March 10, 2004, New York Times

Taking the Artisan Out of Artisanal
By JULIA MOSKIN


PORTLAND, Me.

JIM AMARAL has had a nice business going since Hannaford Brothers'
supermarket started carrying his handmade breads in 2001. But one
morning last month while his baker shuffled focaccias, scones and
organic whole-wheat breads into the soapstone oven Mr. Amaral built in
a corner of the Hannaford store, Hannaford employees were pulling racks
of sourdough rounds and baguettes from industrial steel ovens nearby.

Those loaves seemed as crusty and aromatic as Mr. Amaral's handmade
breads. The hands that made them, though, were in a factory in New
Jersey, where the bread was partly baked and flash frozen in a process
called parbaking. Days, weeks or perhaps months ago, the frozen bread
was shipped to Hannaford's. This morning, a few minutes in the steel
ovens produced bread to order.

Over the last four years, a few big parbaking companies have brought
supermarket shoppers around the country so-called artisan breads. Sales
of the breads ‹ hand-formed, all-natural, dark-crusted loaves once
found only in small bake shops ‹ rose 10 percent last year, according
to Mintel Consumer Intelligence, a market-research company, even as the
rest of the industry cowered before the low-carb onslaught.

But many bakers say that parbaking creates artisanal bread without the
artisan and that bread makers in several communities have been driven
out of business after supermarkets started selling parbaked loaves.

Mr. Amaral said he has held his own in the face of the competition. But
looking over the massed loaves in Hannaford's bakery department, he
concedes that it has been tough. "Customers really have to run the
gantlet to find our bread," he said. "I believe that they want to buy
local, real artisanal bread. I just hope that they can find it."

What is at stake nationwide is an almost $2 billion slice of the $16
billion bread industry. Last year, sales of artisanal and artisan-style
bread in supermarkets and big chains nationwide grew faster than any
other part of the bread business: four times faster than the business
as a whole, and almost 20 times faster than white bread, according to
Mintel. (Bread sales have not fallen in the face of low-carb eating,
but they have leveled off.)

Looking for a walnut-rosemary boule in Honolulu? Ralph's, a
supermarket, probably baked some this morning. Kalamata olive bread in
Kalamazoo? Try Harding's, which can bake a fresh loaf while you finish
shopping. Costco stores bake ciabattas and crusty raisin-walnut loaves.

"Foccacia, levain, ciabatta, ficelles ‹ 10 years ago, who knew what a
ficelle was?" said Sue Brooks, who is the bakery director for the King
Kullen chain on Long Island. "Now customers will come to the counter
and say, `You only have baguettes; what happened to the btards?' "

Parbaking holds benefits for supermarkets and their customers. For the
stores, it means lower costs. Since they bake only what they can sell,
there is less waste. For customers, it means great selection, and they
seem as willing to pay premium prices ‹ as much as $5 a loaf in some
markets ‹ as are customers of artisan-bread shops.

For small artisanal bakers, it means only formidable competition.
"It's going to be a war," predicted Daniel Leader, the owner of the
Hudson Valley bakery Bread Alone and a pioneer in the American
artisanal-bread movement. Peter Reinhardt, who is one of 1,300 members
of the Bread Bakers Guild of America and who has taught bread baking at
Johnson & Wales University's various locations, agreed. "Parbaking is a
major threat," he said. "The term `artisan' is in danger of being
compromised completely." Even the guild has not agreed on a precise
definition of artisanal bread, said Gina Piccolino, the executive
director. All-natural ingredients are a must, she said. The guild has
not taken a stance on parbaking.

Parbaking, pioneered by European baking corporations, was introduced
in the United States by one of the most respected figures in artisanal
baking, Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles, about five
years ago. Others are getting into the game. The most prominent has
been Ecce Panis, a New York artisanal baker, which closed its stores in
2002 and now parbakes exclusively. Concept 2 Bakers in Minneapolis is
expanding its line of parbaked organic breads, Panné Provincio, and
trying to outpace the competition with innovations like btards
flavored with black beans and salsa. Grace Baking, San Francisco's
best-known artisanal bakery, is rolling parbaked Pugliese into the
national market.

Until the advent of large-scale commercial baking in the late 19th
century, all American bread was artisanal: mixed and shaped by hand,
then baked under the eye of a professional baker or home cook. But when
soft, sweet, snow-white commercial bread appeared on grocery shelves in
the 1930's, coarse-grained, handmade loaves lost their appeal. And then
came the Wonder Bread years, when packaged sliced bread became
virtually synonymous with American food.

In the 1970's, the health-food movement enthusiastically embraced whole
grains and home-baked bread, a hallmark of counterculture cuisine. By
the 1990's, artisanal bread was swept up in the wave of gourmet
appreciation that brought extra virgin olive oil, dark-roast coffee and
European cheeses to stores.

The wide appeal of artisanal bread first became clear about 10 years
ago when bakers in many areas persuaded supermarket managers to stock
their products.

Ms. Silverton of La Brea first tried parbaking for the Southern
California market four years ago. In 2001, she sold 80 percent of her
company to an Irish food and agribusiness conglomerate, IAWS, in a $79
million deal.

Ms. Silverton, whose bread is sold in 2,500 stores around the country,
said parbaked La Brea bread is "exactly the same product" as the loaves
she still bakes daily at the original bakery, on La Brea Boulevard. She
insists that mass-produced parbaked bread is not a threat to local
artisanal bakers. "The more good bread there is, the better it is for
everyone," she said. "And especially for people who live far away from
an artisan bakery, which, lets face it, is most Americans."

Jesse Matz, who buys La Brea bread "almost daily" at the Kroger store
in Mount Vernon, Ohio, said that he was ecstatic when it arrived on the
shelf. "I used to buy the supermarket-brand baguette," Mr. Matz said,
"but I noticed that it had corn syrup and chemicals in it. This bread
is natural, and you can taste it."

With enormous labor cuts in the American supermarket industry,
parbaked bread is a godsend for bakery managers like Sue Brooks of King
Kullen, whose in-store bakeries ‹ a must-have for big, upscale markets
‹ are staffed by rotating part-timers. "They're not exactly artisan
bakers," Ms. Brooks said. But they can follow the printed instructions
supplied by Ecce Panis, and replenish the racks all day: a convenience
that fresh-baked bread does not offer.

"The ease of parbaked is really phenomenal," said Peter Franklin, a
bread industry consultant. "I don't see how anyone will be able to
compete with it."

Fran Scibelli, owner of the now-closed Metropolitan Bakery in
Charlotte, N.C., said she could not. Harris Teeter, a 30-store chain in
the area, bought about $10,000 worth of bread from Metropolitan every
week for five years. In 2003, after the chain started selling La Brea
bread, Harris Teeter dropped her product. "My bread really was fresh,"
she said. "But that parbaked stuff comes right out of the oven. It
looks gorgeous, if they do it right. And the sign on it doesn't say
freshly browned, or freshly baked off. It says freshly baked."

Eli Zabar, the owner of the New York-based Eli's Bread, bakes fresh
bread for hundreds of supermarkets in the New York metropolitan region.
He said parbaked bread is too subject to mishandling by supermarket
employees. "If they let the bread thaw out at all," he said, "forget
it, you'd be better off with white bread in a package."

Judah Zweiter, director of sales for Eli's Bread, is less dismissive:
"Parbaked bread has already had a direct impact not just on us but on
every bakery in America. We're all going to have to figure out how to
jump on the bandwagon, or it'll run over us."

Mr. Leader of Bread Alone said he is not jumping on the bandwagon now
‹ or ever. "With all due respect," he said, "bread that's mixed, shaped
and baked in a factory, untouched by human hands, is not artisan bread.
That's not the bread I want to make."

To set his product apart, Mr. Leader has had his bread certified as
organic and has recently redesigned all his packaging. For his Borealis
Breads, Jim Amaral has applied for organic certification, passes out
recipe cards with pictures of the farmers who grow his wheat, and, he
said, constantly harangues customers about the value of local,
sustainable products.

But do American consumers care about the distinction between artisanal
and artisan-style bread?

Even purists like Mr. Leader concede that the quality of parbaked
bread can be excellent.

One recent morning, Lawrence Blake pushed his cart past the Ecce Panis
and store-brand baguettes at Hannaford's market and pulled a Borealis
baguette from Mr. Amaral's basket. "This bread tastes like something,"
said Mr. Blake, who had taken the ferry in from his home on Peaks
Island in Casco Bay. Gesturing to the rest of the bakery department, he
said, "Most of it tastes like nothing."

Copyright 2004*The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
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