The Most Incredible Bakery in Copenhagen

Right now it's 4.45, I got up at 4. And normally I get up like quarter to four. So, come in. The oven is already hot because I have a timer on it. So the timer turns on the oven. So what I do mostly in the morning is I just get in, turn on the coffee machine. And then I go get the dough and then we start baking. Then we have a look inside the fridges. So you see this fridge here, this is where I make the dough. I make the dough in the mixing machine. And then when the dough is ready, I put it in the fridge. So this whole fridge, you can see all the doors are completely filled with dough. And this is actually a new test on some new flour. So they have a label, but all the other ones are just the regular dough. And we are going to do, I think, that one. And then a few more here. We need three doughs in total. So this dough here, like in essence, I refresh the sourdough the day before yesterday. And then yesterday I made the dough with that sourdough. And then that dough has been in the fridge. So it takes about two days to make the dough. And what we are basically waiting for is that the steam on the oven is ready. If the steam isn't ready, we cannot bake yet. But it normally takes about 40 minutes. I think if we start cutting out some buns, then we will be able to bake as soon as the oven is ready. We started together, Frederik, in a restaurant next to our childhood home. Back then we were just like dishwashers peeling carrots and stuff like that. In a little restaurant, we were like 13 years old. This is actually my 20th year in hospitality. Like we finished high school and we moved into the city. And I wanted a job. And the only thing I wanted to do was still keep cooking. But then I got a little job in a restaurant. And then I became a chef's apprentice. Then I worked for free at Noma for my summer holidays. Actually, I spent my holidays when I was a chef's apprentice in one restaurant. I spent my holidays working for free at Noma. And I just felt like there was a little bit more to cooking than just doing Italian cooking. It's like very casual and chill Italian food. And then I switched my apprenticeship to another place where I worked for my former boss, Christian. And I worked with him for like five or six years and ended up with him. He opened one of Noma's second restaurants called 108. And then I ended up working with him for like five years and being the sous chef there. Many people would probably consider that one of the highest rankings that you could get in the industry. But I don't really care about that. I just wanted to... I didn't feel so good there. It wasn't really my type of food, I felt like. So I wanted to get back to making food for a lot of people. And then I got this idea about making bakeries. And that does food as well. Because when you make bread, you can make quite a high amount of organic and high quality food for a pretty low price. It's really good, like actually from a business standpoint, it's a pretty smart way to make a business. Because you can make something that most people like for a pretty low price. And that seems very exclusive in some way. And that's what I think is so amazing about bread. And some people, they're really afraid of eating bread and they think it's bad. It's just because they don't eat the right bread made from the right grains. You need to eat like long fermented sourdough bread made from really, really high quality produce. This flour we're using here is organic and biodynamic and amazing flour. When you eat what I call low quality bread. So now you can see that the steam is ready. Look at here. This one here. Steam is ready. We can actually pop the first bread in. Then you see all the buns are laying on the stone. Then you press the button. When you mix flour and water together. At some point, it will start fermenting. And that is when lactic bacteria is starting to eat the nutrition in the bread. In this case, it's the protein which is the gluten and the sugars in the flour. And the things that's pretty hard for the body to digest is most of the time is the gluten. But if you have the sourdough kind of processing the gluten. Then you eat it and you get it into your body and it's much easier to digest the bread. And also absorb the nutrition from the flour and the bread. And sometimes when you have really cheap bread. It's made with really cheap flour. And that flour is most often it's grown very rapidly. And then the flour actually doesn't have that much nutrition. So then you and it's really not well suited to baking actually. And then you add on different types of preservatives and stuff like that to make the flour better. Even though it is what I would consider shitty flour. And then you start making bread with that. And I have this thing like I want food to be real and like clean. It's a very simple recipe. But the process of making it is a little bit like it's not complicated. It's just a little bit. There's a lot of things that have to go right for the bread to come out good. So these ones are breakfast rolls. So these are what the people in Denmark they eat for breakfast. So we are baking about here in the weekends. We are baking around 250 of these. BMO is bottemost. So it's a bun with butter and cheese. And it's like it's one of those things that everybody eats in the morning. You can smell the bread now. Smells good. So then I was working at 108. And I was the sous-chef there. And I didn't really feel so. It wasn't really my type of cooking. And I wanted to cook for a lot of people. And then I was on a holiday. And I got the idea for what became Lille Bakery in Dresden. And I opened that together with my now ex-girlfriend and her friend. That's like six, seven years ago or something now. The bakery is still running. It's just the girls who has it. I don't have it anymore. After Lille Bakery, what I've been doing for the past years, I've been like a consultant and helped other businesses make better bread and food. In many different ways. It can be like developing concepts. It could also be just like recipes or training staff at a big canteen chain. It can be many different things. My whole point is just like how can I make whatever I know available to many people. Mostly it's about connecting chefs and bakers and millers together and helping them all make better projects. So I work really closely with the mills. And then I work together with the canteen chains and the bakeries on how to train their staff so they know how to make these good products and continue to make them. Because one thing is learning it. Another thing is like keep making them. So Torvik is a little town north of Copenhagen. And there's about 2,000 people living here. And they come here on a regular basis. You'll probably meet a lot of them later. It's a really, really beautiful place. Very close to nature. There's a big forest. If you go that way, you go into the forest. And if you go the other way, you go into the ocean. So it's like a middle spot between the ocean and the forest. And it's amazing. Like some of our underlying principles here at Summer Canteen is health and a concept of longevity. And a lot about longevity is about getting out into nature. Forest bathing it's called. Like getting out, getting into nature. It's very important. And like getting your feet into the grass or into the water. So what I recommend people is like come out here, have a lunch, go for a swim, go for a run, go for a bike ride or something. I personally love to be in nature. And I hope the people will like it too. So we just started doing cardamom swirls, which is really popular here in Denmark. And so I roll a few of them the day in advance. So we just need to take them out. Then here in the fridge. So my routine is actually what we're doing now. But normally I would make a lot of dough also. So we're a bit, it's a bit chill on Sundays. But on the weekdays I'm like, I'm pretty busy. It's like making dough for the day after. Baking all the dough from the day prior. So it can be quite intense actually in the morning. And then the people who are doing the service, they get here around 7. And then they will set up the cafe, take the chairs and tables out. Then we start making coffees and we do morning service. Yogurt, morning platters, all sorts of things. And these ones they're going into the prover down here underneath the oven over here. We have a little proving chamber. It's actually quite simple. There's a little tray in the bottom where you put some water. And that water will evaporate through a heater. And then it will start creating a little bit of humidity and warmth. And that's where we can prove our doughs. And we prove the dough around 28 degrees. I actually didn't want to do so much sweet stuff in the beginning. But people they like, they really wanted something like a soft dough like this one. As I just said before, this place is about health and stuff. But you also need to give people what they want. You can't only do what you want. This can also be a part of longevity. You need to have some good things in life that you look forward to having. So it's just like this. You fill up the oven, you empty the oven, you fill up the oven, you empty the oven. And you do that until you don't have any more dough. Simple? It's pretty simple. And then when we've done that, then we can start cleaning this table down. And then we set up for the breakfast service. 80% of the baking is just timed. It's a program. But the last 20% is where you look at the dough and look at the bread and see how it feels. These first buns are done. I'm just going to make a cup of coffee and then we can keep baking. Which coffee would you like? What can you make? I can make anything. Flat white? Flat white cup. You want flat white cup? So here's a flat white for you, my friend. I don't do a latte art, but I do a nice swirl. I don't think the most important thing is if you can make a swan and a heart in the coffee. The most important thing is that the coffee is good. That we have amazing coffee. And that we have good milk. And that the foam is right. So you see the foam is pretty good. But I don't really care so much about what it looks like. It's good. I'm going to keep baking. It's really good dough today. Very good dough. So the next dough we're doing here, we're doing it with spell flakes. The first buns we did was with sesame and pumpkin seeds. The next ones we're doing is with spell flakes. And the last ones is the sesame buns. So then it's the same dough, but we're putting different toppings on. Okay, sometimes people they comment on the price of the bread. But the flour is like three times the price of shitty bread flour. And you see I'm up here early every morning. We make the dough from scratch. It's really healthy. It's very tasty. And then sometimes people like they think it's expensive that a bun is 18 kroner. What I normally sometimes tell people if they think it's expensive. Then I say like there's flour down there. You can just go home and bake it. It's very cheap to bake yourself. We are really limited on production space and service space. The whole idea is that you basically need to do the rough production here in the morning. Bake all the bread and all that. And then we just turn it into a service section. So then that's why I need to be here pretty early. This is pretty much it. And then the back table where we just prep. In regards to our produce it's very, very, very, very important we get the best produce. Because our cooking and baking is very simple. And if you don't have the best produce you cannot do things so simple as we do them. All the flour we are getting is from a mill here in Denmark. The mill is called Aurean. And it's actually like an organic and biodynamic mill that's existed for around 50 years. And they used to only make whole wheat flour. But in the recent years they've started making a little bit of sifted flour. And that's what we're using the most here. For meat I only use one meat and that is pork from a special place in Fyn called Hinton. These pigs they have such an amazing good life. It's so good. And the flavor of the pork is amazing. And I really love it. So that's the only meat we have on the menu. And we're getting ham for our morning platters. We get minced meat for our meatball toast. We get bacon and those things we're getting from only that supply. Directly from them. And then we have a small little community farm here around 20 kilometers away called Monedalen. They're just delivering us like with herbs like minor very, very, very, very, very good ingredients. Such as at the moment right now we're getting amazing tomatoes from them. I actually don't care about the price. So I'd rather have the guests pay five kroner extra and get the best produce. Because the time it takes to cut a shitty tomato in regards to a good tomato is the same time. It's just the cost of the produce, right? So these are the tent loaves. We're doing about 40 of these a day. So this is what I would consider very unique for our places. We don't do these loaves that all the other bakeries are doing. We do tent loaves. So we're doing these tent loaves and we have to scale them all because they have to be a certain size. The buns like it's just between there between 140 and 150 gram of dough. But these loaves here they can be pretty hard to like look at them and just say like is this 850? So I scale all the dough. So plenty of flour. I've actually started adding a little bit extra flour because it looks good when it comes out of the oven. So you can see it's the same dough as the buns. But it's just the way we shape them. So the buns are more or less just like chopped out with the bench knife. But the tent loaves we need to shape them a little bit. And we put a little bit of flour here in the middle. A little bit of flour on the side. Flour on the scale. Then you have a little piece there. And you make a new piece. This one is 780. Then it's 850 there. 850. Then we do a little shaping here. So just like toss it over. There. And then we'll flip it in a little bit of flour. My favorite bakery is Batting Bakery. The guy who taught me to bake bread. He is working actually not so far away from here in Charlottenlund. He's the best baker in Denmark in my opinion. He like all the good bakers around Copenhagen. Many of them has been through with Lars. Yeah, I worked with him as well. Yeah, it was a great experience. So I was actually working there for about nine months. So after 108 I resigned my job. And I gave myself a one year window to open what became Lille Bakery. And in that time I had to learn how to bake bread. But I also needed to have a job so I was working in Apollo Bar. With Frederik Pille Bras Restaurant. So he's the guy who has, actually in September, the cafe. And then he had a restaurant also in the city center. So I was working there full time. And then I was, every Saturday I was going to Batting Bakery to bake with Lars. To learn how to bake bread. And that was a great experience. It was also a little bit tough because I was working in Apollo Bar until the evening. And then going home, get a couple hours sleep. And then wake up, go to the bakery, bake all morning. And then go straight from the bakery back to the restaurant to work on Saturday evening. What Lars really made me understand is the quality of flour. That the flour needs to be really good. But the other thing he also taught me was how to ferment and make the sourdough and all that. Like making a sourdough bread is fairly easy. But making consistent good sourdough products every day, that can be tricky. That's the hard part. So for the bread nerds out there, I'm basically just folding the dough over itself and giving it a little push. I used to call it the calzone. Because it's a little bit like a calzone. It's a little bit, if you see here. You put the... And then you close it like this. And then you close it like a calzone. The name of the place is Summer Canteen. Yeah, so actually it started because my sister-in-law. So my girlfriend's little sister. She once said something like, sommer all rund. Sommer all year in Danish. And I just felt like it sounded so cool. So first I thought it was gonna be called summer all year. But then I was like, maybe it's better for a slogan. So that's actually our slogan. And then the name became Summer Canteen. Because it's also that we are many different things. We're not just a bakery. We're not just a cafe. We're not just a coffee place. We like many things, which is like a canteen. And then a canteen is basically a place that serves a lot of people. So then I felt like, okay, it has to be called canteen. But canteen in Danish, kantine, is a little bit boring. And it's not international. And so I felt like, okay, let's call it summer in Danish and canteen in English. Because I love summer. I don't like winter. So then here it's summer all year. That's basically why it's called that. I look forward for winter season when we need to make more like stews. Right now we're doing a lot of salads and very fresh dishes with all the nice produce. But I'm looking forward to autumn and winter where we are gonna cook some nice Hokkaido. As you can see, the Hokkaido pumpkins are starting to come up. Then do dishes with Hokkaido pumpkins and lots of spices and all these things. I really look forward to that. Just as the buns comes out of the oven, we will start putting new bread in the oven. And then these breads, they will come out exactly when we open. So we are spot on time. This is the best time. Because you've done all the preparations yesterday and I can feel the dough is good. And then now it's just like finishing it up. And I really enjoy that. And then I like it when I'm walking around the cafe and I can hear people say like Oh, this is really nice. This tastes good. I enjoy this. That's probably actually maybe the best thing. You can hear the response from the guests. So I have a friend who lives in Hellerup. And he just mentioned this spot and said it was like the new big thing. You should come here before it's like all hyped up. We got the breakfast plate, which is some bread, some ham, cheese and eggs and a small salad. You got some yogurt. Some yogurt and sourdough bun with cheese. My favorite. That was your favorite? Yeah. That was my next question. What was your favorite? I mean, I'm always a bun with cheese girl. It's my favorite. I could eat it every day. So that's normally what I go for. BMO. Yeah, exactly. BMO. Bun with cheese. I mean, I feel like it's more cottage kind of. More cozy, cute. It's not as... I also like that they have more than bread. They also do lunch and stuff like that. I'm missing that a lot with the Copenhagen ones. Yeah. I feel like it's just overall more open and more cozy. More like a restaurant experience. It's not as stressful. Yeah, exactly. I think it says itself. It's beautiful. It's cozy. It's friendly. High quality. It's just... Yeah, I love it here. I mean, I think it was needed, right? I think Torbik has everything to offer, but it didn't have... I think the level that the audience who lives here kind of expected. And they had to go into the city and now they have it locally. I mean, I'm not local local since I live on the other side of the forest. So for me, it's great to come. And I guess the locals, I guess they're happy with the level. I think it's always full. So from what I see, they're happy. It's almost 7 o'clock and we are done with the baking. And what we're going to do now is now we set up for the breakfast. And when the breakfast is ready, then we're kind of ready for until 11. And then we need to set up at 11. We set up for lunch at 12. Yeah, so the cheese is sliced, the butter is whipped and the buns are just been baked. And then we have the coffee is ready. Coffee grinders are ready. The filter coffee is ready. The milk is in the pitchers and everything. Because the more we can do now before the guests arrive, the better it is. So here is the POS system. We have the terminal. Then we're actually ready. Well, I've worked here since it opened actually. And I needed a job since I was traveling in the start of this year. And then I saw an Instagram that Jesper needed people. And then me and my friend both applied because we thought it would be fun to be able to work here close to the water all summer. I really like that all the people working here are very nice, which makes it like cozy and fun to be here. And I also like, I really like when it's busy, time goes fast. If you could describe the bakery in one word, what would it be? Busy? No, not always. I would say... What do you think? Like wholesome? Wholesome. Holy clip. Either I'm here like from 7 to 3 or from 10 to 5. So I really like the early shifts because I like the bike ride in the morning and I can see the sun. And that's really nice. And then all the, like the first couple of hours go by really fast because a lot of people come to buy their breakfast. And then it's becoming a bit more calm now. And then the lunch runs, which is good. And I usually like, I'm a friend of house, so I'm like either at the cashier or making coffee. I also like making coffee since now I'm starting to get good at it, which is nice. This one is a yeast dough. The only thing we do with yeast is the cardamom swirl. The yeast in the sourdough is not strong enough to make the cardamom swirl. It will simply not prove. Then you need to add 800 grams of this. This is butter, cardamom, sugar, and that's it. We put this in the middle. I actually hired one of my friends to come teach me. And he is Rasmus from Copenhagen Bakery. You're never too good to learn something new. I feel like I'm pretty good at making bread, but cakes, that's another level. That's something else. He taught me something about how you make the dough. So it needs to be very precise in the amount of butter and sugar and salt and how you mix it. It's very important. They're like really popular. People can't control. I can't eat them. I have made a deal with myself. I can't eat them while I'm at work because I can't control myself. The first day we had them, I ate five. And I was like, I can't do it. So I don't eat them at work. I only eat them on the way home. So, then you give it a little roll that way. And then a little push, push, push, push. And then a good roll in the middle. Like that. And then we use a pizza slicer. And then you take them up. You roll them over your finger. There's one. And I scale them all. Weigh each of them. They have to be 100 grams. Do you want to see this one first? So this one here is tomatoes from Mondalen. And then it's with tomatoes sliced. And then these ones are grated. And then mixed with a little bit of garlic, olive oil. And then Marie, she's putting oregano from the farm as well. A little bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. With a slice of bread. Leafy beets. This is the top when you have a beet root. This is what comes out. And then we have a little bit of beets here. And then you have a slice of grilled bread. And then you have some aioli. And then what we have here, these are meatballs. They're made with pork from a Danish producer. And this is the best pork you can get for money. And then a little bit of tomato sauce. So you have the fattiness of the aioli. The heavy meatballs. And then you have a little bit of grated cheese on top of the meatball. So there's a little bit of beets. Then you will have a couple of pickled cucumbers. So this is really nice to break the fattiness also. You're going to have some parsley on top. A little bit of oregano. Like that. This is coriander and dill chops. Then a little bit of olive oil. That's good. So this is for you, Fredrik. Thank you. So we're making stracciatella with baked bell peppers. And we're doing a meatball toast. And we are doing lots of delicious stuff here. Putting delicious stuff on a plate. A little bit of salt here. So it's pretty simple. My girlfriend, she said, because I was starting to overthink the menu. And then my girlfriend, Camilla, she told me, Why don't you just make the food you like yourself? And I was like, that's pretty simple. So I just made some food that I like. And it's pretty easy to make all this food because we have so good ingredients.