She places the sourdough in a basket and lowers it carefully, holding it by a long strap, from her second-story window near Bishop Arts. Sometime before all of this, Stephanie Leichtle-Chalklen of Kuluntu Bakery had fashioned wire into a hook shape, then cinched the hook to a sturdy tie-down belt that she found in her car. The rigging should survive multiple bread-lowering trips.
It’s a perfect method for the COVID-19 era of doing business, and was inspired by time she spent in Cuba. She stands a full floor above the customer at her home-based cottage bakery. She’s masked-up and payment’s already been handled online in advance. She guides the bread down, using glorious gravity, and you pluck the heavy brown bag from the basket. Inside the bag is a thick slice of focaccia and a boule of polenta and pumpkin seed sourdough the size of a curling stone. The offerings change depending on what’s cooking in her kitchen.
This is Leichtle-Chalklen’s life right now: She’s solo-running a micro-bakery, like many bakers right now. It means putting up house and home, hands, sweat and tears into the business.
Her bread, called kuluntu (it means “community in isiXhosa, a South African language”), all happens in her home kitchen. A typical deck oven could do something like 100 loaves at once; She’s knocking out six at a time with her home oven. She gets started early in the morning, several rounds of loaves shuttling back and forth, each baking in cast-iron skillets to achieve that whackable, crackable crust.
“Here I am in my kitchen just baking by myself,” she jokes.
Leichtle-Chalklen’s focaccia is as fork-tender as wedding cake, adorned with rosemary threads and crackly bubbles. It’s served in a slice as thick and oiled-pristine as that untouched copy of Gravity’s Rainbow you have on the shelf. There’s soft, roasty garlic under the surface of the focaccia bubbles, and the aroma fills the immediate area when you crack into it.
Baking began as a way to blow off some steam. Leichtle-Chalklen is from Coppell, then she was off to New York. She landed some deals at markets on the weekends. She moved to high-end bakeries before she found herself in Cape Town, South Africa, with her husband. The idea was to build community through really good bread. When she moved back to Dallas, and the pandemic hit, sourdough was suddenly everything to her patrons.
“For now, it is sustainable. the only reason this is sustainable is I don’t have a storefront and I don’t have employees,” she says.
Its mid-afternoon and baker Jenna Bresnan will soon arrive back home and get ready for bed. She’s running some errands at the moment. Her husband’s asleep already, most likely. She’s usually a couple of hours behind his schedule. They’ll be up again as the moon fills the sky, folding everything spices into flour-water-salt, because they are nocturnal bakers now.
On the third day, they’ll rise again and bake seeded bread. Bresnan Bread and Pastry’s team bakes out of the kitchen at Brown Bag Provisions in the Design District, where they’ve made exclusive marble rye for a Reuben sandwich. Stephanie and Brent Gilewicz opened Brown Bag in February, just as the pandemic hit, and they now have a baby on the way in November.
They all plow forward in the toughest of times. Did the Bresnans ever consider stopping this all-night madness?
“Oh no, it’s full steam ahead,” Jenna Bresnan says. “We’re all in.” During the lockdown, they sold more sourdough and sourdough starter, than ever. They’ve adapted and grown since then. Brioche pan loaves, marble rye, and a seeded multigrain are all featured on Brown Bag sandwiches.
instagram.com/bresnan_bread_and_pastry.
Maricsa Trejo feels this way, too. There were hour-long lines shooting out the door of Trejo’s first bakery, La Casita, in Richardson. They considered buying little fans for the folks waiting in the glaring Texas heat. Then, the pandemic: La Casita quickly stood up an online shop, which made day-to-day operations more efficient and limited waste. “We managed to triple business,” she says.
Heavy-dusted cinnamon-sugar cruffins lead the orders. Klobasneks are next: Mild cheddar and turkey sausage rolled inside a croissant. Saturdays are the busiest. She pulls up at 3 a.m. the morning prior, getting everything ready for the pick-ups. Trejo and staff are usually out-the-door by 4 p.m., all stretched and sheeted like her croissant dough.
580 W. Arapaho Road, Suite 230, Richardson. lacasitabakeshop.com.
Erika Lam Radtke, the Girl with Flour, cooks out of an enclosed space in her backyard that used to be a kids’ playroom. There were once loads of toys, but now you’ll find drying racks and stainless steel tables. She was born in Southern California, spent some time in Singapore, and came back to America for college. She worked on Wall Street for a time. But food was always a lighthouse guiding her away. As a kid, she made steamed buns with her mom.
Now, she delivers her bread to customers two days a week. The rest of her hours, in between teaching barre classes, are spent elbow deep in dough. Everything is hand-mixed. Sea salt and rosemary melt into the valleys and hills of focaccia. That offering tends to sell out quickly, so sign up when you can. She’s also tried homemade Pop-Tart pastries, reaching into the nostalgia files during a crisis. Those sold in a blink. Those filled with blackberry and a fizzy-sweet calamansi (it’s a limey citrus) were a mega-hit.
Lam Radtke also produces a mind-bending good fougasse, a leaf-shaped sourdough that’s 100-percent lacquered-meets-shatterable textured. The shape allows that crusty-breaking feel on all sides. It’s the food of the gods when swept through good olive oil.
“This is my life,” Lam Radtke says. “I teach barre, but that’s a couple of hours a day. The rest of my life is this.”
For Seth Brammer, there is nothing relaxing about crafting bagels all night at home. He’s “on the edge of comfort all of the time,” he says. His mind ping-pongs around anxious thoughts of scalability and accessibility for his little homegrown bagel business, Lenore’s Bagels.
The middle of nights at the Brammer household, where he runs the business with his wife, Jessica, were once a time of slumber. But now they are for bagels. The Brammers are fermenting, portioning, resting, stretching, proofing, boiling, ice bathing, drying, topping and baking. Before being bagels, they were 20-pound bags of high-end flour from Barton Springs Mill. Barton Springs crushes their germs with stone wheels, which pulverize but maintain the good oils of the wheat.
With the flour and other ingredients, the Brammers are like Denzel Washington’s character in American Gangster: They went straight to the fields to find the good stuff.
“Our poppyseed bagels will make you fail a drug test,” Brammer jokes. Each bagel is carefully wrapped in parchment paper, boxed, and bagged. They hand-write a card that goes with the box. To get them is far easier: All we have to do is enter our phone number on the site. The Brammers will text you from a bagel burner phone. Get it delivered or pick it up.
Why go to these lengths for a few spectacular bagels? For one thing, Seth Brammer believes in doing one thing well.
“I’m making zero money here, but that’s not the point, he says. “You’re trying to grow things that are bigger than you.”
