Real Bread Hero: Tom Baker

Though a quiet, entirely residential street in the Birmingham suburb of Cotteridge might not seem the obvious place to find a booming bread making business, Tom Baker’s house there is the HQ of Loaf, one of the country’s growing number of microbakeries. As most of the bread is for subscribers to its bread club, paying £11 a month up front for a weekly large loaf, it is also one of the country’s pioneering Community Supported Bakeries.

Tom founded Loaf in August 2009 to bring real food back to the heart of the local community. As the name suggests, at the centre of this social enterprise is Real Bread. ‘It’s my weak point,’ confesses Tom as he busies himself in the kitchen, knocking up a late supper of bangers and mash before we get stuck into an evening of dough making. His epiphany came when ‘a friend who was a tutor at Le Manoir [aux Quat’ Saisons] gave me a loaf of sourdough. I was blown away by bread that actually tasted of something.’

Homebakery

Using a cob (earth and straw) oven in his back garden and an ordinary domestic gas oven in the Victorian terrace’s kitchen, Tom turns out up to 55 loaves in each weekly bake for subscribers and a couple of local shops. He chose the homebakery route as a quick and relatively cheap way to start up. Having built the clay oven for his own use a few years ago after attending Richard Scadding’s Earth Ovens course, set up costs were only around £750, mainly spent on legal fees in incorporating Loaf as a company limited by guarantee, insurance and installing a hand basin to meet health and safety regulations.

It’s around 10pm when we begin mixing the white and malted sourdoughs. I ask Tom how he made the jump from being the keen amateur (who I first met at the The Rise of Real Bread in November 2009) to giving up his career with the NHS to concentrate on Loaf full time. ‘I’d toyed with the idea for a while but the conference was pivotal, listening to Dan and Johanna [McTiernan, founders of The Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite, Yorkshire], Andrew Whitley and John Letts [of the Oxford Bread Group]. In the evening, I had a few too many drinks with Dan and Johanna and on the train back I got plotting how I could make Loaf work. I didn’t get home until about midnight but couldn’t stop talking about it and ten days later, I quit my job.’ 

Tom is mainly self-taught, cutting his teeth on recipes from Jamie Oliver’s Return of the Naked Chef but quickly filling the shelves of both his office and oven with the bread of Bertinet, Hamelman, Lepard, Reinhart, Whitley, and many of the other authors to be found on the Companions page of our website. Of these, he says that Wing and Scott’s The Bread Builders has been the most useful but that ‘experience is invaluable.’ A stint at The 
Handmade Bakery was followed by much trial and error at home before Tom was happy that his loaves were up to a consistent standard high enough to start charging.

Loafmongers

As Tom does all of the kneading and mixing by hand, he uses the energy saving ‘work it a bit, leave it to rest for a bit’ method outlined by Dan Lepard in The Handmade Loaf. Over tea in one of the breaks, Tom tells me that despite journalists suggesting that with his surname, a life in bread making was inevitable, he has found no evidence of any loafmongers in the Baker family tree. That said, his ancestry contains one strong link in the form of his great, great grandfather, Joseph Baker, inventor of a patented flour scoop and sifter and founder of Joseph Baker & Sons, which as Baker Perkins remains a supplier of ovens and other equipment to the trade.

For the baking world, Loaf’s schedule is a pretty civilised one. Having knocked it on the head at just after midnight, we don’t have to get up again until 6.30am. By the time I shuffle down for a restorative cuppa, already Tom has the oven lit and the ingredients weighed out for the yeasted breads. Now he’s down the garden, digging up beetroot for that week’s special bread - making it even more seasonal and local than I’d envisaged when I first suggested it. 

We spend the next few hours kneading and shaping, the kitchen slowly filling up with tins, bannetons (proving baskets) and linen-lined trays of white sourdough, ciabatta, sourdough rye and the experimental beetroot rolls. 

Caressing and stretching the slippery ciabatta dough is fun, but turning the white sourdough from the bannetons onto floured peels, slashing the dough and flicking each loaf onto the right spot of the cob oven’s brick floor was always going to be the highlight. All three actions are one shot chances but gamely Tom lets this novice have a go. Thankfully, I don’t cock it up and so help with several loaves in each batch. Twenty or so minutes later, they come out, burnished chestnutbrown crusts contrasting with the creamy-white spirals of banneton dusting flour and darker bursts where we had slashed the dough. The loaves crackle as we dash the new deliveries back into the kitchen.

Positive reactions

Unsurprisingly, reaction to Loaf has been positive. ‘People love it, the rye bread especially.’ When she tried one of the 100% rye loaves Tom had baked for a Soil Association conference, Darina Allen of Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, renowned for its bread making classes, said that it was so light in texture that she couldn’t believe there was no wheat in it. Guests at a Friends of the Earth organic barbeque were similarly encouraging.

On the local front, other than a slight hiccup when the person next door mistook the pre-dawn slapping of Tom’s French-style dough working for a noisy break in, neighbours are quite happy to have ‘the bread man’ on the street. ‘You just can’t get decent sourdough round here. Selfridges in the city centre, maybe,’ says Tom, which is perhaps part of the reason that eight of the original ten subscribers are still signed up to the bread club and have been joined by a further twelve members. 

All this means that Tom just cannot keep up with demand. At the time of writing (mid-August 2010), there are ten people on the bread club’s waiting list, cooking and baking classes are sold out for the rest of the year and Tom has had to turn down an order for 400 buns from a high-end city restaurant.

The future

This all means that the next step is moving to bigger premises with a bigger oven. ‘I have my eye on the pigeon lofts behind the garden,’ says Tom. He’s also looking at the possibility of setting up in a community centre proposed for a nearby park. ‘I want to create a sort of urban River Cottage, with a kitchen, wood oven and charcuterie. Loaf would be a centre for artisan food producers where people can not only learn traditional skills but use the place to set up their own businesses.’ 

The idea is to take on staff and maybe an apprentice from the local community and when the space is not being used for teaching or baking, local people could rent the cooking facilities for their start-up food enterprises. 

Baking over and kitchen cleaned down, Tom, his wife Jane and I we settle down to a lunch of a delicious fennel-studded salami from a local deli, rocket from the garden and (naturally) fresh Real Bread. I ask if there are any tips Tom has for anyone else planning to start up a bakery. ‘Get experience in a bakery – invaluable. Enthusiasm is more important than skill – you’ve got to be able to get out there and sell it. Skill you will learn, and have to, quickly. Oh, and a tolerant partner,’ he adds, prompting a smile from Jane.

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 5, September 2010

November 2018 update: Tom and Jane set up Rye & Roses / Rhyg a Rhosod in Maccynlleth, Wales. Loaf continues to be run by the cooperative.