How a Massive Bread Factory Produces 150,000 Loaves per Week — Vendors

Nels Leader is the CEO of Bread Alone, an upstate New York bakery founded by his father. Today, the bakery is committed to the idea that everyone should have access to good bread — a goal it tries to achieve by baking 150,000 loaves every week.

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Credits:
Producer: Carla Francescutti
Directors: Carla Francescutti, Murilo Ferreira
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Carla Francescutti
Production Coordinator: Nick Mazzocchi
Editor: Josh Dion

Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Supervising Producer, Operations: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer, Development: Gabriella Lewis
Audience Engagement: Avery Dalal
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– And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough. Bread is the type of simple, honest food combining flour, water, and salt. And with care, creating this piece of food that’s nourishing to the world. The pursuit a long time ago might’ve been trying to create the perfect loaf.

The pursuit now is trying to feed a lot of people. We think everyone should have access to good bread. We bake about 150,000 loaves of sourdough bread each week. We’ve been baking with organic grain since our first loaf of bread in 1983, and we continue to do so today.

In my left hand, I have some of our organic wheat flour. This does not look white, it looks yellow. The mills that we source from are preserving all of the vitamin rich germ that’s in the kernel of wheat. So for larger, much more industrial mills, you’re gonna strip out some of that germ

To give the product a long shelf life. And also to give it the white appearance that a lot of folks have come to expect. Most of our breads are 100% sourdough, which means there’s no added yeast to them whatsoever. So all of the leavening, all the fermentation, comes from the sourdough.

We are managing five different sourdoughs every day that then go into tens of thousands of loaves of bread every day and it takes the best baking team, I’d say in the country, if not the world, to do that work every day. And at the heart of that baking team is our senior

Production manager, Juan Hernandez. We have our whole wheat levain, our stiff white levain, our rye sourdough, our biga, and then our liquid levain, which is sort of our core workhorse sourdough that we use in different combinations to create our different sourdough breads. – There are naturally occurring enzymes on the outside

Of the wheat that when you mix with water and give a warm environment, will start fermenting. Mixing is when you incorporate the liquid ingredients and the solid ingredients and develop strength in the dough. This is our mixing station and right now Anna is working on a mix of our whole wheat sourdough.

We have wheat flour, whole wheat flour, and whole rye flour. The first phase, we are combining the flour with most, but not all, of the water in what we call an autolyse. And this is a traditional artisan technique. We’ve already incorporated the flour and most of the water, and now it’s resting while

That water hydrates into the flour. And this dough right now, like we would describe this in baking terms as a really shaggy dough, it will easily pull apart – After the 15 minute autolyse, we then do what we call a final mix where we’re adding sourdough, salt,

Then we add the final dose of water. What we wanna do is push hydration to the very limit and we’ll really develop the dough and go from what is essentially a paste to an extensible, stretchy dough. And so there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough.

This dough is gonna spend the next number of hours in these 25 pound bins. If we just let that 800 pound piece of dough start fermenting, you’d have different fermentation happening in the center. That allows them to go through the first bulk phase of fermentation evenly.

Baking bread is the hard work in all the ways. We’re supported by a team of about 250. Every supervisor at every station is constantly making adjustments to accommodate the dough. Their sensory experience of visually looking at the sourdough, smelling the sourdough, touching the sourdough, and knowing it’s ready.

– Each piece is cut and then it registers the weight up here. Then the chain here, it rolls it into a torpedo. – We have two people catching. We wanna put the seam up so when it gets dumped out at the ovens, the seam is on the bottom.

– The loaf shape goes into our fermentation baskets. We need the structure for the dough to sustain itself over 12 hours. We’ve got three different retarding chambers. A lot of bakeries will use these machines to speed up the fermentation process to proof the bread. We use these machines to retard the fermentation process.

We keep all the doughs at a low temperature with a high humidity, and that allows the dough to very slowly rise and it doesn’t dry out with a high humidity. You need that long fermentation time period to develop the sourdough flavor. And then over the course of the night,

The sourdough digested starch and sugar from the flour and, in the fermentation process, gave off carbon dioxide. That’s what creates the bubbles in the bread. And you can see it still has some resilience to the touch. And so we know that the, the dough is still active.

So right now the team is what we call “scoring” the bread, essentially putting relief cuts into the dough so that when it expands as it hits the oven, the bread expands on those relief points. And it’s a way that we distinguish between the breads at the bakery.

We have an oven system from a German oven manufacturer, Heuft. We think they’re the best in the world at creating artisan baking systems. Each loaf of bread is placed, by hand, onto the pre-loading belt. The loading machine goes to one of the 12 decks in the oven.

It’s called a thermal oil oven system. There’s a burner that heats a fluid that’s then circulated through the base of the oven. And that provides us with really even, controlled heat throughout the whole oven. This oven can do 1,200 of our sliced sourdough breads every hour. Each of our roughly 10 sourdoughs

Has a different baking program so we get the profile that we want. We’re moving the curve of the temperature throughout the bake. The steam is allowing the product to expand before the crust sort of sets all the little pockets that have formed from fermentation. All the little pockets of carbon dioxide are

Being baked into place. What we look for when the bread comes out is we want even coloration. The deep brown and reds that we get in the crust are the caramelization of starches that form during the fermentation process. So as soon as this rack is full, it’s gonna get moved into one

Of our climate controlled cooling rooms. The bread is in this room for about four hours before it’s sliced, and we maintain a very clean environment in this room, and that’s one of the ways that we give a long shelf life to our bread without using mold inhibitors,

Which are in most commercially bought breads. Our bread is distributed around the northeast. The furthest point south that you’ll find our product is in the D.C. area and the furthest point north is in the Boston area. And so each and every day we are doing our job of baking, slicing, delivering fresh bread.

We don’t want it to be an exclusive good. We think everyone should have access to good bread. So we just launched, with one of our partners, a compostable plastic bag for one of our breads. There’s more work to do within the supply chain to make the compostable bag readily available,

But we are the first to bring it to market. And so this has been years of work to get to this point. We’ve got a QR code here that gives these instructions to use this bag as a liner for your compost and then deposit it into New York’s curbside compost program.

We make tens of thousands of loaves of sourdough bread every day in an effort to help feed the world. And now we’re gonna go to our original location in Boiceville. It’s very hands-on work where we’re making bread in much smaller numbers, just doing our part to feed the community.

My father founded the company 40 years ago in 1983 in an old busted up one car garage on Route 28 in Boiceville, New York. At the heart of that business are two beautiful wood-fired brick ovens that are not just a piece of bread alone history, but I feel like they’re a piece

Of cultural history. There are very few active wood-fired ovens of this style that are still in use, even in Paris. So Andre LeFort, the multi-generation French oven Mason, when my father convinced him to travel to the US to build the oven, said, “If I’m gonna travel all the way

To the US, I might as well build two.” We’ll get about 24 loaves on the belt, so a total of 96 in each side of the oven. So you’ve got the fire box down here. This is where we build the fire using scrap wood from local lumber yards.

The flames shoot through this big piece of steel called the gueulard. And to heat the ovens, we rotate the gueulard at five different points to create even heat. Bakeries can play a vital role in a community. Even as the business has grown, we’ve sort

Of doubled down on having a bakery presence in our local communities. We renovated that original location. Tore down everything except for the original brick ovens. We built, what we believe, is the country’s first carbon neutral bakery. We electrified not just a few things, but everything in the building

And then put 600 kilowatts of solar on the property to provide net the needs of the building. We provide breads, pastries, and foods for our three cafes around the Hudson Valley in Boiceville, Woodstock, and Rhinebeck. – Okay, so Mike’s right now about to take out the cast iron gueulard.

It is extremely hot and heavy. So we’re gonna fill this pot up with water and that’ll add some steam to the oven as we’re baking. So this is our overnight levain and it has been proofing for 30 hours. We’re gonna score our bread. This is the Miche Boule.

This is our second overnight bread, which has also been fermenting for about 30 hours. – The commitment to people and planet is a core part of how we believe we’re gonna be successful as a business. But not only do I think that growth in a responsible way is possible,

But for our business we view the responsible work as foundational to our growth. – Man, Mike, these came out real nice. – There’s a, like, from my life experience, there’s just a like a comforting purity to the smell. It’s something that has been always been a part of my life

And that just gives me a sense of comfort and pride. The experience that I can still viscerally remember is taking a warm loaf of bread and then I’d eat the inside out. I could just, like, hollow out a loaf of bread. No matter where you go in the world,

There is usually a bakery. The sense of humanity is almost like intertwined with the sense of a bakery because it’s something that you find everywhere around the world. And I can go to any baking culture and share a common language, even if we’re making different bread. It’s no longer about the perfect loaf.

It’s about bringing this experience to a lot more people.