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| Photo Credit: Courtney Averette |
John Ropelski, owner of &Grain eatery and cafĂ© on North Avenue in Garwood, says he is a slave to the dough. Coming from a family of Polish bakers, bread making is in Ropelski’s blood.
“I like to keep everything to a very high standard.” A bread baker, he says, has to make a lot of bad bread before he can produce good bread.
For Ropelski, bread is more than just what holds your sandwich together. “A good sandwich is good bread.”
To master the art of bread making, Ropelski enrolled in the French Culinary Institute and later working at the renowned New York City bakeries, Bouchon Bakery and Le Pain Quotidien.
“Breads are not glamorous like cake or pastry,” he says. “But bread requires a lot of work.”
Ropelski says bread is more difficult because it requires dealing with yeast. Bread making is a 12-step process, which includes scaling, mixing, rising, proofing, and baking and cooling. “Each bread has a different characteristic,” Ropelski says. “There are a lot of things that could go wrong in these 12 steps.”
A common mistake is over-flouring the bread, especially when making ciabatta—an Italian white bread made from wheat flour and yeast. “Ciabatta has a very wet dough. So people use a lot of flour, which takes away the flavor,” he says.
“Doing it the same way every time actually produces inconsistent results. Bread bakes differently in summer than in winter. Elevation, climate, altitude changes how the bread bakes.”
Another mistake is over-proofing the bread, which alters both the bread’s texture and mouth-feel.
“Good bread, if it’s done right, should have uniform and large spaced holes,” Ropelski says. “A good baguette should have a nice crunch on the outside and be tender on the inside.”“You can avoid over-proofing by adding malt to the recipe,” he says. “The yeast will eat the sugar and the malt will also add brown to the bread’s color. But that will also affect the taste.”
The complicated science behind the breads’ development is the reason his baking schedule begins at 1 a.m. “I was running on four hours of sleep every day,” Ropelski says. “The store would open at 7 a.m. and it would take six hours to make nine breads.”
The daily bread varieties include Italian ciabatta, French baguettes, savory olive loafs, nutritious five-grains and pain de mies. Ropelski also includes custom creations—such as the popular sweet and savory chocolate peanut butter bread.
The hardest part of bread baking is that the procedure changes with the atmosphere and the environment, Ropelski says. “Doing it the same way every time actually produces inconsistent results,” he says. “Bread bakes differently in summer than in winter. Elevation, climate, altitude changes how the bread bakes.”
Ropelski opened &Grain in early 2013. Customers can watch him bake behind his glass-enclosed bakery.
“My friends who own restaurants call me insane because I could be making more money,” Ropelski says. “The general population doesn’t understand bread. All other parts—the kitchen and everything else—can be replicated.”
But not the bread.
Menger Zheng is a Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences junior majoring in journalism and media studies, and minoring in English and food science.
