What It Takes to Run One of the Best Bakeries in the U.S. — The Experts

It's always been a goal to open my own bakery. I opened Wayfair mostly with the intention of just being able to create my dream bakery, making the best possible bread and pastries we can in small batches, in a small neighborhood, build community and keep it that way for many years to come. My hope is that we never have to change and that we can continue to be an example of what happens if you don't grow and if you just continue doing what you do well and keep it small. It's 4 a.m. This is how we start the day. This is our baguette mix. This is a poolish, which is a pre-ferment that we made yesterday. It's kind of a way to get flavor in a dough that you're going to bake the same day. This is our sourdough starter, our Levan. This is the mother. This is the thing that keeps the bakery going. The morning bread bake is definitely one of the more time sensitive and grueling shifts that we have here. The minute you get in at 3 30 in the morning, you're having to think pretty clearly. You're mixing doughs, shaping breads, you're baking, you're trying not to burn things, you're back and forth here and there. Set up mixing and I'm going to run out to the bread oven. Corner! Everything's pretty well timed here. It's all based on like active live fermentation, so if our schedule gets out of order, it can really be kind of disastrous because if you're busy baking bread when you need to be shaping dough, it overproofs and then you're just in a pickle. And luckily the sourdough retards all night so we can just pull this out and bake it. So we start baking this first thing when we get here as soon as that other dough is pre-mixed. This is our sourdough bread with pepitas, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds. This is a very small deck oven. We can only fit between 10 to 12 loaves per deck. You can only bake 40 at a time, which kind of keeps our production on the smaller side, but kind of out of space. There's not really space for a bigger oven in here, so we just do more rounds of bakes in order to meet the demand. The reason we cut the dough is to try to tell the dough which way we want it to grow as it bakes. So you'll see with these round loaves, we're kind of cutting a big triangle or square to make it grow outwards and upwards evenly. So these are our sourdough loaves without anything added and they're in the traditional batard shape. And then the idea is to get all the bread in as quickly as possible so that it all comes out about the same time as well. This is a loader. Basically it's like the old tablecloth trick where this linen slides in and then you pull the linen out and it deposits the bread gently onto the hearth. Otherwise you have to load everything in on the peel. Every time we load a new deck, we go back and we steam the old deck. You really want to give it a lot of steam the first like 15 minutes of the bake to help the crust expand as much as possible. It also kind of moistens the outside of the bread, which counterintuitively gives you a thicker, crispier crust. At this point, all these loaves are just full of air. It's a byproduct of fermentation. You're trying to capture that air. That's what makes the bread rise. The least part of it is those air bubbles inside the loaf start to expand as the yeast dies from heat exposure and you end up with a much bigger loaf. We steam them all and then we go back and mix baguettes. Corner! This is now a cohesive dough. It's had time to sit and rest. So it's coming together and it's super strong. First we add some yeast. Then we start adding some water. We kind of created the schedule based on one person needing to do a lot of different things at the same time. It's like having a bunch of spinning plates on poles. You've got to pay attention to them all or you're going to drop some of them. I was a baker for like 25 years before I started this bakery. I worked at so many other places and when I got to kind of do my own thing, it started as a one-woman show, so it was developed that way. I'm bringing more people into that fold. I swear my first few employees thought I was insane. They're like, you want us to do what and how fast? I'm going to let this rest for a minute because I want to see the dough relax and feel what it feels like once it's relaxed. And that's my last step to double check the hydration. I'm going to go steam the oven again. A lot of the ears are starting to come up now. All those bubbles we talked about are starting to expand and grow. Once it starts developing color, that means that the crust is set and that's when we're going to want to vent because at that point, the moisture inside the oven isn't benefiting us anymore. It's just softening the crust that we worked so hard to make crunchy. Corner! This has been sitting for probably exactly a minute. It feels a little bit tight to me, so when I add the salt, which is the last step, I'm going to add a little bit of water with it. The reason we wait so long to add the salt is because it's really difficult to gauge the hydration once you've added the salt. The salt tends to make all the gluten just tighten right up, so your dough immediately feels significantly drier. The timer's set for two minutes on that, so I'm going to let that finish mixing and get my buckets ready. Okay, I'm going to go back to the oven and vent it. So yeah, these have definitely more decided golden brown going on now, so this is when I vent. We go through, we rotate these by hand, just the front row, because it's a pretty small oven. It's pretty shallow, so the very front doesn't get as warm as the back. So if I just leave these loaves like this, you can tell they're significantly browner on this side, significantly more pale on this side. So to get them to color more evenly, we rotate just the front row halfway through. Corner! Okay, so this is the It's loosened up significantly, so it's a bit easier to flop into a bucket. We put it in these buckets so it's easier to transport, and then because it's a little cooler this morning and we want to keep the fermentation on schedule, once we get this all set up on a rack, we're going to roll it into the slightly warmer room and we're going to cover it with wooden boards to kind of retain the heat produced by the fermentation that's going on. We have about 10 seconds to grab some coffee, and then we need to start prepping our boards for English muffin dough. I'm also going to make sure I don't burn that bread, pull it out, reload the next bread, and hopefully have time to reorganize my bread rack before then. Yeah, so they're looking nicely baked, golden brown, dark ear, not pale on the side. The issue, we like baking our loaves darker anyways, that's just the way that I was taught and the way I admired from early on. It creates a lot of flavor, but there's also a technical reason we do it here in San Diego, because if we bake it too light, because it's so humid here on a regular basis, the dough softens up really easily. This style of bread, this tartine style of bread, which is why I worked for five years before I started here, and everything I know about bread I learned from Chad Robertson. I feel like he doesn't get as much credit as he deserves for this style. While it's heating back up, we'll go take a look at the croissants happening in the main kitchen. It's pretty epic. So it's 520. This is Kanan. Hello, good morning. Kanan's beating the crap out of these croissant blocks because the butter's harder, not super pliable. This is the very, very first step, this is called the lock-in. So he's locking in the butter block into the dough and creating the very first layers. He's going to take this dough and fold it, and then eventually he's going to have 16 separate books of croissants that he's then going to shape in all sorts of different shapes. Okay, next bread wrap coming out corner. It's 530. We have three more hours to get the rest of this bread loaded, baked, pulled out, baguette shaped, and baked, and starting to come out of the oven because that's when we open. We like to have fresh baguettes available by the time we open. This is our English muffin dough. We're going to put it in eight pound balls, let it relax on these boards that are dusted with rice flour, and then we're going to go back and stretch them out so that they're like a sheet of dough, and then they're going to cut them into circles and fry them in clarified butter on our flat top. At 6 a.m., there's a lot more people in the kitchen now. Pretty much the whole kitchen crew's here. It's 624. We got the last batch of sourdough in the oven. Croissants are out of the proofer and starting to get baked off. Scones are done. Matt and I are shaping baguettes. You're folding, then you're rolling, then you're hitting it with the palm of your hand. Basically, anytime you're shaping bread, you're trying to create shape and tension without deflating your dough. So this whole rolling method is meant to create tension on the outside without squashing the bubbles on the inside. This move seals the seam of the bread so that it stays closed and maintains that tension that you just spent time creating. And then I'm very gently pushing this down as I'm pulling it out to create length, again, without deflating the dough. And then it goes on the couche, seam side down, made out of linen, and then it rises in the shape supported by the couche. 651. We're pulling the last sourdough out of the oven, and we're about three-quarters of the way done with shaping our baguettes. The first batch is rising, so as soon as we get this oven cooled down, we'll be able to pop those in the oven, and they should be in by 7... 705? I think the oven's ready. I'm gonna go get the baguettes and start baking. Baguettes are a little bit different. We have to transfer them from the couche onto the loader. We use this little flipper to do it. So like I mentioned when we're shaping, we shape them and then put them on the couche seam side down. So what I'm doing is I'm flipping them upside down, seam side up, and then putting them back seam side down on the loader. We want that seam to end up on the bottom. It's kind of what I like about baking is that, like, you're really rewarded for your attention to detail. You're like a rule follower. Baking is for you. It's 719 a.m. Baguettes are about to go in the oven. The sun's coming up. The bakery crew's all here, and yeah, we're a little ahead of schedule. We're looking good. The first round of baguettes are in. These bottom rows are starting to ear up really nicely, and we're just giving them a whole bunch of steam right now. Because they have a shorter bake time, more steam faster is going to benefit them significantly, and baguettes just love steam. They're starting to look ready. The back row goes a bit faster than the front row, so once the front row looks almost ready, you check out the back row, and this looks nice. It's got a darker color on the ear. It's nice and golden brown. Like, these all look different, right? And that's kind of the point. That's the beauty of hand shaping. If you want every single one to look exactly the same, then you machine shape. Like, that's that, like, crackling eggshell crust is what we're going for. Like, it's just so crispy. Okay, let me grab the next round of baguettes. It's just about 8 a.m. All of the front of house staff are showing up. They're going to fill the pastry case and the bread display and get the shop prepared for our opening at 8 30. We're all in. It's 8 30. All the bread's out. We're open. We set up our scheduling here so that everybody is baking off their own dough, and one of the rewards you get from getting here at three in the morning is that you get to see how the dough you mixed and shaped yesterday turned out. You get to learn from it, and if it's a good bake, there's no greater feeling. It's just so exciting to watch your bread rise and see it turn out the way you wanted and, like, hold that loaf in your hands and feel satisfied.