Episode II: Simon from Blackbird Baking Co
We proudly present you our second story in our series 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, this time we were in Toronto, Canada where we spoke to Simon Blackwell.
Simon’s story is steeped in history. He tells us how becoming a baker was inevitable, how he envisions bread returning to a slow, considered process and how he created a place for people to come home to. In our conversation, Simon explains how worlds come together through one door.
Coming from a family of bakers, Simon’s career was clear to him from a very young age: “I don’t want to be a baker, I want to be a chef,” he told his parents. And so he did.
As a teenager still in school, he started working in restaurants as a summer job. “I was washing dishes and prepping salads, because I knew I wanted to go to cooking school straight out of high school.” After his chefs training, he worked for 25+ years in high-end professional kitchens in Vancouver, Montreal, London (UK) and Toronto.
Yet over time it became clear that Simon couldn’t ignore his family history of baking. “I always had a real love for bread and over time I got more and more interested in the process.” Baking gained his entire focus in only four short years. “Bread now drives my day-to-day life: my living, my staff, my family and running a business that feeds people.”
His parents ran a bakery on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia for over 40 years, so it’s surprising that Simon is self-taught. “I started reading about bread and traveled to New York City to look at bakeries like Sullivan Street Bakery, Grandaisy Bakery and Amy’s Bread. The 100% naturally leavened sourdough I saw there inspired me and I realized that there were very few places to get that in Toronto at that time. I thought: ‘I want to try and do this.’
Learning to bake has been all about traveling and tasting different styles of bread, buying and reading many books, lots of experimentation, trial & error, and most importantly, working with people that share my passion.”
Even though Simon’s family always encouraged him to bake and cook from an early age, the most important things he was taught were not about making bread. “My parents both cooked very well, but what resonated most with me was that we sat down as a family and had dinner together, every night, enjoying good quality food.”
It made Simon realize that both time and quality got lost in bread as we know it today. “Bread used to be a slow process using a levain and baking in wood-fired ovens. This produced gorgeous crusty loaves of bread that would last for 4 or 5 days. Over the last 100 years the process has shifted to large production in big factories; ingredient quality is poor, the whole process sped up with the use of industrial yeast for quick fermentation and high yield. Quantity has become more important than quality.”
He and his head baker Brenan Clarke are doing the opposite of that. “At Blackbird, we talk about ‘the Old World’, where bread was the cornerstone of a meal and there was a love of producing in a slow manner, in the European tradition, as they do in France, Italy, Scandinavia and Germany.”
Most Blackbird breads take 48 hours before they’re ready and ingredients are carefully picked to ensure a quality product. “We use different flours for different products, but there is one local mill that we really love working with. CIPM in Hastings County grows heritage grains such as Red Fife Rye, Spelt and Buckwheat. It’s freshly milled and Patricia, who runs the mill, drives the freshly milled flour straight to the bakery. This really makes a big difference in the bread.”
Next to time and quality, another value embodies Simon’s baking style: perfection. “At first I did not know what to expect, having had no real experience in baking. So I researched and started a sourdough culture with grapes, organic flour and bottled water and got a culture going. It took me months to get the levain to where I was really happy with it.”
During our conversation with Simon, we witnessed the dynamic of perfection in action. Brenan wasn’t satisfied with the result of the pre-shaping of the seeded sourdough. He decided on the spot to pre-shape the entire batch again to give the dough more strength before final shaping. Everybody pitched in, four individuals working as one baker, a team putting all their love into making the best loaves possible.
Blackbird Baking Co was strictly wholesale for its first three years. “I remember the first day, baking the first focaccias: off the peel and on to the stone, using my little two-deck oven for the first time — it felt so incredibly good! The smell was amazing and I was so excited because I realized that this was what I was meant to do. In the beginning, it was four or six loaves of bread, a scale that was not sustainable, but it was just exciting to get started, to get it going. And then to see it all to grow from just me, a small mixer, that little Italian Moretti oven, one wooden bench and now I have over 25 employees here.”
Just over a year ago, Blackbird opened up a retail shop in Kensington Market, a thriving neighbourhood in the middle of downtown Toronto, who has embraced the bakery like family. “We all know the regular customers and are on a first name basis many of them. Some of them come in and want to talk about bread and their own home baking projects, and for some of them it reminds them of home. They come in and say: ‘It smells like my mom’s kitchen when I was a child.’ I get a warm feeling from that and from our neighbours in the market who come into the bakery — we all know and support each other. Many of the ingredients for our pastries, sandwiches and pizzas come from these neighbours: the butcher shop next door, the fruit and vegetable market on the corner, the spice shop at the end of the road.”
Walking into the store, bread is the first thing you encounter. You can pick the loaf you want and bag it yourself. It’s yours from the very start. It’s hard to choose though, they all look amazing piled up in baskets, their crust in contrast against the brick wall. “We push the colour on everything we bake, to the point where people say: ‘why is this bread so dark?’. It’s not burnt, it’s all about creating a gorgeous, hard crust that makes the bread last. We say: ‘this is how we bake the bread, this is how we like it: try it!’.”
Passing the counter, the cooling racks, you see an old book plate of a blackbird hanging opposite the ovens, in honour of his grandfather Henry Blackwell who nicknamed his grandchildren ‘his little blackbirds’. You would expect a backdoor here, but there is none. “This neighbourhood is so old and so dense, there are very few alleys — everything here comes through the front door.”
This front door is where all worlds come together: the bakers leaving after their night shift, pass by people coming to Blackbird to get a fresh loaf of bread to start their day.
It’s also the door to a world where talented bakers are producing a slow-fermented bread that can find its way to the people. Just as bread has eventually found its way back to Simon who never intended to be a baker, pursued a family tradition.
