CRUST-HAVE
New York’s hottest baking class might just be the best thing since sliced bread
IAM sourdough obsessed.
After baking my own sourdough loaves for more than a year, I now follow several sourdough-bread bakers from around the world on Instagram, repeatedly “liking” their caramel-colored finished loaves and thrilling whenever they “like” mine in return.
I now use phrases such as “proofing time” and “hydration” to describe a finished loaf. There’s a countertop grain mill that I use to mill my own flour from both “hard white” and red wheat berries sold in burlap bags. Once I even packed a jar of sourdough starter — a paste made from flour and water left to ferment — when I went to visit friends in France. (They were amused.)
So when I discovered that Meyers Bageri, the Danish-inspired bakery founded by chef and entrepreneur Claus Meyer, was offering weekend sourdough-breadmaking classes at its commissary in Long Island City, I signed up right away.
Meyer, the co-founder of Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred Noma, is a sourdough evangelist. His TEDx Talk about sourdough features a video clip of him at an outdoor Danish food fair railing about the need to ferment dough for more than eight hours. And he’s right — the longer fermentation produces a heartier, chewier loaf with a crispy crust. Meyer sells crusty boules, along with dense loaves of rye bread studded with rye berries, at his bakery in Williamsburg and at his Great Northern Food Hall in Grand Central.
Most of the 10 or so student bakers gathering recently for the sourdough class are also fans of his bread.
“I fell in love with the bread in Denmark, and I really wanted to learn to make it,” says Kristin Zamfotis, 27, an interior decorator. She’s attending the class with her father, who owns a restaurant in
lower Manhattan.
Our instructor is Rhonda Crosson, 42, the head baker at Meyers Bageri and a former chemist. She’s as passionate about sourdough as Meyer is.
“People are really afraid of bread,” says Crosson, who baked in the kitchens of chefs Marcus Samuelsson, Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller before heading to Meyer’s Copenhagen bakery, where she worked on traditional Nordic ryes.
Amid sacks of flour and wooden mills — Meyer’s staff grinds the flour for all of his bread and pastries — Crosson takes us through the steps for making a perfect loaf, beginning with the levain, or sourdough starter. We mix freshly milled whole-wheat and white flours with salt, water, the starter and a little yeast. Then we work the dough until it passes “the windowpane test,” which involves holding up a piece of dough and stretching it without breaking it. We shape our dough into square buns and bake them at a high temperature in Meyer’s industrial ovens.
And then we eat, breaking the crusty rolls apart with our hands and piling them with the charcuterie that magically appears on a sideboard. As we gorge on thin slices of salami from Brooklyn’s Ends Meat and Meyer’s incredible cream cheese smoked with hay, I turn to the man next to me — a bespectacled, 37-yearold software entrepreneur — and ask what brought him to the class.
“Making bread out of flour, water and air — it’s magical,” he says.