In Germany, baking is a serious business.
If you have aspirations to open a bakery there, by law you must hold the designation of "backermeister" or master baker. The process to acquire this designation rivals the most rigorous trade training programs here in North America. In addition to formal academic instruction, German would-be bakers must apprentice for three years and then pursue their journeyman certification for the next five, earning the right to register for the final master course and exam.
Marcus and Ursula Jaeger, the husband and wife owners of the successful Artisan Bake Shoppe here in North Vancouver, met while pursuing their backermeister certification.
"Ursula had just won a major German baking competition when I first met her," recalls Marcus. "I thought to myself, wow, and immediately said to her 'Hi, my name is Marcus, let's get married and open a bakery together.'"Marcus's spontaneous plan wasn't far off the mark. Fresh out of school, the two newly certified artisans came to British Columbia together with the goal of working and exploring for a few months, but, like so many of us, they quickly succumbed to the charms of this province and never left. The Jaegers opened the Artisan Bake Shoppe in 1999 and have been in steady business growth mode ever since.
Artisan Bake Shoppe produces more than a dozen holiday specific baked goods. It was with a view to understanding what it takes to bring these popular treats to the market that I paid a recent visit to Artisan's high-volume bakery in North Vancouver, the facility that provides their retail shop on Lonsdale Avenue with its wares. Marcus was there to guide me through his seasonal operation.
One of the first things I noticed about Artisan's production bakery was the seemingly limited inventory of machinery. While it contained the expected industrial ovens, mixers and a proofing room, missing was the usual clutter of blinking and whirring gizmos that I have seen in most other commercial bakeries. This omission, it turns out, is intentional and is a subject of some pride for Marcus, who explains that avoiding the use of additional machinery to weigh, portion and handle bread dough forces his bakers to work more with their hands and senses, relying on informed intuition and experience, rather than rigidly prescribed mechanical pre-sets.
Marcus began my tour with a sampling of the dough that will eventually become stollen, the bakery's signature holiday offering and easily the most laborious. The dough was chewy, rich and surprisingly delicious raw, brimming with flavours of butter, rum-macerated fruits, almonds, and aromatic brown spices.
My visit happily coincided with the extraction of the evening's batch of freshly baked stollen from the ovens. The stollen slathered in melted butter while still hot and are then rolled in sugar. This process is repeated a second time, resulting in the bread's characteristic white veneer. As a preserving agent, the sugar allows the stollen to remain edible for two months following production. According to tradition, a finished stollen should look like a baby wrapped in fine white linen.
Marcus and I sampled still-hot stollen fresh off the baking racks. The flavour was complex, each ingredient asserting itself independently while at the same time harmonizing with the other flavours. Surprisingly, the stollen was only moderately sweet; no sugar is added to the actual bread dough as the fruit contains its own sweetness, while the rolled sugar coating, perhaps due to its application with butter, seemed more rich than sweet. From the stollen production we adjourned to an office to review a selection of some of Artisan's other popular holiday treats, which include Christmas bread (a fully vegan, almost rye-like bread containing marinated fruits and nuts, a far cry from the much maligned North American fruitcake), amaretto and ginger cookies, pfeffernuesse (gingerbread cookies with pepper) and elisenlebkuchen, small, flourless biscuits made of crushed hazelnuts.
The Christmas bread, which leverages the natural sweetness of dates and prunes and achieves a stunning balance of sweet and savoury notes, is as equally suited to a morning coffee as it is to a post-dinner treat. Broadly speaking, Artisan's baked goods offer a welcome antidote to the shockingly sweet confections that have found favour in more mass market bakeries.
The use of fruit as a sweetening agent and spice as a method of imparting flavour complexity hark back to a time when high fructose corn syrup wasn't the second ingredient in packaged food goods. All of Artisan's products are made with organic, B.C. milled flour and contain no preservatives, added oils, premixed ingredients or dough-enhancing agents. Marcus describes this approach as "honest baking."
As I tucked into a rich, knee-weakeningly delicious coconut macaroon, its gooey centre providing the perfect contrast to the crisp and toasty, golden exterior, never have I been so thoroughly convinced that honesty is the best policy. Artisan Bake Shoppe is located at 127 Lonsdale Av. in North Vancouver. artisanbakeshoppe.ca
Chris Dagenais served as a manager for several restaurants downtown and on the North Shore. A self-described wine fanatic, he earned his sommelier diploma in 2001. Contact: [email protected].
