Orwashers Brings Back the Neighborhood Bakery

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Keith Cohen took over Orwashers in 2007 with the aim of reinvigorating artisan bread for today's customers.
Keith Cohen took over Orwashers in 2007 with the aim of reinvigorating artisan bread for today's customers.
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Vilma, who has been with the bakery 18 years, shows off a freshly baked loaf of Sourdough Bread.
Vilma, who has been with the bakery 18 years, shows off a freshly baked loaf of Sourdough Bread.
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Each day, Orwashers bakes, on average, 4,000 loaves of bread.
Each day, Orwashers bakes, on average, 4,000 loaves of bread.
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“Orwashers Artisan Bread” by Keith Cohen is the perfect baking companion for food enthusiasts looking to recapture the art of handmade breads.
“Orwashers Artisan Bread” by Keith Cohen is the perfect baking companion for food enthusiasts looking to recapture the art of handmade breads.

Baking is a combination of art and science. Master baker and owner, Keith Cohen shares his expertise in Orwashers Artisan Bread (Race Point Publishing, 2014). Full of step-by-step instruction and detailed behind-the-scenes looks at how artisan bakers work, Cohen provides recipes to hone your own baking skills to craft the perfect loaf time after time. In the following excerpt from chapter 1, Cohen introduces the neighborhood bakery, and how he uses old-world techniques to serve modern consumers.

You can purchase this book from the GRIT store: Orwashers Artisan Bread.

When I first walked into Orwashers in 2007, I was transported back to my grandfather’s butcher shop in Kew Gardens, Queens. The clientele he would have served in his neighborhood kosher butcher shop was very much the same as those who originally sought fresh-baked bread at Orwashers. Like a lingering scent, the shop seemed to exude a friendliness and intimacy that comes with the one-on-one interaction of a long line of bakers and shoppers. It felt familiar. It felt like home.

When I took over ownership of the bakery from the Orwasher family, much had changed in the world and neighborhood around the bakery. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the invention of commercial-style loaves and the bread slicer would dilute and alter the process, taste, and experience of eating the breads to which this earlier generation of immigrants was accustomed. Today customers are more familiar with individual loaves. Homes are all equipped with electricity and refrigerators to keep bread cold or even frozen for days. Society’s drive to produce everything faster, cheaper, and at a higher volume has caused a shift away from quality; producers have abandoned locally made and natural products and ingredients for less expensive, less pure equivalents such as chemically enhanced, bleached, and bromated flours. Equating the types of foods that have lined the shelves at grocery stores and overtaken the average person’s diet in the last seventy years to those of the past is like comparing a hot dog to a filet mignon. In a span of one hundred years, society’s view of bread and what it stands for has changed significantly. What was once thought of as a wholesome staple became known as something that packed on calories—and inches—and offered no nutrients or substance, thanks to its new method of mass production. Traditionally baked artisanal breads are given the time and care they need to ferment and bake to perfection. However, in an effort to give them a longer shelf-life, most mass-produced breads aren’t baked for long enough. Therefore, the question facing me as artisanal baker when I purchased Orwashers old-fashioned, European-style bakery soon became: How can I bring back the bread of yesterday while serving the new customer of today, and hopefully tomorrow? The answer? I brought back the old methods of bread baking and preparation while keeping in mind my target consumer. What better place to merge the best of the past with the best of the present than at Orwashers.

In order to create this new method, I became inspired by the past. I pictured myself as a baker in France two hundred years ago, prior to refrigeration, prior to electricity, prior to modern amenities, and asked the most basic question: How did they make this great product? Today we have mechanical mixers, but back then, bakers had to manually knead the bread. There’s only so much dough a person can knead by hand without cramping and tiring, leaving the dough still in need of some development. So, what did bakers do hundreds of years ago to add this development to their dough? In lieu of mechanical mixing, they left the dough out to ferment longer. Another crucial difference is that before the mid-nineteenth century, there was no commercial yeast. Bakers had to use old-world dough levains, bigas, and starters. But instead of just returning to these old-world techniques and ingredients exactly as they were hundreds of years ago, I realized that I needed to change things up ever so slightly in order to be successful in this new-age economy. The levains, bigas, and starters are living organisms that need to be fed and nurtured. Just like the old-world measurements in the original Orwashers recipes that cited a pinch of this and a dash of that, old-world treatment of the starters also wasn’t sufficient for ensuring their preservation or consistency. Even the old starters needed a little refreshing. Over time, things get adulterated—people forget to feed the starters on time, or they don’t add the right amount of flour or water—we’re only human, after all. With this in mind, I decided to refresh and rebuild the starters every year so they would remain extremely robust and incredibly authentic. This also allows the starters to be rid of any potential commercial yeast in the air that may have seeped into them.

  • Published on Jul 17, 2014
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