For the love of bread

By Rebecca Fox

After travelling the world, Auckland born-and-bred chef Andrea Dudding settled in the small Otago town of Owaka about 10 years ago. She tells Rebecca Fox about her love of bread and making it her full-time passion.

A puff of flour drifts in the air as an aproned Andrea Dudding dusts her bench.

To her right is a large barrel of flour, some oil, salt and her ever present dough scraper. She reaches into the fridge, pulling out a bowl filled with a smooth buttery brioche dough.

A quick tap on top indicated what she already knows by sight - it is ready to be made into her popular scrolls. The colour of the dough changes each time depending on the eggs, sourced from locals, as the brightness of the yolks changes depending on what the hens eat.

She smiles and lets us in on a secret as she spreads the dough with her hands into a rectangle on the formica bench. As brioche is an enriched dough and very sticky, putting it in the fridge for 20 minutes makes it much easier to handle.

Andrea Dudding in her Owaka home where her artisan baking business 2Birds has been born. PHOTO: CRAIG BAXTER

What she fills them with depends on the season or whatever local produce she has been gifted or traded. As it is stone fruit season, there is an apricot compote, made from cooking down the stones and waste from the fruit, flavoured with cardamom and casiss, in the fridge.

A quick sprinkle of sugar over the dough helps ‘‘ease the way’’ so they do not become gluggy when cooked and Dudding spreads the compote over it, working quickly in the heat of one of our rare summer days, leaving generous blobs to provide a treat when bitten into. She scatters over some roasted pecans and quickly rolls the scroll up and cuts it into six. It’s put into a lined muffin tin to proof for a time, then washed with a brush of milk and in the oven they go.

This is Dudding’s happy place - her small 1960s-1970s kitchen in her Owaka home where her artisan baking business has been born.

It might be as far as she could get from her 20 years in Europe and the United Kingdom, living in cities like London, Barcelona and Edinburgh, but she says she was never an inner-city girl. So when she decided to come home to be closer to family, she chose the job furthest away from her hometown of Auckland, which happened to be Owaka.

‘‘It's a slower pace of life. But it's the community that you're here for. That's the way I like to live. You walk down the road and it takes you half an hour to get to the shop, just 200 metres down because you're too busy chatting to everybody.’’

While most of her career overseas was working in pubs with the occasional fine diner here and there - a proper home-cooked meal has always been her specialty - baking, in particular bread, has always been a hobby ever since her first after-school job at a bakery making sandwiches.

‘‘I love bread and I love working with the dough.’’

Dudding eventually made the leap into making baking a fulltime job. PHOTOS: CRAIG BAXTER

Then during the Covid lockdown, with plenty of time on her hands, she began to do a deep dive into bread making and practise more, developing her repertoire of breads.

‘‘I just love it. Flour and dough and water and salt and yeast in all forms. Just combined together in different ways. It's fascinating for me.’’

When the community was organising a Christmas market, a friend suggested she bake some breads for it.

‘‘I didn’t think anyone would be interested. It sort of went from there. People kept saying, come back, when are you doing the next market? We love your breads. It went from there. Five or six years later, it's still going.’’

Dudding started out baking mostly foccacias and ciabattas - its creation the result of some New York chefs trying to see how much water they could get into a dough before it became glue - before expanding out to flavoured breads like the market favourite roasted garlic. She now makes up to 100 various loaves a market such as tiger bread, a ‘‘not a Vogel’s’’ loaf, as well as her foccacias and ciabattas.

‘‘ It's fascinating for me. I've now got a roll of about 30 different styles of breads I do - not all at once. I always like trying new things.’’

She is experimenting with Tsoureki, a Greek braided bread, usually made at Easter, and admits she struggles with Middle Eastern breads but knows practice makes perfect.

Her breads are a mix of yeasted, sourdoughs and gluten-free which she sells online and through the Clutha Community Market every Saturday. That requires prepping on Wednesday night and getting her starters ready for baking on Thursday.

‘‘I just want to offer a good product, a real bread and product, or cake, or whatever I'm making, that I've put all my time and attention into.’’

Learning to produce in volume has been another challenge. She sources her ingredients from local growers and uses organic where she can and while she admits trying out butter alternatives to try to keep prices down, she came to the conclusion nothing beats butter when it comes to bread.

It had also taken time to realise that while she wants to make everybody happy, she cannot do that.

‘‘The quality of the product is more important to me than the quantity. Sometimes that means I get to market and I sell it in an hour. But then again, other days not.’’

Dudding's breads are a mix of yeasted, sourdoughs and gluten-free. PHOTOS: CRAIG BAXTER

One of her biggest achievements has been the gluten-free breads she makes. She describes the process as more chemistry than baking to get a nice, soft spring dough as it requires keeping a lot of moisture in it. She is proud of her gluten-free brioche-style burger bun which is used by a local food truck, and her sandwich loaf.

‘‘I do a nice artisan one as well, which I have used as just normal bread and people don't know.’’

It requires her to scrub the kitchen down from top to toe before she gets to work so she makes her gluten-free breads first.

Dudding slowly came to the realisation that she wanted to work for herself and make baking her fulltime job but it was important for her to stay true to the way she wanted to make breads, live her life and sell her products. She initially worked part-time and baked on the side - resulting in many very late nights - but a few years ago she made the jump to making it her fulltime job.

‘‘It’s one of the hardest things I think I've ever done.’’

But she finds it very rewarding and is keen to share her passion with others so she is beginning to expand her social media presence aiming to show people what they can produce and then move into teaching people how to do it in their own homes.

‘‘I like showing people how to bake, and how easy it can be, because a basic bread is just four ingredients and a little bit of time.

‘‘But that actually fits in very well to a busy household, because you can make a dough in the morning, chuck it in the fridge, and not worry about it until you get home at night, come out, work with it a wee bit, chuck it back in the fridge. So while it does take two or three days, on a Saturday or a Sunday morning you have got a lovely, fresh-made loaf that you've made yourself. That's taken 10 minutes every time here and there.’’

Making a sweet treat. PHOTO: CRAIG BAXTER

Or equally it could just be to make their own bread for a special occasion or Christmas or Easter, she says. A basic loaf of bread like a focaccia can be knocked out in a couple of hours and with a mixer you can make a ciabatta in a few hours, she says.

‘‘I do like sourdough, and I use it a lot. I like the flavour, but because I haven't got the time or the space, really, to do a lot with it but there are so many things you can do with sourdough. Sweet, savoury, you can make granola, you can make crackers.’’

She gets her inspiration from the many recipe books she ‘‘can’t stop buying’’ - her favourite author is British baker James Morton, the first winner of the Great British Bake Off and the first person who made the science of breaks make sense to her - social media and her own intuition. Another favourite is ‘‘king of bread’’ British-based, French baker Richard Bertinet.

‘‘He’s an amazing baker and I would love to go and work with him or study with him.’’

A quick brush before baking. PHOTO: CRAIG BAXTER

A lot of it is experimentation and not everything works out first time. Her birds were well fed in the early days and then as her bread improved she started sharing them at the town’s swap shop until she achieved a product she was happy with.

‘‘I couldn't charge money for it because they weren't great but I didn’t want to waste them either. I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of community support; they’d ring me and tell me if it was good.’’

After working in community, church or school kitchens around the district for the past few years, Dudding is hoping to have her own commercial kitchen up and running soon. She has a container kitchen which has just passed council inspection. It is just up the road from her home on land belonging to fellow Owaka small business Basil&Baylys.

By next summer she is hoping to be in there making use of the big commercial oven.

‘‘I’m really excited.’’

It means an end to packing up her car every week with her baking supplies and starters and setting up in a new kitchen. Then having to pack it all up and transport it home at the end of the bake.

‘‘They always say when you work for yourself, you've never worked harder, and that's absolutely true. Three in the morning, you're thinking, oh, no, I've got to do this.’’

Every now and again she stretches herself to do a wedding cake and is quite happy doing a birthday cake for the locals.

‘‘I might occasionally make one for the market and sell it by the slice but it’s not my forte.’’

rebecca.fox@odt.co.nz