must refresh or feed the mother with more flour and water regularly, to keep it alive and active so it will leaven the bread and give it a good flavour. Seeing their horrified faces picturing hours of graft, I hastily added that for the vast majority of that time the baker need do nothing at all – the dough is left alone to prove, or ferment.
Giuseppe had in his possession a sourdough mother, known to have been ‘alive’ and in use since 1790, which his bakers use in the commercial bakery he co-runs, and in Franco Manca, his chain of pizzerias, where it is used to leaven the pizza dough. Giuseppe was born in Positano on the Amalfi Coast, near Naples. It was on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples that Giuseppe’s sourdough starter originated. It may be even older. ‘The bakery in Ischia has it on record that it has been in use since 1790, but the bakers say there is no reason why it cannot date back to Roman times,’ he said. When I told Giuseppe that we wanted to start a bakery in our home, he offered to show us how to make sourdough bread. We set a date, Friday November 16 2010.
We chose to make bread on Fridays, starting after both children returned from school and leaving it to prove overnight so it was ready to be baked and then to sell on Saturday morning. As the day approached, on Giuseppe’s instructions, I bought a few basic pieces of equipment. ‘Don’t buy professional stuff, just improvise – as you know, they might not keep at it.’ I fully expected them both to give up after a short time myself, but I did not imagine that they would not turn up at all.
