VERO BEACH — In the back of Patisserie Vero, baker Mark Edmonds’s work space is inviolable for six hours each day. Starting at 3 a.m., he sees virtually no one as he clears his head of all but ingredients and proportions, calling only on the memories of how to form hundreds of loaves of bread.
So when in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, strangers suddenly stream into his sanctuary, Edmonds, a quiet man, has to summon an urge to not only speak, but lecture.
The dais is his flour-shrouded bread-making bench, as a group of eight to 10 men and women gather round, blankly taking in the vast stainless bowls, the vats of flour, the racks, the boards, the basket-shaped molds, and the stack of three clicking, humming very expensive ovens radiating warmth even from 10 feet away.
Eagerly the students wash their hands and take their place at the stations Edmonds has prepared, each with containers of pre-measured flour, water and yeast.
With hardly an introduction, class has begun, and bare hands have plunged into thick, sticky dough. Taboos fall away as they grasp the saying chefs have used for ages to dismiss any gawkers: The hand is nature’s spatula.
The day’s class is dedicated to that spatula, diamond rings and Rolexes remembered too late to rescue as the beginning bakers regain their own memories from Play-doh days.
“We did mud pies when I was little,” recalled Laurie Carney. “We filled them with real icing, and sold them around the neighborhood.”
The last time she tried her hand at bread-making though was 40 years ago. It was a disaster, she says, and she never tried again, until today.
Another student, dentist Suzanne Conway, sharing a station with her grown daughter, may have had mud pies in her past too.
“Mix, mix, mix,” urges Edmonds gently, as flesh and dough became one in bowl after gleaming bowl. “Just let that comingle.”
“I love that word,” said Carney.
Words seemed to thrill as much as process here. Edmonds’ delivery – he majored in theater at Carnegie Mellon – was patient, yet passionate.// “Isn’t this great?” chimed Ann Taylor, another student. “This is like Halloween.”
She may have meant the house of horror-like sensation in her hands, plunging into the goo, now topped with a blob of malt syrup the color of motor oil.
“Ciabatta means ‘slipper’ although they look more like Dumbo shoes,” explains Edmonds. “Today I made 50 pounds of ciabatta.”
Over time, he has trained his Vero audience to accept a darker and darker crust on the shop’s ciabatta.
In New York, where he trained at Amy’s Bread, the most famous ciabatta baker, Tom Cat bakery has a version that is coal-colored, baked in an 800-degree oven.
“You won’t be selling these, so it doesn’t matter,” he said, as Taylor made him repeat his instructions, scribbling notes with a doughy hand. “And I’m not paying you, so it doesn’t matter.”
What the students were paying Edmonds was a relative bargain: $45 for a nearly three-hour class, including a bagful of bread to take home.
Patisserie Vero Beach, housed in a modest cinderblock building, sits like a little macaroon on Old Dixie Highway.
And like a macaroon (a Patisserie specialty, in four variations), the bake shop has appealed to Vero’s inner child, a beacon in a wasteland of white bread and Krispy Kremes.
“Everyone’s calling everything ‘artisan’,” says Edmonds. “It doesn’t really mean anything – Panera has artisan bread, McDonald’s has artisan bread. So the Breadmakers Guild considers artisan bread to be without additives or preservatives of any sort, like vitamin C, which is one of the less gross things they add to bread. Look on a loaf and you’ll see a laundry list of stuff in bread that shouldn’t be there. Bread needs only to contain flour, salt and yeast or wild yeast.”
What it does contain is gluten and today, for this class, gluten is God.
“We’ll have no anti-gluten chatter here,” he quips.
Artisan bread also contains more water, Edmonds explained. Hydrating the dough to the maximum level – before it falls apart in a gluey mess – is everyone’s goal. That triggered a wave of insecurity: what kind of water? Tap, bottled, filtered?
That wasn’t all.
What kind of salt and what grind is it? What about his gloves?
He must go through hundreds, Taylor says, as if disposable gloves were reserved for surgeons.
He set the fears to rest quickly.
“Everyone says you can’t bake crusty bread in Florida because we have terrible water. But all in all, bread is much less picky than we think it’s going to be.”
As for salt, any sea salt finely ground is fine, but he pulled out a box of Maldon salt from England, just to show off the flakes he reserves for his spelt pecan sandies.
“They never quite dissolve so you bite into them,” he says.
Most home bakers think to use warm water to get the yeast going. Edmonds, though, adds ice, to slow the fermentation down.
“Low and slow is best, like barbeque,” he says.
He points out the proper gluten structure developing in his “poolish”: a Polish starter dough, or pre-ferment, that goes in his baguettes and rolls.
The semolina loaf will use poolish, but for the ciabatta, he makes a thicker pre-ferment called biga that boosts the robust bread’s development of its characteristic holes.
Not a measuring cup in sight, by the way, another difference from the Betty Crocker bread baker.
“We do everything by weight,” says Edmonds, “because it’s the only way to do it. Everybody scoops differently and I’d have to teach you how to scoop flour, and take into account the atmosphere, whereas on the scale it’s always the same no matter who does it. And it’s easier and faster once you get used to it.”
All the bread paraphernalia – the French straight razor to score the bread, the “peel” or wooden paddle he uses to slide loaves into the oven, the linen “couche” that the dough rests on – can be had online through the San Francisco Baking Institute, or King Arthur’s Flour website, full of other baking essentials like good chocolate and sourdough starter.
If nothing else, the bread class delivered a glossary of terms for the mind to better take in the complexity of the loaves sitting on Patisserie’s shelves.
Those brown crusts? Caramelization.
The range of hole sizes in a slice? The crumb.
What is it called when the bread expands as it bakes? Oven spring.
At last the loaves were ready for the ovens, warm and woozy in their floury couches.
Like a practiced parent at a changing table, Edmonds gathered them up and let them roll off the couche onto the peel. He was more like Gretel in the fairy tale, when opening the oven door, he gave a short shove and the loaves scooted off onto the hot stone.
Outside the bakery’s picture window, the afternoon light began to flag, none too soon for Edmonds who arrived in the pitch of night.
“How long are you here every day, out of curiosity?” asked Taylor.
“A very long time,” Edmonds responded. “But where else would I want to be? What else is there to life?”
Patisserie Vero Beach, on Old Dixie a block south of S.R. 60 eastbound, offers classes in bread- and cookie-baking through the holidays. Call (772) 770-4122.
