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    Secrets of a Waterloo Baker
    Secrets of a Waterloo Baker
    Secrets of a Waterloo Baker
    Ebook193 pages3 hours

    Secrets of a Waterloo Baker

    By Inara Strungs

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    About this ebook

    Long ago, in 1918, a small traditional bakery was built in the inner city suburb of Waterloo, Sydney. This was well before the tower blocks, the ice addicts, the trendy new apartments and the fashionable restaurants in Danks St.

    The last owners of Elma bakery were a Latvian migrant family who baked primarily rye bread (black, and sweet and sour) from old Latvian and Estonian sourdough recipes. The bread was highly prized and sent all over Australia, and the recipes were a closely guarded secret.

    This book explores what the secret of the bread actually was. Was it just the recipe, or did the milieu of Waterloo and its history contribute, or was it the Latvian background of the bakers?

    This is a book (with many photos) for anyone interested in old trades such as traditional bread making, and baking sourdough. It’s also for the many new residents of Waterloo to gain an insight into its interesting history, from convicts to Bubonic plague to Green bans (which lengthened the life of the bakery). It’s also for Australians in general to learn how migrants enriched their nation.

    It’s a book for anyone who wants to hear the Waterloo baker finally reveal his secrets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTellwell Talent
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781925447484
    Secrets of a Waterloo Baker
    Author

    Inara Strungs

    Ināra Strungs is an Australian Latvian living in Brisbane. She has qualifications in Arts and medicine (histopathology). Her previously published books are a novel, 'Sunstone', and a work of nonfiction about her parents’ traditional Baltic bakery in Sydney, 'Secrets of a Waterloo Baker'.

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      Book preview

      Secrets of a Waterloo Baker - Inara Strungs

      SECRETS OF A WATERLOO BAKER

      Ināra Strungs

      This is an IndieMosh book

      brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

      an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

      PO BOX 147

      Hazelbrook NSW 2779

      http://www.indiemosh.com.au/

      Copyright 2016 © Ināra Strungs

      All rights reserved

      Illustrated by Linda McInally

      Photographs supplied by Aivars Štubis,

      Oskars Štubis and Anita Apinis-Herman

      Licence Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.

      To my parents,

      Līga and Pēteris Strungs,

      bakers extraordinaire.

      Kviešu maize, griķu maize,

      Tā pa ciemu lenderēja;

      Rudzu maize, miežu maize,

      Tā saimītes turētāja.

      (Latvian folksong)

      [White bread and buckwheat bread

      Just loaf around;

      But rye bread and barley bread

      Feed the people.]

      INTRODUCTION

      ‘Every food worth eating has a secret recipe,’ says my friend as we tuck into a delicious risotto in a restaurant in Danks St, Waterloo.

      ‘Exactly, and why would you give it away to the opposition?’ I reply. We agree that there is something in the risotto that definitely isn’t in the list of ingredients and which the chef wouldn’t divulge.

      I am in Sydney visiting family and am having lunch with an old schoolfriend. Though I was born in Sydney and lived there for 21 years, I still like to be a tourist when I come to visit from Brisbane, where I now live. Hence I thought it would be interesting to check out Danks St with its trendy restaurants and galleries. It is an interesting mix of old warehouses and factories, modern units and street cafes, with palm trees and sports cars lining the road.

      We sit drinking our long blacks after the meal and discuss the change in the area since we’d attended the nearby Sydney Girls High School. Waterloo has gone the way of many inner city suburbs—originally industrial or slums but now redeveloped as highly desirable areas to live. They are close to the city, the beaches and other facilities, and have good transport and a sense of history.

      Then my friend says, ‘Talking about secret recipes, your family must have had a few.’

      I’ve also just been thinking about my family. They had a small business, called Elma Bakery, several blocks away from Danks St. I’d lived there with them in the 1970s and continued to visit the bakery until the 1990s.

      I think of the delicious smell of baking bread, a hot, moist, slightly sour smell that stimulated the taste buds and always pervaded the bakery and our living quarters, and of the way the bread was baked.

      ‘Yes,’ I say to my friend after a pause, ‘there were secret recipes. No one wanted them after the bakery was demolished in 1991, but I bet there are people today who wouldn’t mind having them.’

      ‘Exactly, all those passionate home bakers and those who are obsessed with cooking shows or with natural food. You should record the way it was baked before it’s too late. Do you know the secret recipe?’

      ‘No. Not really.’

      ‘Well, go and find out. You always said you had hundreds of happy customers who couldn’t find any other bread like it.’

      I decide to take a journey into the past to uncover the secret art of black bread (and sweet-and-sour) in Waterloo.

      1

      BREAD, BEAUTIFUL BREAD

      I go home to my parents place in Arncliffe, where I’m staying while in Sydney, and think about Elma Bakery. My mother and I have a few glasses of wine, and my father whisky, as we discuss the bread. They offer me some black bread they’ve bought and say, ‘It’s not too bad.’ Every bread is measured against the bread they used to bake.

      I lie in bed afterwards, considering what the secret of the bread’s excellence and success really was. I try to consider it in a logical way and go through various factors.

      Was it the place, Waterloo, where it was baked? In other words, was it the effect of the environment or the terroir, to use a viticultural analogy? Was Waterloo a place where migrant food thrived, like Dixon St in Sydney or Acland St, Melbourne? Was it the long history of Waterloo, one of the oldest suburbs in Sydney? Or did the bakers and their Estonian and Latvian heritage hold the secret to the bread? Or was it, I hear you ask, the actual recipe, which I’ll have to get hold of.

      Before I explore these factors, I think about Elma bread and research breads in general and what the current state of play is in this field. It’s such a basic part of life and seems so commonplace, yet there is much ferment in breadmaking. There are various movements promoting changes in breadmaking, even ‘bread wars’. There is a powerful artisan bread movement and linked to this, methods devised to judge or appreciate bread. This has all become more prominent in the twenty-five years since Elma Bakery closed its doors.

      The types of bread baked at Elma Bakery were mainly black bread and sweet-and-sour. I remember eating it warm, just out of the oven, with butter or peanut butter melting over its spongy surface, and savouring the aromatic, crusty taste. They were dense breads made of varying proportions of wheat and rye flour and didn’t look like conventional Australian white bread. In some ways they were an acquired taste, or bread you had to grow up with to appreciate. Hence it was eagerly sought by European migrants, particularly Latvians and other Balts. More recently, it has become more popular with the general population when artisan baking has come to the fore. In earlier years Elma Bakery also produced a health bread and a fruit bread. The fruit bread was more to Australian tastes and I used to sell it to my friends at school.

      Of course, bread overall has a very rich history. Some type of bread is a staple of the diet of many cultures in the world, whether white bread, brioche, pumpernickel, rice bread, naan, lavash, damper or another of the thousands of breads available. Bread is as old as it is ubiquitous. There is evidence prehistoric humans may have eaten a type of bread at least 30,000 years ago in Europe, since starch grains, possibly from ferns or cattails, have been found on grinding stones.[1] From the Neolithic Age 10,000 years ago, grains became the mainstay of making bread.

      Not surprisingly, bread, breadmaking and ovens are part of the culture and folklore of many ethnic groups. In some peasant mythologies, the rising of dough is associated with the rising and nurturing powers of the sun, and the oven, already womblike in form, is a fertility symbol and has magic dimensions in that it can transform food from a raw to cooked state.[2] There are many metaphors involving the concept of bread, for example, as a synonym for the basic necessities of life. Bread also figures in religious ceremonies such as the Christian Eucharist. Bread is important in Latvian culture, from where my family originated, but more of that later.

      I think of how bread has been baked over the centuries and how this has changed in recent decades. In the nineteenth century in Australia, grain was ground in public mills and bread was baked at home, in public baking houses,[3] or in privately owned bakeries (such as W.M. Hennessy’s Royal Park Bread Factory in Melbourne which employed 40 workers in 1889, according to the North Melbourne Advertiser, 20 December 1889). Family bakeries developed in the early twentieth century, and there were also larger scale bakeries which used mechanisation, such as dough and moulding machines. Sliced bread was introduced in the 1950s and mass production followed in the 1960s. The methods used in plant bakeries are based on the Chorleywood Bread Process. This was developed in Chorleywood, England in 1961, so bread could be baked faster and with the lower protein wheat available in England.[4]

      This switch to mass production was why Jane Wilson from the Vogue Entertaining Guide visited Elma Bakery in 1991 and wrote nostalgically that it was a ‘time-warp of a bakery’. She went on to say that it ‘produces two types of authentic Estonian bread, a tangily aromatic sweet-and-sour and a rye’, and praised ‘the superb crusting on the bread’, which ‘is produced by the gentle radiant heat of the brick oven’.[5] This was in contrast to the electric and gas ovens used in large commercial bakeries.

      The ‘time warp’ type of bakery became popular again as the artisan bread movement developed. There were various reasons for this—the urge to go back to basics in a mechanised, computerised and globalised world, and dissatisfaction with the taste of bread produced in large plant bakeries, which is sometimes described as ‘flavourless fluff’, etc. American chef Julia Childs famously said, ‘How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?’ There were also health concerns about the chemical additives in commercial bread.

      Much of the movement was concentrated on producing sourdough though in France it was applied to a wider range of bread, such as breadsticks, croissants and brioche as well. There has been much passion generated in this resurgence of interest in bread, as one would expect with such a staple of most Western diets. It has spawned things like the ‘slow baking’ movement and the Real Bread Campaign.

      It has also prompted a book called ‘Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way it is Made, and the People Who Make It’, published in 2006 by Steven Kaplan. His Proustian description is worth quoting to show how strongly he feels about bread:

      I was enraptured and exalted by good bread. It excited all my senses; it spurred dreams. Delighting body and spirit alike, it inscribed deep traces of beauty and joy, Proustian moments that immobilised time. Good bread was sufficient unto itself; at any hour of the day; it needed no accompaniment, not even butter. It jealously satisfies all desires: vox panis, vox dei. And yet the pleasure of finding it and eating it was now becoming rare.[6]

      Kaplan explains how French bread suffered a decline in quality over almost a century as it was mass produced and became flavourless. In the 1990s, ‘bread of the French tradition’, without additives or freezing, was again produced and flavour was regained.

      Kaplan, along with sourdough artisan bakers, has also been instrumental in popularising criteria for the judging of bread, particularly its taste, much in the way wine and cheese and other foods are judged. These are known as ‘organoleptic’ criteria,[7] related to their sensory properties or detected by the sense organs.

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