This is the first of three articles featuring six of Adelaide’s best restaurant bakers all whom have agreed to share their recipes. Other chefs whose bread will be featured are Johnny Trsicari (Chloe’s Restaurant), Vincenzo LaMontagna (Vincenzo’s Cucina Vera), Justin Miles (Windy Point Restaurant) and Dennis Whetstone (Red Ochre Grill). This week the team at Enoteca Brent Kemble–Beech, Jodie Zerner and Hugh Duckworth who share their daily bread making and Rebecca Stubbs chef at The Retreat at Chapel Hill Wines. At Enoteca they make a classic ciabatta with a delicious thin crispy crusty made gritty with coarse polenta and it has a soft luscious chewy centre. Rebecca has the added advantage of a huge wood oven and makes sour dough that she extends to many permutations.
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left — Brent Kemble–Beech, Enoteca Adelaide click here
to go to his recipe for the class ciabatta they make at the restaurant
right — Rebecca Stubbs, The Retreat at Chapel Hill Wines, McLaren Vale South Australia
click here to go to Rebecca’s recipe for her milk sour dough
Bread is one of the most seductive components of a menu. Good bread is often more memorable than the skill of the chef, the originality of the menu or the quality of the ingredients and the lingering memory of just baked bread a reason to return. Strangely while commercially available bread has undergone vast improvements restaurant bread until very recently had sunk so low as to be embarrassing. In the early 80s there wouldn’t have been a restaurant in Adelaide in the top 40 that would not have been able to boast they made their own bread. The baking of bread is the ritual of all good restaurants regardless of price.
In the early 90s Australian restaurants in search of staying economically viable started to charge for bread. At about the same time, wages and expenses took profits from an attractive figure of approximately 25% to something between 5–10% for brilliant managers. In the last four years the hike in power and water prices has gobbled half of that. Running a restaurant is a dangerous game! Cheap restaurants and pubs in Europe have long charged for good bread. We found it odd that the waiter came around asking how many semmel (rolls) we had eaten. Sometimes after copious demi litres of local white it was pretty hard to remember. Stunning white bread, crusted with rock salt and caraway, still warm, straight from the village baker it came with fresh sweet butter. We ate them with Biechel and Knödel, a lung soup lusciously laced with fresh paprika, the likes of which, we never see in Australia and dried chilli with massive parsley rich bread dumplings made from stale bread. The memory makes me salivate! My point is that these are dishes where the accompanying bread is an integral part of the dish and bad bread ruins these simple rustic dishes.
At the high end in Australia $40–$60 main courses no one expects the charge for bread to be as blatant as appearing on the bill. Has anyone ever been charged for bread in a Michelin starred or for that matter a posh restaurant in the eastern states? Never!!! And yet it does happen in Adelaide time and time again. Of course, anywhere you have bread you still pay for it but it’s factored into the rest of the food and doesn’t tackily appear on the bill.
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What makes a restaurant great? There are so many components that make the whole. Great food, great wine, great service, environment, exquisite flowers, accoutrements, view, price and product knowledge are just the start. But, nasty bread served with crap olive oil, burnt sugary fake balsamic or butter that has languished so long in the fridge it tastes of nothing else, or so fridge hard it is impossible to spread is a memory that annoys diners more than a bad course. AO
to read about fabulous New York Baker Jim Lahey and his really fabulous book MY BREAD and get more information about baking your own bread click here
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