Episode I: Łukasz From ZOLA
We’re delighted to introduce you to our series of inspirational stories on bakers and their passion for bread. Hungry for their journey, motivations and philosophies, Rise is a backstory about living and loving bread. We interview bakers around the world, starting in Berlin, Germany where we spoke to Łukasz Sołowiej.
Łukasz might not feel like a real bread baker, talking to him tells us something different. His story reveals a passion for baking that is rooted deeply in his early childhood, established during his travels through Europe and ultimately manifested into a baking philosophy. In our conversation, he explains why bread is life.
Growing up in Poland, close to the Ukrainian boarder, Łukasz first got into pizza. Watching American television shows, he saw the Ninja Turtles and Bill Cosby eating pizza: crispy baked dough with melted cheese, something that he’d never seen in Poland.
When in 1993 a pizzeria in his town first opened its doors, a moment Łukasz has been dreaming of, he discovered this wasn’t the kind of pizza he’d seen on tv. It was the search for finding pizza as he imagined it, that eventually lead him to a career of baking.
Being the first one to leave the town where eight generations of his family had lived, Łukasz broke with another pattern as well: he’d be the first man of the family to be working in the kitchen. Moreover, working in a kitchen for a living. His heart lead him to London where he, now easier known as Lukas, would be trained as a pizza chef. Not expecting at the time that he would be running a bakery not long after.
Starting out in a kitchen with no cooking experience at all, a chef in London recognised Lukas’ fire, took him in and schooled him as a pizza chef.
Later, moving on from this gastropub to Shoreditch House, Lukas’ freshly trained profession was about to change when the man who ran the bakery there, announced that he was leaving.
“They were looking for someone to replace him. I asked my chef if I could do it, because I’m really into baking. I wanted to learn how to do it and that’s how it started. The Mexican baker would teach me.
On the first day he showed and explained me everything. On the second day I was doing everything myself. He was there with me, but he didn’t do anything. He was just watching me. On the third day the baker didn’t show up and I was running the bakery for another six months. I was baking focaccia with tomatoes, rosemary and onions, a bread with seven type of seeds and sourdough breads.”
As an autodidact and mentored by experienced bread bakers, Lukas’ most important lesson was learned by his Mexican teacher: how to behave and how the dough behaves.
“I’m always doing it, how I feel I must do it. The beginning is a very important stage. When you make the dough, you have to understand it, you have to read it. A baker has to have warm hands, even when it’s cold, so the dough is listening to the baker. When you touch it, you don’t want to destroy the language. Doing it every day, you have to understand what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.”
Baking bread is a delicate process that asks a lot of patience, “Mistakes are easily made. You can shape the dough too early or overproof the dough easily. You have to know what you’re doing and being in a rush doesn’t help. Of course, there are tricks for when you’re in a rush, like using warm water in the dough or proof it in the oven. I don’t like these tricks, because you’ll taste it in the bread. You have to be patient.”
Lukas learned that your mood is reflected in the bread. On a hasty morning, he rushed the dough and later, tasting the bread, he didn’t like it, “something is off”, he said. Earlier that morning, he couldn’t completely focus on the dough and this distraction was traceable in the bread.
“When I work, I need to have music. And it has to be positive music. Everyday I play different music, sometimes we’re listening to reggae, sometimes to funk, hiphop or rock ’n roll. It doesn’t matter what kind off music, as long as it’s positive music.
Trash metal for example, is an excellent sound for making bread, because it’s got good energy. If you listen to Slayers South Of Heaven, a song that gives me goosebumps, I get this positive energy and then I give that to my product.”
The importance of music to Lukas, is not a coincidence either. As a kid he studied piano for years and today he still plays the guitar and bass guitar. Music is a family tradition that he still carriers out, but again in his own rock ’n roll way.
Working as a baker allowed him to play music during the day, when he finished baking and the neighbours are only just half way through their working day.
He shares another favourite soundtrack for making bread, it’s a song by The Bambi Molesters, “It sounds like something from Tarantino movies: guitars: guitars solo’s, second guitar in background, no lyrics, only music. Why it pairs so well with bread? I guess it’s because of me. Since I was a kid, I love both music and bread.”
After moving from from London to the English east coast, to Berlin, Lukas is now running a pizza place called Zola in the Kreuzberg area. Big, rustic sourdough breads are laid out on the countertop with a huge wood fire oven that is baking pizzas in the background. “I had never done bread from pizza dough before, but I started doing it here because I had too much over proofed dough and I thought, let’s use it, let’s try. And it’s working nicely.”
The dough Lukas uses for his pizzas and bread is based on the recipe of poolish, another thing he’d learn from his Mexican mentor. “It’s the kind of sourdough which was made by polish bakers in France in the nineteenth century. At the time, polish people were traveling around Europe a lot. It was such a cool story to hear that polish bakers were famous back then. It touched me, because I’m polish.”
He realised later that it were these polish roots that had steered his life to the direction of bread. “At the countryside, there were really good bakeries. As kids we would go to the bakeries where we could smell fresh bread. It’s just amazing! We always knew someone who worked there, so we’d knock on the door and ask for a piece of that fresh loaf: I will never forget the taste.”
However, in addition to baking pizza there is another experience that inspired Lukas greatly to start baking bread.
He spent lots of time with his grandmother at the country side. “Every weekend and holidays I was at my grandmothers house with my sister. I remember that she used to bake us bread, sourdough loaves in big trays, in a wood fire oven. I was watching her, but I didn’t help her baking. Where I’m from only women cook, I’m simply not allowed to go to the kitchen. I had to go abroad to learn to cook.
The feeling of getting my very first own bread out of the oven, is such an amazing feeling. When you think of the history of food, bread is one of the first things which was important for human beings. It’s this kind of the base of nutrition. It’s the first thing you need and I felt like: I can feed people!”
It’s not only the reward of rebellion; leaving home, entering the kitchen, mastering a traditional skill and being able to provide people with a basic need that is heard in Lukas’ story.
He’s kneading the dough while we’re having this conversation and there he explains that there’s another level of existence present in bread. “Bread is the mixture of water, flour and yeast: a living bacteria. It gets bigger and bigger, It starts to be alive. All the time it’s alive and that’s what’s so cool about it. Bread is life.”
ZOLA IN BERLIN, GERMANY
Get yourself a loaf of Lukas’ bread and don’t forget to try the pizza.
WEBSITE
Zola facebook page
CREDITS
Interview / text by Noortje Offreins
Images by Ailine Liefeld
