A Baker's Delight

Samuel Heys’ journey as a baker began in 2016, when he was a Medical Science student “who just liked baking bread” at his adopted home in Canberra, before moving to Melbourne and taking up baking full-time. Heys, originally from Cheshire in the north of England, describes himself as “an ordinary, young guy who lived near Manchester.” The journey, he thinks, began with “a bit of leftover pizza dough that I decided to make into bread. It was nice.”

The joy of turning a roll of unwanted pizza dough into something new, and slightly unconventional appealed to Heys. “There was enough of a wealth of knowledge out there for me to sink my teeth into, and I just start reading and reading and reading” said Heys. “I kept going with my degree, the whole time I just started baking more and reading more. At the end I didn’t know what to do. The idea of postgrad was pretty gloomy. I thought well, I really like baking and I could try to get an apprenticeship, and maybe do that. It’ll be a fun job or a good job for a little while, and here I am now. I think it was a good decision.”

Upon meeting Heys for a 4a.m. masterclass of a baker’s daily, the icy winds of a wintery Melbourne morning dissipate into a warmth and cosiness that feels homely. One could be mistaken for thinking that this is simply a cheap trick from the freshly fired oven, but it is quickly apparent it emanates from the sheer joy of a person doing what they love.

Heys smiles as he metronomically loads the first loaves of bread from their baskets into the three-tiered oven that towers from floor to ceiling. He appears almost autonomous in his movements as he rolls his wrist with every loaf, but he is clearly engaged completely with the process, “All our loaves are fermented overnight in their shape.” He explains, “you come in, your bread is all ready to bake, so you just bake it and it’s out.”

“Everything we mix today we’ll shape and bake tomorrow. I guess it’s becoming more of the norm. Our way of doing things is more normal because it makes the bakers happier, and the customers are happy, I hope.” He says with a giggle.

“The sourdough was mixed yesterday but we bulk ferment them overnight and divide them in the morning. It gives a nicer product than if you shape them and leave them overnight, and we don’t have time to do them first thing.”

Heys will load 230 loaves of bread every Saturday. Within the first ten minutes of our conversation he’ll load a full trolley of 72 loaves into the oven, before repeating the process each hour until the magical number 230 is attained.

“For me being a baker, I’m doing a lot of the same thing every day.” Heys says, “if I’m shaping bread I’m shaping them all the same way. If I’ve got 1 or 100, 200 or however many, I’m sort of in a flow state and I think a lot of bakery work is like that. You have to be ok to come in and just say “Okay I’m going to do the exact same thing that I did two days ago, with maybe one tiny difference.”

It’s clear Heys loves the art of baking itself, the feel, the act, the physicality, attaining a consistency of quality and efficiency in itself is his art form. The product is very much an extension of Heys himself.

I mention to Heys my own connection to his craft. Upon moving to Melbourne, knowing only two people, I’d moved into a house with housemates I’d had only two conversations with over very fragmented zoom calls, thanks to a spotty internet connection. My newly found housemates, and very soon close friends, remembered my mention of a fondness for fruit toast, and gifted me with one of his fruit loaves which quickly became a favourite of mine. Heys eyes instantly engaged with my recalling of the comfort it brought me in a time where I was trying to re-engage with the concept of home.
 
Tradition and community, form a significant part of why Heys loves being a baker, he feels engaged to something grander than just a simple act of making bread. “I don’t know many of our customers but I feel a strange attachment to them,” he explains, “Being a baker in an area, is a very old, old tradition. I think its nice if I think about that, how that’s me today. I’m doing things maybe slightly differently, with the mixers and ovens, but I’m still doing the same thing and customers are still doing the same thing that people have been doing for hundreds of years. It’s nice! I don’t need to necessarily know the customers to feel like I’m a part of that community.”

Heys furthers his connection of his bread with his community.“You can take bread to events, and houses. People are always happy to see some.”

I ask Heys if he feels peoples’ attitudes towards bread have changed, particularly as costs of living rise and people perhaps reassess what they can and can’t afford to treat themselves to, from day-to-day, “I think customer attitudes have changed,” says Heys, “I think people are more enthusiastic about buying these sorts of things and making it a more regular part of their life. It’s nice if you can afford to do that.” He pauses. “I know our bread is more expensive than the supermarket, I’m not going to be pretentious about it, we don’t make bread for everybody, we don’t make enough, we don’t do sliced bread, we don’t do tin loaves. If people can make it a regular part of their life, I think its better for you, as far as a treat goes, 8 or 9 dollars, it’ll last you for a few days.”

In an ideal world Heys hopes that people could have access to fresh bread any time they please, “it would be nice to bake throughout the day. I think its nice if people can expect to have fresh bread at 5pm.”

Heys’ joy of baking is set to be shared in 3 hour bread making classes he hopes to begin soon at Wildlife. “It’s designed, very much, for new people to kind of get to do every part of bread making, so you can do it all at home. I want to make it as easy as possible for it to fit into your life, and be able to bake based off feeling, and know what to look for, instead of what the recipe says.”

“We quite regularly get customers asking if they can take home starter, which we happily do. I’m glad they are engaged in the process.”

Our conversation naturally gravitates to the Covid-19 pandemic and the uptake in interest surrounding home-made sourdough during lockdowns worldwide. “There was a lot of interest during Covid. I think it was nice. We sold a lot of flour and crazy amounts of bread and we became a reason to leave the house.”

“People would come and buy bread every single day, and I know there are people who were very, very grateful for us to be here. People would send us gifts, and gorgeous notes. Their life felt easier because of us.”

“I don’t talk to the regulars or know any of the regulars but it does remind me we are in a community.” “It’d be nice to talk to the regulars though” he laughs, “there are constantly people staring through the window!”

I ask Heys what it’s like having to work outside of the 9-5 cycle our lives are largely built around. He explains “it makes your life a bit of a weird one. You have to get quite good at napping if you want to have a social life at night, especially if you work weekends. I get to do stuff when no one else is around though. It’s quite peaceful really, especially on Mondays.”

“It is a job you need to love a lot, because if you don’t, you’ll just resent it.” Heys continues. “It’s also a job you can’t do forever. I think the physicality, the night shifts, it wears you down. If I meet an older baker now, it’s sort of 50/50 if they’re doing it now to just get to retirement or because they’re still incredibly driven and want to start their own shop.”

Heys says the life of a baker is best described this by an expression of his “sometimes confusingly” named colleague, Sam. “It’s like a secret job that no one knows about, it’s really peaceful, we come to work, chat shit and make bread, we like doing it and we really care about it.”

“Not bad for a leftover roll of pizza dough.”