It is morning in the Hudson Valley and the ovens are full of bread.
Long and crusty baguettes, sour and pungent rye, foccacia shot through with herbs and olives. Hearths are being fired, challah is being braided, sourdough starters are greedily devouring sugars as they ferment in buckets and tubs, expelling gassy bubbles into the morning air. The long, dark night of supermarket bread is over.
The last few years have seen an explosion in the number of artisanal bakeries in the Hudson Valley, putting quality breads in the eager hands of more and more people. But nestled high in the Shawangunk Mountains, one small town has been enjoying handmade breads for almost a hundred years.
The Postmaster’s Pumpernickel
The Cohen family moved to Ellenville from the Bronx in 1920 and opened up Cohen’s Bakery in a stately brick building downtown. There, they baked bread for generations of Ellenville residents, including their famous raisin pumpernickel bread: sweet and toothsome, the pumpernickel bread for people who think they hate pumpernickel.
You can still walk into Cohen’s Bakery today and buy a loaf of that pumpernickel, as well as rye breads, rugelach, and bagels made using the same recipe the bakery was using in 1920. It’s an invaluable piece of the Hudson Valley’s culinary history, and it was almost lost forever.
In 2003 Ruby Cohen, son of founder Harry Cohen and sole proprietor of the bakery for 45 years, was searching the Valley for someone to sell the bakery to. Perhaps it was a symptom of the low-carb Atkins craze that was inexplicably sweeping the country at the time, but no one wanted to buy it. It fell to Bill Tochterman, Ellenville’s retired postmaster, to step in and buy the bakery in order to keep it from closing down. Today, Cohen’s Bakery is operating in much the same way it has been for the past 94 years, with a few exceptions. They now make a line of low-gluten breads for the ever-increasing number of customers who have difficulty tolerating gluten. And in addition to their wholesale business, they ship their famous breads all over the world, especially to former customers and Ellenville residents who have left the Hudson Valley. As Andrea Smith, who runs the bakery’s wholesale and shipping business, explains, “I mail a lot of bread to Florida.”
An Early Leader
Cohen’s Bakery was one of the Valley’s few outposts of artisanal, handmade bread for years until Daniel Leader opened up Bread Alone in Boiceville in the early 1980s. Originally a chef working in some of New York City’s finest French restaurants, be became bored with what he called “fancy food for high society.” When the restaurants closed for August vacation every year, he’d follow his French colleagues back to their home country. It was in France that Leader fell in with a group of bakers and discovered his true calling. “I really like food that everyone can enjoy,” he says. “Bread crosses all economic lines, all cultural lines, all ethnic lines. Everyone seems to love bread.”
There wasn’t anyplace else in the Hudson Valley selling organic, European-style breads when Bread Alone opened in 1983. He wasn’t sure how people would react to his bread. Unbeknownst to him, there was a hidden customer base just begging to be tapped into. “We were fortunate because back in the ’80s there were a lot more Europeans with second homes in the Catskills,” he says. “Most of our original customers were Polish, Russian, French, or Italian. They immediately got it. I didn’t have to educate them.”
Bread Alone quickly grew into a miniempire, adding locations in Woodstock and Rhinebeck and distributing their bread to markets and restaurants throughout the region. Today, Leader is considered one of the country’s preeminent bakers, has written several celebrated books for home bakers, and has managed to successfully scale up Bread Alone’s production capabilities without any sacrifice of flavor or integrity. “We’ve been very disciplined about our production,” Leader says. “Actually, I think our product is better than ever now.”
Sheila Buff, author of the recently published A Food Lover’s Guide To The Hudson Valley, agrees. “I think it helps that they really only do bread,” she says. “They don’t do too many cakes, cookies, whatever. When you focus on just making bread, you’re going to get a better product.”
Buff credits Bread Alone with whetting the Hudson Valley’s appetite for artisanal bread, as well as the steady increase of farmer’s markets throughout the past 30 years. “People began having more access to good bread through the markets, instead of having go all the way to the bakery,” she says.
A Knead for Bread
It was at a farmers’ market that Simone Williams first saw the need for handmade bread. She was looking for a way to teach her three-year-old son about farms and where food comes from, when she hit upon the idea of setting up at farmers’ markets and selling cheeses from many of the Valley’s small-batch cheesemakers who were too busy and short-staffed to attend the markets themselves. As she went from market to market with her son, she sampled the bread being sold. She was not impressed.
“I thought, ‘Geez, this bread is terrible,” Williams recalls. “There’s got to be better bread out there that I can sell instead of this.”
Her search led her to the breads of Highland’s David Meltzer, which she began selling alongside her selection of cheeses. When Meltzer told her that he was closing up his Highland shop, she saw an opportunity. “I told him, ‘We need to partner up because I can’t let you go out of business. Your bread is too good’.”
They rented a space at the old high school in Beacon, managed to squeeze a commercial oven through the door (“We had about that much room on either side,” she recalls, holding her fingers a whisker’s width apart), and All You Knead was born. Meltzer did all the baking, Williams handled all the business. They were successful enough that they soon opened a storefront on Beacon’s Main Street. Then one day Meltzer told Williams he was moving on. She had little prior baking experience. So for two weeks, she watched him bake. She watched his hands. She watched him do everything. “The last thing he said before he left was, ‘Call me if you need anything,'” she says. “And I never did. Three years later, we’re still here. I would not accept going out of business.”
If anything, All You Knead’s breads are even better than they were when the shop first opened. The small storefront quickly sells out their daily batches of baguettes, sourdough loaves, and hearth breads, much to the disappointment of those who come late in the day. On a recent afternoon, an elderly woman stopping by the bakery was crestfallen to learn that the bakery did not currently have any of its gorgonzola pecan bread. Williams suggested that she try the jalapeno cheddar bread instead. “Well, eventually,” she said to Williams, leaning in for emphasis, “what I would like to do is try them all.”
Better Late Than Never
“I think we’re getting there,” says Tarah Gay of Kingston’s Outdated Café about the Hudson Valley’s flourishing bakery scene. When they first opened two years ago, Gay was surprised how hard it was to find bread that lived up to her standards. “We couldn’t find anything that looked or tasted like it was made by hand, and it made a really big difference when we found one that was,” she says. “We make everything else here ourselves by hand, so why use bread that wasn’t?”
The bread they discovered was from Bonfiglio & Bread in Hudson. Like All You Knead, Bonfiglio & Bread was founded when Rachel Sanzone and Gabriele Gulielmetti realized that there was a lack of quality bread in their town. Although they had no professional training, they soon began baking bread and selling it out of their apartment every day at noon. When people began lining up at their apartment at 11:45 am, they realized they might be on to something. They now run a successful café and bakery on Hudson’s main thoroughfare, Warren Street, and sell their breads, bialys, and croissants throughout the region.
While Gay mainly attributes Bonfiglio & Bread’s success to the quality of its product, she also thinks that more and more people in the Hudson Valley are finally ready to pay a little bit more for real bread. “Where I grew up in Burlington, Vermont, handmade bread was a common thing,” she says. “It’s all we had. And I think now New York’s finally headed that way.”
And no one agrees with that sentiment more than Daniel Leader himself, who once hoped his bakery’s success would spur local amatuer and professional bakers alike to follow his lead and take breadmaking into their own patient and well-floured hands.
“I’m very optimistic about the Hudson Valley,” he says. “But honestly, I thought this was all going to happen twenty years ago.”
Cohen’s Bakery 89 Center Street, Ellenville (845) 647-7620
Bread Alone 3962 Route 28, Boiceville (845) 657-6057
45 E. Market Street, Rhinebeck (845) 876-3108
22 Mill Hill Road, Woodstock (845) 679-2108
All You Knead 308 Main Street, Beacon (845) 440-8530
Outdated Cafe 314 Wall Street, Kingston (845) 331-0030
Bonfiglio & Bread 748 Warren Street, Hudson (518) 822-0277
This article appears in July 2014.
