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Published in the September 2005 issue of The Hill Country Observer By Stacey Morris RUPERT, VT. – Anyone who thinks baking a loaf of bread is a simple task has never talked to Jedediah Mayer. Mayer is baker and sole proprietor of Rupert Rising Breads. Which means, he does it all, from mixing, kneading, baking and finally, delivering of hundreds of loaves of bread each week to area stores in his Subaru Outback. It’s a sunrise to after-sunset job fueled by an intense love of the labor, but it’s not the mountain of details that often consume the bulk of his attention – it’s Mayer’s tending, shepherd-like to batches of active culture, the foundation and key to his bread’s taste and texture. During peak summer season, Mayer produces more than 500 loaves of bread a week in his kitchen. Clearly he loves baking - but a carefree creative outlet it’s not. For starters, there’s the starter - a stiff mound of dough that hosts the active cultures that allow the natural leavening process to take place. Each batch of bread Mayer bakes requires a particular number of grams of the starter, plus a little extra set aside for the next day’s baking. Mayer said the difference between natural leavening and commercial yeast is profound. “Dough made with commercial yeast rises in an hour before baking whereas I let mine rise for four hours,” he said. “With the natural leavening process, you’re tasting the pure ingredients in the bread; there’s no need to add sugar or malt etc. to cover up the pungency of commercial yeast; it ruins the essence of how bread is supposed to taste. “A lot of people think they’re allergic to wheat,” he said. “When it’s really the yeast and corn syrup of commercial dough – it just clumps up in your stomach and sits there.” Mayer’s list of allotted bread ingredients is stringent: organic, unbleached hard red winter wheat, organic wheat germ, sea salt and water. “The other secret, said Mayer, is the time required for the natural leavening process to run its course. “It takes time and a lot of freshness by feeding it all the time (with flour and water), it keeps it healthy and active,” he explained. “If it doesn’t stay fresh, you can get bacterias like candida. “The longest I’ve been away from my starter is a day; I was away from it one night and only because I taught a family member how to care for it,” he said. “Baking the kind of bread I do is kind of like having a high-maintenance pet – you always have to be around to take care of it.”
A SWEET START Mayer got his start seven years ago as a baker of sweets, but ultimately found churning out pies, Danish and croissants to be unsatisfying. So Mayer jumped at the opportunity five years ago to work for The Harvest Market in Stowe that made breads in the European tradition of naturally leavened bread baked in wood-burning ovens. Three days a week, he was left to do the baking of 120 loaves per night on his own. “It came quickly to me and felt very natural,” Mayer recalled. “I knew for sure I wanted to do it on my own, it was just a question of where and when. I’d already worked on recipe of my own and had an active culture growing that was capable of being used for baking.” With two small children to raise (wife Mandy works as a school nurse and health teacher), it soon became clear that the ‘where’ part of the equation would be at the family’s Rupert home. The ‘when’ was a matter of seeing through the lengthy renovation of their kitchen to accommodate a six-foot deep by four-foot wide brick oven. “The toughest part,” said Mayer, “were the two years spent not baking.” Today, he bakes three days a week (four in during summer months), spends two days delivering and has about a day and a half off per week. Mayer’s specialty is the Pain Au Levain, a 100 percent wheat-based bread with a golden interior that he said is characterized by a nutty flavor and airy, creamy texture because it’s mixed with a high level of hydration. His customers report loving his bread with a number of accompaniments, including olive oil, Nutella and goat cheese. Mayor said that grilled cheese sandwiches with his bread have become the family favorite, largely because unlike the spongy, corn-syrup-laden store-bought bread, his bread slices are sturdy enough to withstand the grilling process without disintegrating or tearing. Pain Au Levain is baked in two-pound freeform loaves and as baguettes. In the fall and early spring, Mayer adds a Pain de Miche bread to his repertoire – a combination of whole wheat, white wheat and rye flour, formed as a boule.
A HOME OPERATION A typical workday begins a 6 a.m. feeding of his starters that have been fermenting overnight, followed by a four-hour rising period. If dough temperatures are favorable, Mayer is usually mixing by 11 a.m., followed by shaping and more rising. He mixes a batch every hour for six hours. The baking is the shortest part of the process: 30 minutes for baguettes (baked at about 600 degrees), followed by batches of two-pound Pain Au Levain at about 550 to 500 degrees for 40 minutes. The high temperatures, explained Mayer, give the bread a dark, crusty exterior and a soft, moist interior, or ‘crumb.’ “Once the baking starts, it’s all a rotation,” he said. “The first batch cools while the next batch bakes, when the first batch is cool enough, I wrap them in paper bags and get them out of the way for the ones off the rack. “It’s my favorite part of the day,” said Mayer of the late evening hours when dozens of loaves of bread are rising in the oven. “The house smells wonderful and you hear a chorus of cracking as the bread loaves come out of the oven and hit the colder air.” During peak season, Mayer bakes more than 500 loaves per week, after Columbus Day, it scales back to between 3 and 400 His oven is large enough to accommodate baking 33 baguettes at a time and about 24 Pain Au Levain at once. Not surprisingly, some of Mayer’s biggest fans are European transplants who tell him they’ve been bereft for bread that resembles the flavor and texture of bread they enjoyed back home. “America is about quantity, baking bread fast for mass-production, that’s why we have nationwide bread chains like Wonder,” he said. “There’s no such thing as that in Europe; most villages have a bakery and it’s where everyone goes to buy their bread.” Which is the reason why Mayer, despite the popularity of his breads, is content to remain a one-man operation – for now. “I wouldn’t mind expanding to where I hire a part-time driver and someone to help me bake,” he said. “But I never want to get so big that I’m no longer baking. “It’s the craft of baking that’s important to me. There’s a very romantic side to baking that as soon as you start becoming a big, commercial bakery, that intimate quality gets lost.”
For more information on Rupert Rising Breads, call (802) 394-0013.
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