Love artisanal bread? Here are five places to find great loaves in South Jersey

The pandemic seemingly brought out many peoples’ desire to become bread bakers.

Maybe the desire was there all along and with a lot more time on their hands, pursuing that thing you always wanted to do was a healthy way to weather the lockdown.

For some, the bread-baking trend is in line with a greater desire to know where your food is sourced from and what's in it.

“I would say mainly, and I’m hoping this is true, that people are beginning to realize they need to find the best food they can get their hands on,” says Donna Wallstin, owner of Nearby Baking in Rancocas Woods Village of Shops.

“Artisan bread is a craft and it’s not like we just invented it,'' she continued. "It’s something that’s been going on for ages, the way this bread is made. If it’s sourdough — I’m not saying all artisan bread is sourdough bread — but it’s a technique ... I really appreciate it when people want to learn how to do this as long as they stick with it.

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“When I first saw all the hullabaloo about people baking bread during the pandemic, I’m like, ‘Ok, let’s see what happens a year from now. How many people are going to stick it out?’ ''

Wallstin, a Haddon Heights resident who grew up in Marlton, bakes her sourdough bread in a wood-fired oven hitched to a trailer and parked behind the Creek Mercantile building, not far from Ma & Pa’s Tex-Mex BBQ. You can’t walk up and order her bread. Instead, you can get on a bread list.

“I’m trained as a chef,” said Wallstin, who uses locally grown grains and flours from Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

“I lived on the West Coast for like 10 to 12 years and then came back here. I came back here and there wasn’t any bread that I liked,'' she recalled. "That was back in 2000. I decided, ‘Ok, I’m going to sit and figure this out’. I started baking at home and I was blown away with the quality of stuff I was able to make. I said, ‘This is it, I want to do this.'

“I didn’t want to get back in the restaurant world. So, the other thing I learned not long after I started baking at home was about wood-fired ovens. So I pursued the idea of building my own.”

Wallstin has no retail set up and bakes to order, “almost like a community sustainable bakery kind of thing.”

People order via an email that she sends out weekly and then pick up on the day she asks them to. Wallstin does it this way because she works mostly alone.

“There’s only a limited amount of bread that can be baked in a session any time you fire the oven,” she added. “What I do is very unusual. I don’t think you’re going to see anybody do bread the way I do it.”

Elizabeth Degener, known as “The Cape May Bread Lady,” uses a wood-burning clay oven. Degener has had a popular roadside bread stand at her family’s Enfin Farms in Cape May for more than 12 years. During the summer months, there are long lines of people awaiting her bread. She makes about 150 loaves a day and sells out fast.

“If the yeast shortages were any indication, I know the pandemic certainly heightened people’s interest in bread making,” she said. “People had excess time, and with internet resources like they are today, great websites and YouTube videos, it’s much more accessible to learn a craft.

"Even 15 years ago when I was learning,'' Degener recalled, "we had internet of course, but not as much content and videos as we do today. So that certainly makes learning anything more accessible."

Bread making, she said, conveniently fell into her lap after she worked on a farm in Germany for many months that had an outdoor oven. She learned the basics there.

“I didn’t exactly go searching for the craft, but embraced it when the opportunity presented itself to learn more about it," Degener added. "When I finished college and traveled a bit, I thought baking would be a nice thing to do alongside growing vegetables on the farm that can add value to my farming endeavors, which I found from working on farm, produce alone is difficult to make a lucrative business out of.”

‘God-awful loaves of white bread’

David Murray, owner of Crumb, a Haddonfield eatery which makes innovative sandwiches and seasonal salads, recalls being in culinary school and taking extra baking classes. When he learned about sourdough starters, it sounded like a lot of work.

Sourdough starters are referred to as “the mother” and bakers put them in their refrigerators and then have to remember to refresh flour and water or “feed” them regularly. The mother generally consists of a mix of wild yeast, bacteria, flour (50% white and 50% whole meal) and water.

Murray closed his popular Haddonfield restaurant Denim BYOB (he has retained the brand) during COVID-19, taking a step back due to health issues. With extra down time on his hands, he began to bake bread, a skill he always had and was passionate about.

Before long, he was back in the business with Crumb, his sandwich and salad joint, with business partner and fellow chef Walter Gouldsbury.

Murray’s been a trained baker for about two decades but other than making Parker House rolls or focaccia at his restaurants for dinner service when he ran Denim and other places, he didn’t get into baking “seriously” over the past decade, because he was more hands-on with being an operations chef.

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“It wasn’t really until I sold the contents from Denim and Cluckwerks (his ghost kitchen that focused on chicken sandwiches) that I had all this free time and I was kind of just doing it and keeping myself busy and having fun while my kids were at school during the day, and I was at the house and my wife was working,” he shared. “I’m like, ‘I can make some really good bread and have fun doing so.' I had the free time and I had the accessibility, so why not?”

Murray credits social media channels like YouTube with inspiring the new baking craze that took hold since COVID-19 slowed down our lives.

“For starters, no pun intended, I think with the pandemic and a lot of people kind of having a little bit of cabin fever in the very beginning and with the accessibility of things like the TikToks and the YouTubes that are out there, people began to realize that it’s not as intimidating to bake breads as you would once think,” Murray explained.

“I remember growing up and the big deal it was for my mom when she got her bread machine. Back in the day, the department stores would always sell these bread machines that would make these God-awful loaves of white bread for the most part, but it was like the greatest thing in the world if that’s all that you knew.”

Murray is no longer intimidated by the notion of having to feed his starter.

“Once you get comfortable with the bread and you get comfortable with the feedings and everything, it’s amazing how simple it is,” he shared. “I have alarm clocks set on my phone to remind me for feedings but, I don’t even think I need them. Once somebody realizes how easy it is, there’s no greater reward than the first time when you bake a perfect loaf of bread with the proper oven spring and the perfect crumb interior.”

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And for this accomplished chef, the satisfaction that comes from a perfect boule is different that preparing a perfect piece of fish or meat.

"It’s totally a different feeling when you cut into that bread and you see that crumb, it’s the same feeling every single time,” he says. “I’ll never get tired of the smell of the bread. I’ll never get tired of the process of making the bread. To me, it’s in me now for life. Once you’re there and you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back to buying bread from supermarket.”

Murray sells dozens of loaves a day at Crumb, mostly focaccia slabs, which he says is a generous portion and retails for $6. People often pre-order.

“In addition, I do brioches, I do some Pullman loaves,” he added. “But I do all different flavored focaccia and that’s what I’ve been known for. The focaccia just really fit well into the theme that we do for Crumb since the majority of our sandwiches are on focaccia.”

Flavors for the seasons

Josué Santiago Negrón, owner and pastry chef at Dulce Artisan Pastry in Collingswood, noticed at the beginning of the pandemic that more people were visiting his storefront with questions about baking bread.

“They were coming here to ask if we had sourdough and get advice on how to start their own sourdough starter, stuff like that,” he shared. “I think that was one of the things that people started trying to do after they were home from the pandemic. A little bit of home projects.”

Dulce Artisan Pastry opened in 2016 along Haddon Avenue, a fulfillment of a dream for Negrón, who received culinary training in his native Puerto Rico. He offers a wide variety of breads and desserts.

Dulce, pronounced dool-say, means sweets in Spanish.

Santiago Negrón worked for the Ritz Carlton in Florida early in his career and had stints with Marriott, three different Stephen Starr properties in Philadelphia, and also baked for the Hyatt in Philadelphia.

Dulce's menu offers plenty in the bread department including sourdough, sour multi-grain loaf, sour whole wheat, country white, Mallorca (Puerto Rican sweet bread rolls), chocolate Mallorca, brioche loaf, cinnamon sugar brioche, honey oat loaf and more.

“We do baguettes every day and have two to three different breads every day,” Santiago Negrón says. “Some of them are repeats through the week. I have sourdough and brioche on Wednesday but I also have it on Saturday. We change two of the loaves with the season. Now with the winter, we’re going to do an orange-cranberry walnut.

"We do have things that are all year long, very basic, but we do change flavors of the season,'' he explained. "We always have cheesecake, we always have cookies. The breads are the ones that people are more familiar with. When they come to the store, they see better what we do for pastries. After they try the breads a lot, they want to try the pastries, too.”

Earlier this year, Santiago Negrón purchased the space on White Horse Pike in Haddon Township that formerly housed Peter James and Silver Spoon Catering, and he has plans to turn that into a commercial kitchen. It will give him the capacity to expand his offerings.

"Eventually, we’re hoping to have more storefronts where we can sell some of the same items we sell here,'' he explained, "and it’s also possible in the future we would like to have a café where we can use our own bread.”

‘I really love what I do’

Olde World Bakery and Café in Eastampton also offers all kinds of artisan breads, in addition to bakery treats such as cakes and pies.

Their artisan breads are hand-shaped and baked in their custom-made brick oven.

“We use only the finest quality ingredients from our grains and flours, as well as other locally grown products to serve you a wide variety of hearth baked breads,'' according to the website. "All breads can be made to order.”

There are about 16 different types of bread listed on the Olde World Bakery and Café menu, including seven-grain, French baguette, French boule, sourdough, whole wheat, ciabatta, garlic, Irish soda bread, brick-oven Italian and more.

For some bread lovers, regular pickups are an important part of their routine.

Fans of the Cape May Bread Lady will have to wait awhile for that next fresh loaf, however.

Degener recently had her second child and is a “mom to 2 under 2, so I am closed until the spring.”

“I’m probably going back to the drawing board over the winter and decide exactly how to proceed next year with two little ones,” she reflected.

But you'll still find Wallstin is out in Rancocas Woods, rain or shine, year-round. She said she makes “hundreds of loaves per week”.

“Originally, I was involved with a nonprofit that fundraised to buy the equipment that I had,” said Wallstin, who has taught classes at the Burlington County Agricultural Center in Moorestown. “That nonprofit is no longer. Back in 2017, I bought the equipment from that nonprofit and now I’m just doing my own.

“The oven is outside but rarely does the weather interrupt me. I’ve figured out how to get around it sometimes. Word of mouth is what generates the business …I love that.''

Wallstin has no employees, just her oven, a lot of know-how and her passion for making bread.

"Everything that gets done here, I do it. I value that relationship with the people that buy my bread. I have customers I’ve had for seven years. I really love what I do and this is my only livelihood.”

Celeste E. Whittaker is a features reporter for the Courier Post, Daily Journal and Burlington County Times. The South Jersey native started at the CP in 1998 and has covered the Philadelphia 76ers, college and high school sports and has won numerous awards for her work. Reach her at 856.486.2437 or cwhittaker@gannettnj.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Where can you get great artisanal bread in South Jersey?