Food feature: Artisan baker Mark Newman

Thursday 28th January 2010

Mark Taylor meets the man who has swapped his life in computers for running his own artisan bakery business

It may only be 10am on a wet and windy morning but Mark Newman is in a good mood because a customer has just paid him the ultimate compliment.

“Somebody just came in and asked me if I was a master baker,” he laughs, as he prepares the next batch of loaves – handmade baguettes that will be ready for lunchtime.

His small Ashton bakery is warm and full of the smell of freshly baked bread. Some of the loaves on display have just come out of the ovens and the crusts are still crackling as they cool down on the racks.

As anybody who has tasted it will testify, the quality of Mark’s bread is exceptional, but even he would admit he isn’t a master baker quite yet.

After all, he has only been baking professionally for a few months.

I first heard about Mark’s Bread last summer when a friend told me that he was baking bread for neighbours and friends in Southville.

They had tasted his sourdough and said it was some of the best they had tasted After a few emails, Mark finally got in touch and told me he that his baking career was still very much in the early stages and he wasn’t ready to talk about it.

A few months later, I got back in touch with him and he told me that things were progressing and that he had found a site for his bakery and hoped to be ready to sell bread to the public by Christmas.

He still wasn’t ready to talk, but invited me to visit the bakery anyway to taste the bread.

My perseverance had paid off because when I finally got to meet Mark in his new bakery in North Street, the bread was some of the best I have ever tasted.

It’s not as if Mark really needed any publicity as he has already built up a large and growing customer base entirely through word of mouth.

When I finally get around to interviewing him in the small, open bakery, we have to stop several times in the first hour because of the stream of customers turning up to buy bread.

Mark has come to baking late in his life. Now 50, he worked in computer software development for more than 20 years, until he gave up his well-paid job last year.

He had always been into food and cooking – before computing, he ran a small catering business selling falafels and carrot cake to health food shops – but when he hit 50, he fancied a lifestyle change.

“Thinking back, I was always looking for something else to do,” Mark tells me. “With the recession, my job became more and more pressurised, less fulfilling and I got quite stressed out by it. I needed an alternative career plan.

“I had thought of running a café but then my wife, Maria, bought me a bread course for my 50th birthday and that changed everything.”

Mark attended a two-day basic breadmaking course with master baker Paul Merry at Panary in Cann Mills, Dorset, followed by a professional course there, and he soon realised that’s what he wanted to do.

“I gave my job up in February 2009 and spent a few months visiting bakers, working with them to get as much information as I could. I then started doing a weekly bake for friends and neighbours, borrowing the kitchen at the South Bank Centre.

“I used to send around an email to people telling them what I would be baking that week and then I would go around in the evening, delivering on my bike. That helped me experiment and develop various styles of bread.”

With limited savings, Mark set about buying secondhand equipment from bakeries with a view of opening his own.

A fortuitous meeting with Tobacco Factory owner George Ferguson resulted in Mark finding the perfect premises.

“I had my eye on this place because it was a derelict garage and I knew the lease was held by George Ferguson so I approached him at the Tobacco Factory market.

“It was a ‘serendipity’ moment as he was just about to start work on the Brewery Theatre next door and he had already been thinking about doing something with food in the extra space at the side.”

Mark moved into the small room adjacent to the theatre in October and started baking, initially for wholesale customers such as the Tobacco Factory Café and Riverside Garden Centre. He delivered the bread himself on a bike with a purpose-built wooden trailer box that can hold 50 loaves at a time.

All of Mark’s bread is made with specialist organic flours from Shipton Mill in Gloucestershire.

Some of the breads are ‘wild’ breads, made with levain or sourdough with no commercial yeast. Others are ‘yeasty breads’. All are made slowly and gently by hand.

The long fermentation process of sourdough enhances the flavour and texture and makes the final loaf more digestible – ideal for people with certain wheat intolerances.

“Most people don’t understand sourdough because we don’t eat it much in this country but it gives it so much more flavour and it has good keeping qualities – it develops over the course of a few days.”

As well as the South Bristol Sourdough loaf, the range includes the Malthouse (a traditional English tin loaf made with a blend of wheat flour and malted wheat, malted rye and malted barley), white overnight, walnut bread, rye bread and one made with spelt.

“I do a lot of overnight breads,” says Mark. “I make sourdoughs that take a long time to prove. Generally, that enhances the products because slow is good.

“All of the bread I bake takes about 18 hours to make from start to finish in one way or another.

“Everything is done by hand and on a busy day I am making 250 loaves. I’m doing 12-hour days but I believe if you’re passionate about something, I think you’ll succeed.

“Most bakers don’t come at it from the same angle as I have. It’s a graft for them because they’ve been doing it a long time – often since leaving school to become an apprentice.

“I make the bread during the day because I didn’t want to do nights like most bakers. I wanted to maintain a good work/life balance, but I also wanted people to see how the bread was being made.”

Mark says most of his inspiration to become a baker was seeing bakeries and markets in France.

“If you go to Europe, every town has good bread but in this country the tradition died in the 60s with the industrial, mechanically-made sliced loaf.

“I have lived in Southville for 25 years, I like the area, I know loads of people and I want this to be a community bakery. I knew there was a demand for bread and I wanted a bakery that was quite open so people could see it being made and I wanted that interaction with people.

“At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do retail, but I like people coming in and talking about bread.

“I don’t have ambitions to get much bigger. By definition, an artisan baker is small and the bigger places get the more difficult it is to maintain quality and people start to cut corners. I’m trying to do this without compromise. All I want to do is make great bread.”

Believe me, judging by what I've already tasted, he already is.

Mark’s Bread, 291 North Street, Ashton, Bristol, BS3 1JU. Tel: 07910 979384 www.marksbread.co.uk