RECIPES FROM THE BAKERY
HOW DID TORONTO END UP WITH THE BEST CROISSANTS AND SOURDOUGH LOAVES ANYWHERE? ASK THIS MAN.
IIF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD ABOUT EMMER YET, you will soon. Toronto’s buzziest new bakery has foodies swooning, lining up for hours to buy fresh sourdough loaves and doublebaked croissants. Since opening in May, the most sought-after items, like the pain au chocolat stuffed with black currant chocolate, sell out within 20 minutes. Dozens of chewy sourdough loaves are baked every hour, the smell of fresh bread constantly wafting out of the sun-filled space in the Annex. Lynda Reeves and her husband are huge fans. “Michel says that Philip’s bread and croissants rival Poilâne in Paris,” says Lynda. Emmer is the brainchild of Philip Haddad, a self-described food fanatic, sourdough obsessive and prosthodontist by trade, who, you may remember, baked flatbread in his backyard pizza oven for our May 2018 issue. Emmer is Philip’s first bakery, a decadein-the-making journey made up of equal parts A-list mentors, worldly travels and dogged dedication. Philip first became obsessed with sourdough 10 years ago, when he watched a video of Nancy Silverton, the American godmother of sourdough and owner of La Brea Bakery Café in Los Angeles, who created a starter out of grapes. A few years later, by chance, he met Nancy at her Italian restaurant, Osteria Mozza. “I told her I was trying to make her sourdough and it just wasn’t working,” says Philip. “She replied, ‘Then you’re not doing it right,’ and we had a long conversation.” When he got home to Toronto, he followed her advice and his sourdough journey began.
Later, on a trip to Paris, he met the trailblazing baker Véronique Mauclerc, owner of Boulangerie Mauclerc, which had one of the oldest wood-fired ovens in the city. Philip asked if he could shadow her and, much to his surprise, she agreed. He spent several nights working alongside her, getting a behind the scenes look at what it takes to run a bakery. On his last day, Véronique told him to grab some of her starter on the way out. He combined it with another starter, courtesy of a friend in Italy, and has been using it for a decade. “I have one I keep at Emmer and one at home, just in case,” he says. “It’s so strong; I don’t think you can kill it.”
All the while, Philip kept making sourdough in his spare time, serving it at dinner parties, giving away loaves to friends and receiving rave reviews. “People started saying, ‘It’s so good — you should sell this,’ ” says Philip. “That’s when I decided to approach a master in bread.”
In 2017, Philip messaged Richard Hart and asked if he would come to Toronto and train him. Richard is the former head baker at Tartine in San Francisco, where his sourdough loaves reached cult status with passionate bakers and bread lovers alike. Credited with helping launch North America’s love for sourdough, Richard is now getting Europe on board with Hart Bageri, a bakery he opened in partnership with René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen. “I never thought Richard would reply to me,” says Philip. “But the next thing you know, he’s in my house.”
Philip and Richard built a test kitchen — outfitted with just a few work tables, a small oven and a mixer — near Toronto Pearson Airport in Mississauga, Ont.
They spent long days baking with different types of Ontario flour, experimenting with fermentation times and troubleshooting issues as they arose. “One of the most important things he taught me was that, if you’re messing up — if the bread is overproofing or it’s too wet or not wet enough — to think about how to correct it because you could have 200 loaves sitting there. It’s all about trial and error,” says Philip.
After a week of long days in the kitchen with Richard, Philip felt ready to take the leap. In the summer of 2017, he bought a two-storey heritage building near his home and started dreaming up plans for signature pastries, menus and interiors.
While he waited for two years on building permits, Philip spent his evenings holed up alone in his yet-tobe-opened bakery, rolling out pastry dough, tweaking recipes and trying every flour he could get his hands on, from European imports to freshly milled whole grains. Philip toiled over fermentation times and fridge temperatures. He tried “every chocolate under the sun,” and went through some 500 pounds of butter to perfect his golden, chewy croissant, which now rivals the output of any Parisian boulangerie. “It was a really bizarre time. I often felt like, Am I going to pull this off? That’s why it took so long for me to decide to open because I needed to know that it would work,” says Philip. “And it has.”
The week after he got the building permit approvals from the city, the pandemic hit. Like so many other people, Philip had to pivot. Originally, he planned to gut the building and take a year to renovate the two-storey space, creating a sit-down restaurant and a bakery. But as the months of lockdown dragged on and the future of in-person dining looked uncertain, Philip debated what to do: should he take the final plunge in a decadelong journey and open his doors with a scaled-back version? “I decided to just open the bakery and see what happens,” says Philip. “It took a little while to adjust because I always had this vision of what people would see when they came in. I had to let go of that because it was kind of consuming me. And then I thought,
It’s about the product; it’s about the ingredients.”
The bakery underwent a quick makeover. The walls were painted white, the floors sanded, and new cabinets were installed. The exterior was painted black, inspired by old buildings in Soho. The patio is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner while the pastry team works on the second floor. Philip hopes to start renovating the sit-down restaurant next year.
The bakery’s name is an ode to Philip’s love of ancient grains, emmer being one of the first wheat grains from the Levant, where Egyptians have milled it for 3,000 years. For the logo, Philip collected old pieces of his aunt’s handwriting. “I kept thinking of people in my life who would have loved the bakery and I thought of my aunt, who was like a mom to us. She passed away 20 years ago,” says Philip. “Now when I walk in, I think about how she would have loved to see this.”
To help bring his vision to reality, Philip enlisted some of his close Toronto food friends and collaborators. Emmer’s executive chef is Jed Smith, chef and co-owner of the acclaimed restaurant Donna’s and the former chef de cuisine at Momofuku Shoto.
“I think what makes Emmer stand out is that everything that we possibly can make is made by hand,” says Jed. “We’re curing our own meats, making crème fraîche and every kind of sauce — even the hot sauce that goes into the breakfast sandwiches. We could order in all these things and save time and money, but we want to make sure that everyone is getting the best possible product.”
During the pandemic, Philip has loved seeing home cooks and baking enthusiasts around the world become obsessed with sourdough. “It was great that it was getting attention, and for people to realize that it’s something attainable,” says Philip. “You can make amazing bread from home.” But as every home baker knows, there’s nothing quite like the real thing.
Emmer’s sourdough is proofed in linen-lined wicker baskets for
18 to 22 hours in special temperaturecontrolled fridges. The result is an inexplicably crunchy crust with a moist and airy centre. The sourdough is sold at the take-out counter and used in Emmer’s sandwiches or as the base for many of the extravagant toasts, like the Beef Tartare on Toast with Labneh (see page 106), which are served for lunch on the patio.
Rounding out the lunch and dinner menus are house-made pastas topped with breadcrumbs, fritto misto with a crispy batter made with sourdough starter, seasonal vegetables and raw seafood, an homage to the Peruvian restaurant that previously occupied the space before Emmer.
Philip’s days are as busy as ever. He gets to the bakery at 4:45 a.m. and begins sheeting the croissants while the other bakers start rolling out the English muffins for the breakfast sandwiches or getting the sourdough loaves ready to proof. By 7:30 a.m., Philip heads home to spend time with his dog, a miniature wirehaired doxie named Mila, and is off to his dental office, where he still works full time. At the end of the day, he’s back at Emmer, checking in and making sure everything went smoothly for the day.
But Philip isn’t too fazed by the long hours. For now, he’s enjoying the moment, whether that’s working with his team of pastry chefs in the early mornings or seeing the smiles on customers’ faces as they bite into an egg and brioche breakfast bun.
“All these serendipitous, weird encounters over the past few years have amounted to this,” says Philip. “It’s been such a surprise to me. I thought a handful of people would come in every hour, and we’d be happy. It’s more than I could have ever imagined.”