My baker's dozen: Bob Wright

Who are you?

I'm the owner and sole employee of Bobs Bread Bakery, based in North Norfolk. My career was in civil engineering, which gave me useful planning skills. Otherwise, my retirement project of baking has been a complete career change for me.

What’s your relationship with the rise of Real Bread?

I have home baked on a family scale for around 40 years and have long been a supporter of organic and other real foods. I’ve always made Real Bread, although I didn’t call it that until I became aware of the Real Bread Campaign a decade ago. Having become a microbaker, I love to talk to my customers about the benefits of my Real Bread and I hope that have converted a few people. In my role as a local councillor, I speak to our local schools and hope to get them growing their own loaves next season.

What does Real Bread mean to you?

To me Real Bread is just one element of real or slow food. Making food from a few basic ingredients is more satisfying and healthier than processed foods, and cheaper too. Back when I began baking in the ‘80s I recall a wall chart of E numbers that horrified me and which I have tried to avoid. Real Bread is an everyday example of simple and healthy living.

Where, when and how did your love of Real Bread begin?

The paths to the oven door are varied. For me it all began in my childhood. My mother baked most of the bread eaten by our family. I still recall the aroma of her loaves as they cooled in the kitchen; and the pleasure of her firm and tasty sandwiches compared to the limp and bland offerings at friends’ birthday parties.

In the perverse way of the teenager, as I grew older I shied away from the kitchen and never really experienced joining her in the simple delights of mixing and baking. However, flour had definitely entered my blood and when I left home it was not long before I tinkered with baking my own. My mother's bread was certainly an inspiration and so at that time was John Seymour's freshly-published Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, which also had me bottling, allotmenting and trying many other food-related crafts

A milestone in my bakery life was a family recipe for treacle bread, shared with me by a colleague from Yorkshire. This wholesome, wholemeal loaf was a revelation and I've been making this now for four decades.

What do you do?

I make around a hundred Real Bread loaves each week, of seven or eight fairly traditional and sourdough types, for farmers’ markets. In-between those events, I bake for a local bistro, local delicatessen, local residents and friends too. Some of these are delivered on my three wheeled Christiania cargo bike, which has the twin benefits of keeping me fit and providing a mobile advertisement for my wares. 

What’s your aim, mission, ethos or motivation?

I enjoy the act of creating Real Bread loaves in my kitchen and sharing these with people and businesses in my local area. The interaction with these is satisfying and I love that these people have become addicted to these, and the concept that good, simple food is worthwhile. 

How did things develop?

I'm sure that many of you also make bread in your kitchens, by hand or by machine. For me the step up to becoming an amateur microbakery came with the creation of the North Walsham Farmers’ Market nine years ago. At that time no baker could be found to join the market and fortuitously for me someone recalled that I enjoyed making bread and asked if I'd be interested. Now, I'm a serial volunteer and so I promptly agreed without really realising what I was getting myself into. 

Multiple batches of bread are somewhat harder to produce and coordinate than my family-focussed experience up until then. I quickly learnt that the secret is to keep the oven full at all times. I used my professional project planning skills to produce a timeline for each type and batch of bread, so that, in theory at least, loaves were ready to pop into the oven as soon as the previous batch came out. Working with one eye on the timer became a habit and over time the duration of my baking has reduced as I became more efficient.

Did you have a ‘screw it, let’s do it’ moment or other epiphany?

I was made redundant six years ago and decided to treat it as an early retirement. Up until then I had been baking for farmers’ markets and not much more. This enforced change enabled me to step up production, baking several times a week. Soon after this, like many bakers in the Real Bread community, the Covid pandemic gave me an opportunity to expand. I recklessly offered contactless doorstep delivery and was swamped with orders ! Many of those early customers still buy their loaves from me. 

What and who has helped and inspired you along the way?

At the start of my baking journey, Knead to Know was a very helpful and inspirational guide in general, and especially on insurance and registering with the local authority. Most of my baking skills have been self-taught but I was fortunate to attend a sourdough course at Pump Street Bakery in Suffolk. This de-mystified the process in a way that reading from a book can never do as well. I would recommend training like this to any aspiring baker.

What have been your biggest challenges so far and how you have tackled them?

As my sales increased, I have had to expand my bakery. I work from a large domestic kitchen, and originally hand mixed everything and cooked in a domestic oven. A new Rofco oven, and second-hand Hobart mixer and large fridge have been progressively added to keep pace with production challenges. I am fortunate to have the room for this, but have now run out of space. 

What have been your highlights so far?

I have thoroughly enjoyed the social side of bakery, meeting and chatting with customers makes it all worthwhile. I have also met and become friends with a number of local chefs and delicatessens who I have supplied. I welcome all customers’ compliments, but receiving praise from these catering professionals has been a delight.

Do you have any top tips?

I encourage any baker starting out to have confidence in what they make. I have an unfortunate tendency to doubt the quality of every batch I bake, so it is marvellous when customers regularly return to buy from me, and when I receive praise from them face-to-face or on social media. That feedback is very inspirational and keeps me going in the middle of each long bake.

When baking a range of different loaves, careful time planning each morning is really important and well worth writing down, whether on a whiteboard, paper or in a more formal timeline.

My final tip is to keep on top of cleaning surfaces and equipment as you go and washing everything as you finish with it. Working in a mess is ultimately time consuming.

What’s next?

I do need to keep reminding myself that my bakery is primarily a hobby, so I don't need to expand further. I’m looking forward to working with our local schools on Bake Your Lawn and bread bakery in general, though.

Ensuring we all leave a legacy of bakery skills is important if we are all to ensure the sustainability of Real Bread. A neighbour’s teenage daughter helps me occasionally and I hope that I will be able to pass on my experience and equipment to her one day. 

@bobsbreadbakery

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Other bakers' dozens

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