Poland’s Daily Bread

Text and photos by Karolina Wiercigroch

A bread-based breakfast is on the everyday menu in most Polish households. Slowly, people started longing for high-quality, traditional bread, like those made from ancient grains at Rdest.

Polish folk culture celebrates bread and grains in a very special manner. Its roots can be traced back to the old Slavic beliefs, which have become mixed with Christianity over the centuries. Bread, a symbol of abundance, hospitality and divinity, was present at many kinds of rituals and celebrations. Even today, the newly married couples are welcomed by their parents with a tray of bread and salt upon arrival to the wedding. 

For centuries, the respect for bread has been one of the most crucial elements of Polish food culture. When a bread crumb fell on the floor in a Polish house, it was immediately picked up and kissed, as a sign of gratitude. It is sometimes still believed that throwing away stale bread is a sin that could bring bad luck. Freshly baked bread was marked with a symbolic cross as a type of blessing.

The post-Communist transition in the early 1990s brought new technologies and ways of speeding up the baking process. Many bakers abandoned traditional methods. Bread became cheap and easily available. People started buying it at supermarkets and convenience stores, forcing many local bakeries to shut. 

Today, while the overall consumption of bread in Poland is declining, the majority of Poles still buy bread on a daily basis. A bread-based breakfast is on the everyday menu in most Polish households. Slowly, people started longing for high-quality, traditional bread. Especially after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people tried baking at home and turned to artisanal bakeries looking for healthier, more tasty products.

Artur Ogrodziński applies a fine-dining palate to his bread baking.

Edere

Artur Ogrodziński had started baking bread for his guests at Dyletanci, one of the most acclaimed fine dining restaurants in Poland, where he works as a sous chef. He almost instantly knew that he wanted to bake more. 

The pandemic sped up his plans, with the restaurant work becoming quieter due to the Covid-19 restrictions. During uncertain times, a bakery seemed like an obvious choice. He and his business partner renovated a small space in an industrial brick building in central Warsaw. Ogrodziński took some of his sourdough starter from the restaurant’s kitchen and started baking. He used his own recipes from Dyletanci, his bread Bible (Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman) and a handful of tips from a befriended baker. 

At Edere, the work is done with artisanal methods. Most breads are made with sourdough starter, with only ciabatta and focaccia using commercial yeast. Everything is constantly measured. Ogrodziński checks the temperatures of the flour and the room to adjust the warmth of the water. 

“If the water is too cold, the starter won’t work as much as it should. If it's too warm, the dough will start fermenting too quickly,” he says. 

The dough can’t rise for too long and can’t be sped up. At first, there were a lot of trials. And a lot of errors. Both Ogrodziński and Filip Wylęgała, the second baker, are chefs. They’re keen to experiment with flavors, adding different herbs, seeds or spices to the bread. But they never try to speed up the process. 

“We have time,” Ogrodziński says. “We’re not going to add yeast to our sourdough bread. Our bread rises for as long as it needs to, may it be four or five hours rather than two. And while we’re trying to be as repetitive as possible, it’s a natural product, so it may look or taste a little different each time. In order for it to always be the same, we’d need to use chemical additives, which the large commercial bakeries do.

“Some customers are used to a perfect bread. If it looks slightly off, has or doesn’t have a crack, seems slightly higher or lower, they assume there’s something wrong with it. But in most cases, it’s still the same, delicious bread. This changes, luckily. People started buying ugly fruit and vegetables to avoid food waste, now they’re slowly getting used to eating imperfect bread.”

Cebularz is a flatbread topped with fried onions and poppy seeds. It originates from the Jewish cuisine of Lublin.

Ogrodziński bakes a few kinds of sourdough bread, both wheat and rye, some with a selection of seeds—nigella and chia, sunflower, flax and sesame. Cebularz, a flatbread topped with fried onions and poppy seeds, which originates from Jewish cuisine of Lublin, is a big hit, available made with either sweet or savory dough. 

Wheat and rye chleb parzony is similar to the French pain bouilli: A part of the rye flour is mixed with boiling water before kneading the dough. This is a very traditional method, evocative of old-school Polish bakeries. The procedure enhances caramel notes of the flour, makes the crust crispier and allows for the bread to be kept for longer—the original reason for using boiling water.

Ogrodziński and Wylęgała work different shifts. Ogrodziński comes in around 6am and stays until 2 p.m., preparing the dough. Wylęgała works at night; he starts around 10pm and bakes the bread from the morning dough. These roles are traditionally called ciastowy — from the Polish word ciasto, meaning dough, and piecowy, from piec—the oven. 

Raised in the countryside in a family of outstanding horse breeders, Ogrodziński grew up with an exceptional respect for nature. He grows his own vegetables, makes charcuterie, keeps bees, still cooks at Dyletanci and doesn’t seem to sleep much. 

“I like hard work and so does my entire family,” he says. “The more projects I’ve got, the more exciting life gets.“

There’s a growing demand for artisanal bread, but not enough space at Edere to bake more at the moment. They’re hoping to expand. 

“I think it’s better to eat less, but things of good quality,” says Ogrodziński. “For some of our customers, our bread may seem expensive. It’s two or three times more than what you pay at a commercial bakery or a supermarket. But it will last for a good few days. Some people buy a loaf of white bread every day, eat a few slices and throw away the rest, as it’s not edible the next day.”

Ryszard Majchrowski bakes in the oldest ceramic bread oven in Gdańsk, built before World War II, which his father restored in 1973.

Piekarnia Ryszard Majchrowski

“I’m running a museum,” Ryszard Majchrowski says jokingly, his eyes twinkling with pride. “We haven’t changed a thing since my father took over the bakery. The oven, the ingredients, the method — it all stayed the same.”

Majchrowski had started working at his father’s bakery on April Fools’ Day and was only going to stay for a few months, maybe a year or two. That was 39 years ago.

Józef, Majchrowski’s father, came to Gdańsk from the village of Kunowo in 1945. He opened a small bakery in Chełm, a district of Gdańsk. In the postwar years, there were more than 50 small bakeries in different parts of the city. Today, only a handful remain. Majchrowski remembers hiding between large bags of flour and eating the warm, crispy bread crust. 

“It’s still my favorite part of bread and my favorite thing to eat,” he says. “I will never forget that taste.”

In 1972, Józef took over a run-down bakery at Dolna Brama in the historic part of Gdańsk, Stare Przedmieście. It was one of few buildings in the area that survived the war. Some still carry holes of the World War II bullets. Józef restored the bakery and opened its doors in January 1973. 

Nothing has changed since. The pre-war ceramic bread oven—the oldest one in Gdańsk—still is the heart of the bakery. The bread baking methods remained the same. The ingredient lists are as short as they always were: flour, salt, water and sourdough starter or yeast.

Aside from electric mixers, every step of Ryszard Majchrowski’s breadmaking is done by hand.

“We use yeast for wheat bread and a sourdough starter for any whole meal, rye loaves. For the wheat bread we start with podmłoda—a pre-ferment made of flour, water and yeast. It’s the first phase of fermentation,” Majchrowski says. “Salt is really important. Without it, the bread is tasteless. But too much salt isn’t good either. If the bread is too salty, the dough won’t rise. What’s good and tasty for humans, is also good for the dough. Not too much, not too little, just the right amount.” 

He was never tempted to use chemical additives to make his bread easy or quick, or to dress it up like the packaged supermarket breads. 

“People loved everything that came in shiny, colorful packaging,” he says. “After decades of communism, we craved colour. In Poland, everything was gray.” 

Mixing and kneading the dough is the only part of the process done by old bakery mixers and not by hand. Everything else is manual work: dividing the dough, forming loaves, drizzling them with water for a crispy, shiny crust. 

It was Majchrowski’s brother, Marek, who was supposed to take over the family business. But he left the country in November 1981, two weeks before martial law was introduced in Poland. He decided to stay abroad, first in Austria, then moving to the U.S. Majchrowski, a mechanical engineer, decided to help his father instead.

“I wouldn’t still be here, had I not liked it,” he says. “In life, temporary solutions are often the most durable ones. At first, I thought I wanted to go back to designing shipyards’ cranes. But this was the right decision after all. The factories shut, and I’m still here, baking bread.”

Józef worked at the bakery until he was 85 years old, and Majchrowski’s mother sold fresh loaves until the age of 88. 

“People were different back then, they were tougher.” 

Majchrowski’s bakers start mixing the dough around 5 p.m. and finish baking around 5 a.m. They make between 200 and 300 loaves each day. When the city sleeps, the bakery is filled with lively music and the smell of freshly baked bread. Throughout the night, the bakers take turns forming loaves and placing them in the hot oven. One of the bakers, Tomek Andrejew, has been baking with Majchrowski for more than 25 years. 

“A baker sleeps during the day or not at all,” Majchrowski says. “My life revolves around bread. Every day, no matter what, you have to come in, feed the starter and bake bread. The life of a baker is far from normality, but it’s got a certain charm. If you play it right, you will have a few hours for yourself to lie in the sun.” 

Before the bakery opens, there’s usually a line of hungry customers waiting outside. But the first clients come much earlier, just before midnight. The regulars know that they can knock on the windows in the middle of the night and buy a loaf of warm bread. 
“I’ve noticed that in recent years, people started appreciating artisanal products again,” says Majchrowski. “The quality of food is important. Some customers still remember my father’s bread, but we have more and more new customers these days. We used to mostly serve our neighborhood, but now people come from different districts of the city, surrounding towns and villages. People will always eat bread.”

Karolina Huzarska works alone at Rdest, and since she does not wish to bake at night, she starts heating the oven around 7 a.m. and doesn’t allow the customers in until 11 a.m. She needs one day for prepping and making the dough, then another one for baking and selling.

Rdest

“This is my favorite bread,” Karolina Huzarska points towards a row of small tin forms. “All it needs is a little bit of butter, maybe a pinch of salt.” 

She starts placing the tins in the hot oven.
“I make it with spelt sourdough starter and an ancient type of spelt called schwabenkorn. I’m using a graham grind. It’s a type of coarse-ground flour, named after its creator, Sylvester Graham, an American dietary reformer. He reinvented the grinding process: The bran is separated and then added back to the coarsely ground flour. For this reason, the flour’s texture is really unique.” 

The loaves slowly rising in the oven, Huzarska pours us some freshly brewed mint tea and gets back to her story about bread. 

“It’s actually quite a challenge to use those ancient, organic grains in bread baking,” she says. “They work great in pancakes, waffles or pasta, but their properties, mainly the gluten strength,  aren’t always strong enough for bread. It’s much easier to work with conventional wheat flour. 

“That’s connected to how wheat has been modified. The grain is modified to be cheaper to grow and more effective in bread baking, which you can achieve with gluten strength and high water absorption. It basically makes bread cheaper. Ancient grains, on the other hand, are naturally strong and resistant, but that makes them more difficult to hull. They’re more expensive, because they require more work and give smaller crops.”

The story of the revival of ancient types of spelt in Poland began in the 1990s, when Zbigniew Babalski opened the first organic farm in the country. It took a few years for the grains to adapt to local conditions and another few years to convince suspicious Poles to start buying his whole-grain, strange-looking, dark pasta. 

“I also use einkorn and emmer,” says Huzarska. “I buy grains directly from the farmers and mill them here. I prefer to do this myself, as the flours you can buy, even the whole-grain ones, don’t contain the germ. That’s because it’s the most perishable part of the grain, as it contains saturated fat. But it’s also the major nutritional component of grain.” 

Huzarska has started working with Pradawne Ziarno (“Ancient Grain”), an initiative that supports biodiversity in Polish grain farming. Pradawne Ziarno managed to recreate several types of ancient grains and reintroduced it to the system by encouraging farmers to start growing them. Huzarska tests the grains in her breads: Triticum polonicum, also known as Polish wheat, Persian wheat and Indian dwarf wheat.

“A few hundred years ago, people farmed over 2,000 types of plants,” she says. “Today, monocultures of wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, barley, cassava, soy and cane make up 70 percent of all crops. By increasing biodiversity, we help rebuild the local ecosystems, destroyed by conventional farming.”

After years of avid home baking, Huzarska, a graphic designer, renovated a small space in Warsaw’s Old Mokotów district and opened her bakery this February. 

“My mother didn't bake bread, neither did my grandmother. But my great grandmother did. I started baking after having my kids, as I wasn’t able to find a good, convenient source of quality bread to feed to my children. After I’d moved to Warsaw, I started thinking about baking a bit more seriously. I worked at a local bakery for a bit, just to see how bakeries worked. And it was exhausting! Used to a sedentary lifestyle, I was not prepared to be on my feet for eight hours straight. But I liked it.” 

Rdest is currently open three times a week. Huzarska works alone, and since she does not wish to bake at night, she starts heating the oven around 7 a.m. and doesn’t allow the customers in until 11 a.m. She needs one day for prepping and making the dough, then another one for baking and selling.

Karolina Huzarska tests ancient grains in her breads: Triticum polonicum, also known as Polish wheat, Persian wheat and Indian dwarf wheat.

“I’d like to offer all sorts of things related to grains, like freshly milled flour,” she says. “I’m making herbal kombucha and would like to start selling my own muesli made with ancient grains, like einkorn flakes, which I cut for myself and eat in a porridge. I used to hate oatmeal until I tried cutting oat flakes myself. I bought good quality oat grains and was mesmerized with the intensity of flavour. The taste is completely different!

“It’s really important for me not to waste too much. A good bread is way too precious to be wasted! That’s why I’m using any leftover loaves to make different kinds of breadcrumbs. I also make kvass with the unsold rye breads. It’s a probiotic drink typical to Central and Eastern Europe. I make mine with only two ingredients: rye bread and honey.” 

Kvass originates from Kievan Rus’ and was traditionally made with leftover rye bread. However, with the growing popularity of the refreshing drink, it no longer made sense to bake bread just to turn it into kvass. That’s why most of what can be bought today is being made with malt or concentrate rather than actual bread. Artisanal kvass is rare to come by.  

Huzarska loves experimenting. Her classic rye bread is delicious, but so is the one made with spelt, red millet pap, Korean doenjang paste and roasted sesame seeds. The whole-meal einkorn bread contains birch buds and the Vilnius-inspired rye is sweet with plum jam and Lithuanian malt. Karolina often mixes kimchi, hazelnuts, edamame or cheddar into the dough.

“I love my job. The work is hard and physical, but my mind can relax. When I worked as a graphic designer for big food brands, I didn’t always feel at ease promoting values I did not necessarily share myself. I really wanted to find a job that would be in line with my ethics. 

“Here, I share numerous positive interactions with people who come to buy bread. I feel like it’s more than just a bakery, that this place helps revive the local community. In recent years, many small businesses in Poland were shut down, not able to compete with large supermarkets. And because of that, many neighborhoods seemed dead, people no longer had a place to stop by and chat. I think that the popularity of small bakeries and local artisans regains the city space back for people. I’m hoping that the pandemic will end up helping rebuild the local businesses.

“I love hearing stories about my bread from the customers. ‘OMG, I ate the whole loaf at once!’ Or, ‘It lasts me the whole week, I had the last slice yesterday and here I am, ready for the next one.’

“It seems that the archetypical Polish respect for bread is slowly returning. My bread is more expensive than what you can buy at a supermarket, but it lasts much longer. I think that the way people consume bread has changed, people start eating less bread, but of better quality. I also noticed that they started buying my bread as a gift for house visits. This makes me very happy. I think that the wisdom of our ancestors is somehow resurfacing, especially with the pandemic.” 

"Rdest" is the Polish name of knotweed. It reminds Huzarska of carefree summers in the countryside. She used to run around meadows, playing with plants, knotweed being one of them. 

“To me, it refers to the wilderness, to biodiversity.”   

Once the spelt breads are ready, Huzarska skilfully takes the hot loaves out of the oven. We impatiently wait for them to cool down and then eagerly spread a thin layer of butter on thick slices. She was right: This bread doesn’t need anything else.