Wednesday, April 18, 2007
On a roll: Business is booming at Bread Craft bakery
Food writer Lindsey Nair
- lindsey.nair@roanoke.com | (540) 981-3343
Front Burner columns
Fridge Magnet blog
- We want YOUR review of Firefly Fare in the Roanoke City Market Building
- Valentine’s Day specials
- Greek stuffed pork tenderloin
- Visit the Fridge Magnet blog
Look who's cooking...
Meet our lineup of home cooks
The massive, yawning Bongard oven is as impressive to a food lover as the golden loaves of bread that beckon from a stainless-steel rack.
But the most appealing sight at Bread Craft on Peters Creek Road has got to be the storage room.
That's where you will find the star of the entire establishment: a lump of sourdough starter (levain) that Bread Craft owner Alex Eliades lovingly feeds with flour and water daily.
"Junior," as Eliades jokingly calls it, holds court in the storage room with bins of dark and golden raisins, sesame seeds, rum, walnuts, roasted garlic cloves and glistening kalamata olives, among other things.
All of those natural ingredients and others go into the type of high-quality artisan breads that Eliades served up with fresh coffee at 5 on a recent Tuesday morning.
One taste of his rum-raisin brioche and chocolate-cherry sourdough bread and I completely forgot that I was awake at such an obscenely early hour.
By that time, though, Eliades (pronounced Ee-lee-ah-des) had already been up making breads with his lead baker, Rebecca Yarwood, for hours.
Even before that, beautiful baguettes and ciabattas and batardes were probably pirouetting through his dreams.
"I love eating bread just as much as I like making it," he said. "I can get it fresh all the time now -- it's just a beautiful thing."
Ten months after Eliades, 36, opened his mostly wholesale bakery, business is swelling like rising yeast rolls.
He supplies the Hotel Roanoke, Tinnell's, Metro and Montano's in Roanoke and Bel Pasto in Roanoke County. Vintage Cellar in Blacksburg buys about 100 loaves of his bread every Friday and sells out by noon Saturday.
Bread Craft does retail, too, selling loaves to customers who stop by the bakery between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Artisan bread
Video by Lindsey Nair
Production by Daine Vineyard
This summer, a deal with the new Roanoke Ukrop's is expected to expand Bread Craft's output by about 50 percent.
Eliades "loves all types of food, and he cares about a handmade product," said Bel Pasto owner Pam Martin, "and he is part of that whole movement."
As an Army brat, Eliades lived all over the world and was interested in food from a young age.
"I've seen so much food," he said. "I ate Beluga caviar in Moscow, veal brains in Switzerland and iskander in Turkey."
In Turkey, he told his mom how much he missed Big Macs. Now he misses iskander, which is similar to a gyro.
His first job, at age 15, was as a dishwasher for a pizza parlor in Springfield, Va. He washed pots and pans as fast as he could -- not so he could go home early, but so he could watch pies being made.
After a job at a Northern Virginia conference resort, Eliades attended the Culinary Institute of America and put his fine education to the test at a long list of establishments.
"I always pushed myself to do a good job and do as much as possible," he said.
An old German baker at the Sarasota Bread Company in Florida taught Eliades how to make artisan, or handmade, breads.
"That was a turning point for me. I baked a little bit before and did pastries before, but I never did artisan breads before," he said. "That's when I fell in love with it."
He followed his love to the San Francisco Baking Institute, where he honed his sourdough-making skills, then landed at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia in 2000.
A search of Southwest Virginia bakeries turned up nothing that met his standards, so he bought about a dozen loaves at a time from a baker in Renick, W.Va., and threw them in his freezer.
Finally deciding he wanted to fill a niche, Eliades found 4,100 square feet of space for the right price near Peters Creek and Hershberger roads and opened Bread Craft in June 2006.
Metro owner Andy Schlosser says Eliades' breads are so outstanding that they become the centerpiece of many dishes rather than an accompaniment.
For example, Schlosser said, in a composed salad of grilled walnut-raisin bread with melted brie, wild salad greens and apricot jelly, the bread is the meat and potatoes of the dish.
Executive chef Billie Raper at the Hotel Roanoke said Eliades' knowledge and creativity allow the baker to sit down with a chef and brainstorm the perfect bread for any dish.
With Eliades' help, Raper developed some new sandwiches for the Regency Room menu, including lobster salad on a cracked pepper roll and a Monte Cristo and smoked salmon BLT, both on the buttery egg brioche.
The hotel is also serving Bread Craft's garlic loaf, kalamata olive bread and baguettes.
"I just think Alex is kind of on the edge of what is going on right now," Raper said. "You can definitely tell he loves what he does. You have to, because you aren't making a fortune at it."
For now, Eliades employs just a couple of people, including Yarwood, who worked at The Greenbrier with him. He says he knew after seeing a picture of Yarwood's handmade wood kayak that she loves working with her hands.
Very soon, Bread Craft will contract out its deliveries. Currently, Eliades and his wife, Karen, are sharing delivery duties in between parenting their youngsters, Graham, 4, and Alaina, 2.
"I believe she [Karen] is half-tempted sometimes to set up some cots in here for the kids so she can help me," he said with a laugh.
As he expands his staff, his hours and possibly the waistlines of some adoring fans, the laid-back baker still reacts with gentle disbelief and humility when his breads are lavished with praise, telling me he can't believe that people drive out to Peters Creek Road to get his bread.
Said Martin: "He is a nice guy on top of everything else."
