Lessons from banker to baker

previously shackled to a keyboard

We’ve written about our past before, in fact it’s on the front page of our website - we were looking for a change of direction, a route out of London, a vocation not a chore. We sat there sharing the food we’d cooked with friends and the answer stared back at us - pizza.

I’ve followed the time honoured career path from engineering to finance to artisan sourdough pizza, which isn’t quite as daft as it sounds as a love of food and sharing it with others was the one constant throughout. People are often shocked by the transition from banker to baker but for World Escape Day we wanted to list the top 3 skills we’d learned in one life and applied in another.

• Network - a networking event was my idea of hell, but change the subject matter and it’s more like catching up with friends. I look forward to meeting with new suppliers and those with a passion for the best produce, sustainability and provenance. The connections you make in your new chosen field are invaluable, embrace every opportunity to expand your network. You’ve picked this new area, I promise it’ll be far less painful chatting to others about it.

• Work ethic  - by most people’s standards I used to work long hours, I’ve never been work shy. Nothing quite prepares you though for the slog of starting your own business. I envy those who leave the office and don’t spare it another thought until they arrive the next day. I’ve barely switched off since we started - I need to get better at this - but it only shows how much we care. I think it was the Innocent book which referred to ‘The Eastenders Test’. If you get home from a 10-hour day and you still have the drive to spend another 5 hours working on your project (rather than simply watching Eastenders) then you’ve got what it takes to put in the long, hard hours to turn your idea into a reality. I hate Eastenders but we did 6 months of this before selling our first pizza.

• Play to your strengths - For engineering and finance you need to be numerate but it’s been more handy than we’d expected for our fledgling business. Models to predict when the dough would be ready, ramp geometry to get the oven level, restaurant projections, it all helps to know your way around a spreadsheet. You’ll have a string to your bow which can be applied to your escape.

Emerging from wedding and festival land

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time from Stick in Mind on Vimeo.

Meet Harris, keeper of the dough secrets

That's Harris above. I'm sat in a Shoreditch coffee shop writing this newsletter, a flat white sipping cliché.

The caffeine’s required though, there’s a lot to catch up on. Our last newsletter came out just after we’d returned from our US pizza road trip. Time dilates in wedding and festival land, the long evenings, cheery customers and late night drives home blurring into one another. Flicking back through the calendar we’ve been busy.

Did we even mention we were finalists in the BBC Food and Farming Awards?

We made the last three in the street food category, which with less than a year’s trading under our belt was more than we could ever ask for. We got to meet some amazing people, Giorgio Locatelli had a play on the oven and has even taught me the ‘poor pizzaiolo hands’.

DO

I struggle to describe the DO Lectures, an ‘ideas festival’ comes up short. It’s the moments around the campfire, the chat with the speaker you admire on a crazed early morning run / swim, which make it special. But special it is and we were lucky enough to be there. Bertha did us proud through a pizza worshop, two hundred plus bread rolls and a hundred odd pizzas, she likes to think of herself as official oven supplier to DO 2015. Look out for our article on dough in the latest yearbook.

Blogatron

Would be the name of a Transformer which sporadically morphs into blogs and we’ve just about kept them ticking over. If you’re that way inclined you’ll find introductions to starting your own sourdough mother, tales of my paper bag collection, interviews, videos (the same as above), and a rant on doing things right the first time - 10 Bertha’s points to anyone who clicks through to all of them, redeemable in our restaurant.

…once we finally find a site.

I promise you we’ve been looking. I roam the streets, searching for advertising boards and vacant plots. We’ve a crack team of Friends of Bertha’s - we love you guys - sending us tips on where might be available. Feel free to join this team, come one come all, a shedload of Bertha’s points available to whoever finds us our home. We’ll get there.

So where can we find you now?

Well since you ask we’ll be at BrewDog Bristol this Saturday, 15th August and Moor Beer Taproom the following week, 22nd August.

What’s not to love about pizza and beer?

Sandbags

I have no regrets in life. That’s a lie, I bloody hate these sandbags.

At a generous estimate they’re 30% reconstituted with Gaffa tape, that’s on the rise, I’ve owned colanders with fewer holes.

We bought these before our first mobile event, one of the many last minute items we scrambled to source before selling to the public. I was working at my old job, my last free weekend not the most productive with a 19 pub stag do yomp across the Lake District and each evening consumed ticking off the tasks to get us up and running.

I knew the proper way to fill the sandbags, to line each section with a thick plastic bag, pour sand into each, keeping it contained and secure. But in haste, and with the weather forecast threatening to blow our marquee away, we dumped the sand straight into the bags and hoped for the best.

Error.

If you ever see two feet protruding from the back of a yellow Land Rover, muffled curses emanating from the bowels of the van, chances are that’ll be me. Typically I’m lying face down, pinned under a hot oven, trying to wrestle a limp, slug of a sandbag free as it ejects sand from at least 4 orifices. Half a tonne of oven bolted to the chassis doesn’t make the clean up operation any easier.

From that point onwards we vowed we’d always do things the right way, first time. If a job’s worth doing and all that.

time for flavour

More of a vlog than a blog.

Time - 90s of yours and a snapshot of how we spend ours. Water, flour, salt, our secret ingredient and why it matters.

From the creative StickInMind goblins


time from Stick in Mind on Vimeo.

Q&A with With Mustard (lot of withs there)

We had a lovely chat with Bristol based food blogger With Mustard, she asked the questions, we did our best to answer them, for plenty more on cooking and eating in Bristol and beyond we'd wholeheartedly recommend her site.

Bertha's Pizza -Roving, Bristol

Pizza, in the last eighteen months, has made quite a resurgence in Bristol. For the most part, these new establishments are independents, sourcing ingredients locally where they can and making fresh dough on site. Whilst some aim to recreate a taste of Napoli, others are eschewing traditional ingredients to encapsulate flavours from the Southwest.

One of the most striking to arrive, is Bertha's, run by Graham and Kate Faragher. From their sunflower yellow Land Rover, converted to carry a hefty wood fire oven, they make some of the best sourdough pizzas in town: Graham usually working the tricksy dough, whilst Kate deftly plucks pizzas from the mouth of the roaring oven.

I caught up with Graham to ask him a few questions. Seems I'm not the only one to find the thought of a fire above your petrol tank vaguely terrifying!

WM: How did Bertha's begin?

GF: In our back garden with a Sheffield steel brick lined oven called Bertha. We were looking for a change of direction, a route out of London. A vocation, not a chore. We sat there sharing the food we'd cooked with friends and the answer stared back at us -pizza.

WM: What was it that drew you to Bristol?

GF: We believe in local food and we believe in Bristol for what it stands for -supporting independent producers and we want to be part of this. Great pizza is simple; good ingredients on good bread. Our job is to team up with the best local producers and showcase their produce. Bristol is the best hub for tapping into all the amazing produce coming out of the Southwest -so here we are. There also happens to be great climbing, cycling and surfing on the doorstep.

WM: Your yellow Land Rover is fast becoming iconic on the Bristol street food scene. Was it quite an undertaking to modify?

GF: Yes. It's half a tonne of oven. We were originally considering vintage vehicles such as Morris Minor postal vans but after several cycle tours of the area, we knew it'd never get up the hills. She's ex Darlington Borough Council highway maintenance; under the grey stripe, there's still a red reflective strip. The oven had to be built within the vehicle itself, it's too big to be loaded straight through the back. It had to be cured over a couple of weeks, gradually building larger fires and yes, it massively freaks you out lighting a fire inside your new car. Over the drying process you lose 100kg of water and get a very soggy dashboard.

WM: You did a lot of research before you started out. Where did you eat the best pizza?

GF: Probably somewhere in the US. I'm going to stick my neck out and say Pizzicletta, a tiny neighbourhood pizzeria in Flagstaff Arizona. The same place I flew 5000 miles to work in during my holidays in my old job and, exactly the kind of place we'd like to run in Bristol.


WM: What elements did you take with you?

GF: An obsession with the dough, in fact I had that already but they drilled it home. They use a much wetter dough and longer ferments than you see this side of the Atlantic, and at first it was an absolute shocker trying to work it. In the US they're also far less hung up on the Neapolitan 'rulebook' of toppings; the best places just look at what's fresh at the markets and build a topping around it.

WM: Sourdough has a slow ferment and is trickier to handle, why did you decide to use it for your bases?

GF: It tastes better. Granted there are lots of health benefits, the longer ferments in particular make it much easier to digest. It also gives a softer crumb and it's flavour that dominates most decisions at Bertha's HQ.

WM: What's the secret to a good tomato sauce?

GF: Good tomatoes -that's it really. Lots of pizzerias get hung up on San Marzano tomatoes, tinned and shipped over from Naples. We tried loads of different varieties and there are some really good ones but we've not found any to match those we sourced from the Isle of Wight. We use an organic tomato grower with a passion for heritage varieties. It was hard work to build up the volumes we require -in the early days we'd have to call ahead of each event, place the order on Monday, they'd be picked on Tuesday, sent over on Wednesday and at the market on Thursday: like a foodies Craig David. Our secret tomato sauce recipe, which I'll reveal exclusively here is, the best tomatoes you can find and sea salt.

WM:You often use seasonal and foraged ingredients -what makes a great topping combination?

GF: Balance -less is often more. We spend a lot of time trying to pair ingredients which tick off each of the senses and have just the right moisture content, as no one likes a soggy bottom. There's a reason a Margherita is a classic; the umami bomb of the tomato and parmesan; the richness of the mozzarella balanced by the acidity in the tomatoes and the flecks of char across the crust providing bitterness to offset the sweetness. We look for similar layers of flavouring in whatever is seasonal.

WM: With street food you are out in all weathers -have you considered finding a permanent location and premises?

GF: We're trying! We've been looking for what seems like ages, but it's tough. Rest assured you'll be the first to know when we find somewhere and send any recommendations our way if you see a space in your neighbourhood.

WM: Finally, what have been the highs and lows of your journey so far?

GF: We wear our heart on our sleeve when it comes to our food. This is our passion. You'll never please everyone and we struggle not to take any differences of opinion personally. It's also incredibly physical, back breaking work with 500kg log deliveries and oversized bags of flour. It's all worth it though when you get a customer coming back, grinning from ear to ear, mozzarella still stuck to their chin, raving about the food you've just made with your hands.

Paper Bags

We use more flour than most households.

Should we launch a restaurant it won’t have happened overnight. We’ll have kneaded several tonnes of dough before bricks and mortar was ever a possibility.

Rather than put the bags out with the recycling we started collecting a sack here and there. I counted them today and there’re 26. Over half a tonne’s worth stashed away in a cupboard. If all goes to plan we’ll decorate a section of the wall with them. Wallpaper with meaning.

These bags have taken us through some of the steepest sections of our learning curve. But may we never stop improving.

Flour & Water

We keep two sourdough starters. Extravagant I know. This is mainly down to nostalgia but there’s the odd occasion where there are benefits of maintaining two at different hydrations or water contents. Sanj is getting on a bit now, born in my old flat, named after a flatmate and good friend he’s been with us throughout our baking journey. Clare, his classier other half has nobler heritage and hails from 200 year old Lapland stock if you buy into that kind of thing. I don’t. Granted I like the story and want to be part of a baking lineage, but my own view is that your starter quickly adapts to the local microflora, ours having long ago acquired a Bristol accent.

As an experiment I wanted to start a new starter. One born and bre(a)d in Bristol [sorry]. I mixed equal parts flour and water and left it on the counter. Repeated this once a day discarding 3/4 of the mixture and after a week baked a loaf. It really was that simple.

I lie. Baking’s not simple. Baking the perfect loaf’s a Sisyphean task, but one where you’re rolling dough not boulders and even the disasters taste great. Getting you own starter going is simple though and well worth the effort - amazing what you can do with just flour and water.

Seven days of starter evolution and the resultant loaf

There are plenty of well written guides online for making our own starter so I won’t dwell on the specifics, I like this one for example. Although my personal tips would be the following:

• Use a decent organic flour with as much whole grain as possible
• Rye makes a welcome addition, it has more soluble sugars than wheat and typically higher amlyse activity, all of this equates to more food for the starter
• Don’t bother with fancy glass Kilner jars, granted they look nice but with regular feedings and cleaning they smash far too easily. This grows tiresome. Cheap plastic containers like soup containers work much better
• And finally if all of this still sounds too daunting, give us some notice and we can bring some of our starter along to an event for you (assuming you pass our extensive starter adoption vetting process)