Česky
How did a physics graduate think of opening a bakery?
It's been more than twelve years, and my wife came up with the idea and wanted to learn how to bake her own bread. At the time, she went to her friend to teach her. She came back with sourdough starter, instructions and bread, but cured of her ambition to bake - she found it too complicated.
It doesn't quite look like love at first sight...
I guess my male ego kicked in. I read the instructions, understood them and then started to make my own bread. Soon we learned how to work with the sourdough starter, to guide it so it wouldn't die and work properly. I started to enjoy it more and more and started to bake bread according to the recipe we had from the friend.
Then the road to my own bakery was within reach?
Not by a long shot. Rather, it was just the literature from abroad that was growing, and I tried to improve myself by self-study. At that time, it was not such a boom in the Czech Republic as it is today. I was experimenting with different flours and looking for how it works. My wife was on maternity leave at the time, so I thought I could try baking for friends and make some extra money. Gradually it started to swell and our oven in the kitchen was no longer keeping up. That's when I started thinking about some more traffic.
Can I now? Can I say you were a baker now?
I guess so. The decision was made to get a business license. I had to get a guarantor because baking is a tied trade and not everyone can have one. So I officially became a licensed baker.
What happened next after moving into your own operation?
We rented a space and bought equipment. In less than a year we grew to where we thought we would be in about five years. We were baking twice a week and delivering hundreds of loaves to the surrounding area. It was an incredible pace that was already very hard to juggle with my job at Multiscan, and burnout didn't take long to set in.
You wanted to quit?
We went at an incredible pace for over a year. We baked in the shops, hired a temp to help out. My wife delivered, I baked at night and irradiated patients during the day. At one point we got in over our heads and said stop. We took two months off and went to the seaside, where we thought about what to do next. On my return, to make matters worse, I got a bad case of pneumonia. That was probably the last straw. When I got over it, we came up with the idea of starting to do workshops and gradually getting away from baking in a big way.
How much are you currently baking?
Today, we run two baking workshops a month under our brand Our GOOD Bakery. As far as the baking itself is concerned, we sell most of our products ourselves at various fairs or social events. We've definitely slowed down a lot and are trying to enjoy it.
What are some of the things that people learn at your workshop?
We have a total of four courses. A basic one for complete beginners who have never baked. Then one for advanced students who want to keep learning and improving. The third course is pure wheat bread, where we learn toast bread, potato bread, fougasse, which is a kind of French specialty, baguettes and other... And the last course is a rye course, which is just pure rye breads, like the Russian Moscow, the Lithuanian Pajuris and the Finnish Ruisreikäleipä. This is really for the challenged, because the processes are very complicated. But at the same time, it's very exclusive, because they are mostly breads that are not baked here at all.
