It was a misty morning, and Dale Dugan, baker for the four restaurants and one wine shop in Baltimore's Charleston group, said his bread was giving him a weather report.
On days like this one, he said, when there is a lot of moisture in the air, the dough likes to spend a short time in the proofer. Moreover, the bread's "oven spring" its first rise in the oven, will be more ample. Additionally on humid days, you have to watch the crust.
"If there is too much water in the air, you can get a hyper-exaggerated crust," he said. Finally the chances of a "blow-out," the dough pushing through the crust, are much higher on humid days.
"From April on, Baltimore humidity becomes an ingredient in our bread," he said. "Our bread is basically a body of water, and anything that affects water affects us," he said
But, Dugan added, humidity is not necessary a baker's enemy. "You have to moisten the bread anyway," he said, but the trick is to keep the moisture under control.
Dugan, 48, is by his own description an old-school bread baker. He and his assistant, Carrie Goltra, bake between 200 and 600 loaves a day at Pazo restaurant on Aliceanna Street. The loaves are then distributed to the other Charleston group sites. He bakes in an oven fueled both by gas and chunks of wood that he splits with an ax.
"I spend a lot of time with my head and arms in the oven," he said. He forms the loaves by hand.
"I don't knock the guys that use machines to shape their breads, but I don't think that is really artisanal. When the Sistine Chapel was painted, he [Michelangelo] wasn't using a blow gun."
By his count, Dugan has baked bread in 32 different ovens in his 26-year career. Among them are ovens in the region's better-known bakeries - Atwater's, Stone Mill, Big Sky, Linwood's and Clyde's. He also worked at the now-defunct Cover to Cover Bookstore Cafe in Columbia. There he met his wife, Alison, then a pastry chef, now the mother of their 14-year-old son, Jacob.
If you spend a day watching Dugan work, as I did recently, you come away with a fistful of his observations on both bread-baking technique and philosophy. He baked Pugliese, Fougasse, Pan de Pages breads for Pazo, Semolina golden raisin bread and french rolls for Charleston, baguettes a l'Anciennes for Petit Louis and the wine shop Bin 604, and Pane di Como for Cinghiale.
