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Bonkers about bread

Photo: R. RAVINDRAN

BREAD TALK Craig Ponsford

A romance with bread? What could be more prosaic? The bread we’re familiar with after all is grimly functional: sliced, packaged and devoid of any identity. Everything in fact that artisan baker Craig Ponsford believes that bread should not be.

Based in San Francisco, Craig, president of the Breadbakers Guild Of America and owner of the successful ‘Artisan Bakers’ bakery, is among an influential group of bakers who are redefining bread by moving it out of soulless factories and reinventing it, as artists.

Appropriately enough, he’s based in California, which has been steadily changing the way people eat, cook and even think about food with its focus on fresh, seasonal, local produce.

To artisan bakers, creating a painting and a baguette aren’t all that different. Discussing bread with a group of home bakers at the French Loaf on Harrington Road, Craig compares a baker to a jeweller, musician or artist. They all have palettes of materials that their work evolves around. And the results are never identical.

“There are absolutely no absolutes in baking,” says Craig. “Your main product changes all the time because of mother nature: the glutens, enzymes, protein, all these things make baking a little mysterious.”

He adds that nobody can become a baker overnight. Just like any art, it takes dedication, concentration and many years of actual practice. “You can’t just become an artisan. You need years of experience before you understand the variables. You need to keep touching the product every day. You need to experience the process over and over and over again…” He adds with a smile, “In most cases… Sometimes there is a magic person.”

So how do you tell when bread is artisan? Craig lists the basics: It should be as natural and organic as possible, made from just flour, water, salt and yeast.

If it’s a sourdough there may not even be yeast. (Sourdough is a natural starter. It’s kept for years to ferment, fed regularly with flour and water.) “Sourdough is just like wine and cheese,” says Craig, “everything that is needed to ferment the product is already there.” He talks of how San Francisco is famous for its sourdough. “We make it so sour I sometimes say you can screw in a bulb and it will light up,” he laughs. “You hear bakers saying ‘my starter is 200 years old’ there. Their grandfather or great grandfather started it, and they just keep adding flour.”

“The idea of a 200-year-old sourdough is very cool. Very romantic. But the truth is if that starter died and the baker introduced a new one, the customer wouldn’t know.” After all, artisan bread is so organic it’s heavily dependent on its immediate environment. “If I brought my starter here, from San Francisco, and we started feeding it with Indian flour and water, it would change entirely,” he says, adding, “It would become an Indian sourdough.”

Craig’s been baking for about 20 years now. “I went to school to become a chef and got distracted along the way. I became a baker.”

Today, he creates a fascinating variety of artisan breads like Roasted Garlic Sourdough, Irish Soda Bread and Pumpkin Seed Bread besides coming up with innovations like the Brownie Booster, which he calls ‘Red Bull in a brownie.’

“We work with the company that makes boosters for Red Bull and are developing them so they can be baked into brownies and have the same effect.”

They should prove useful for his next go at the prestigious Bread Olympics.

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