Industry spotlight.

Name: Dave Braverman

Home: Mt. Airy, Pennsylvania

Occupation: Artisanal Baker and Founder of Le Bus Bakery

Family: Wife Andrea, two sons: Benjamin and Joseph, and daughter Jamie

First job: A Hebrew school music teacher

Mottoes by which I work: Mainly, I don't try to out-think the things that brought me success. I don't try to reinvent our image or style of business.

In 1978, David Braverman, a musical conductor and classically trained musician an old school bus into a local lunch pick-up joint. From the small propane stove in the back, "Dagwood" sandwiches, homemade soups, plump muffins, and whole grain breads emerged. Faithful customers, most of them bleary eyed co-eds from the nearby University, lined up for a taste of David's unusually good coffee and freshly made concoctions. When David moved to a free standing cafeteria, the company's eponymous name followed. Today, Le Bus retains its mission of preparing wholesome baked goods. From the 30,000 square foot bakery, 80,000 pounds of bread emerge from a 220 square foot oven every week in order to feed Philadelphia's hungry brothers. Though the Le Bus baked goods are sold in over a hundred new locations, many of Braverman's original staff members are still-after 20 years, part of the Le Bus family. Ruth Drye, for example started as a part timer when the bus first opened; today she is a partner. Esther Press, patron saint and mentor since 1983, who invigorated the pastry and bread program, continues to help shape the company's future. Though his humble beginnings called on only few individuals, today Braverman relies on his 200 plus employees to maintain production, deliveries, accounting, marketing, and so on. He is the first to explain that his success is all about his support team, "It costs us 95% of what we charge, to make the bread. Why docs it cost that much? People cost money. People require managers, and people require workman's comp., and insurance benefits. People are expensive." Braverman admits the company's labor cost can run as high as 45%50% and that his food costs aren't far behind. "Our food cost is high because we're using real butter, real honey, eight or nine different grains, barley malt, and nitrate free dried fruit. We're picking though olives and pumpkin seeds, re-hydrating sun dried tomatoes, chopping them by hand, anti sorting through raisins anti cilantro. We use real ingredients and don't use doug h enhancers." Many of his breads are given 24 to 48 hours to rise on their own, developing precious flavors and delicate textures. From the first days on the bus antI his original yeast starter of apples, flour and water, Braverman recognized the recipe for his success. Handmade style and quality ingredients, whether it is the coffee or croissants, won't go unnoticed by one's clientele; in fact it will build it.

Q: Have you always wanted to be a baker?

A: I started out as a musician, believe it or not. I was a music major at NYU-a pianist, not a very good one to be honest, but I was mainly conducting. When I got out of college, I wanted more than anything to have a career as a musician-a conductor. I started and ran the Arbel Choir in Philadelphia, a Middle Eastern Jewish Music group from 1973-1978. The choir is still around today, but after four years, I decided to change. During those formidable, first years after graduation, struggling to keep the choir together, I learned what it takes to persist through whatever comes your way in order to reach a goal.

Q: How did you go from music to food?

A: My dad was in the luncheonette/deli business, he also owned a vending truck on the Temple University campus.' During my college and choir years I used to visit him. I always liked to cook, and after graduation I just thought, 'you know what, for a year or two let me just open up a vending truck and make some money.' I just dove into it head first. I decided that, even if it was on a food truck, I was going to roast my own beef, and mix my own dressings, and do all this stuff kind of New York Jewish deli style. My dad said I was nuts-everybody said I was nuts! But I was never one to listen to anybody, and I just started doing it. We outfitted the back of an old school bus we bought for 500 bucks with a little propane oven/stove, got our licenses, and opened up on the Penn Campus [University of Pennsylvania]. We made huge sandwiches, like the Carnegie Deli. We had a few seats inside, but we gave them up after a few months because we had no production room. After about a week we had a big breakfast trade; we were right in front of the Law School.

Q: What was "the bus" known for?

A: Coffee and muffins. I had been living in New York for a few months, prior to opening the bus. I used to go to Zabar's to get coffee; I really liked it; there wasn't much in the way of coffee in those days. So, I thought I could bring the coffee back and serve it on my truck. I had no idea the quantities I'd be using and within about a week of grinding the beans in this little hand grinder, I realized it wasn't going to work. After calling around, I contacted this really nice company called Ireland Coffee. The salesman came in and said, 'Alright, I'll give you our cheapest blend-it's the one all the vending trucks use...' And I said, 'No, no no, I want your best blend. I want really good coffee.' It was really quite good. So all these people were buying the coffee, but I was stuck with these garbage pastries you had to by from the vendors. I didn't want any part of that. So I went to my mom s house; we pulled out every cookbook in her kitchen and baked muffins all night. Until then I had no idea how to bake. I found out soon enough that muffin recipes were pretty basic; you can just improvise with whatever you want. I would bake muffins on the bus in the early morning and roast beef in the afternoon. The muffins came out a little crooked because we were parked on a grade, it became a sort of trademark, but nobody cared because we were making these great muffins with fresh peaches, zucchini, carrots, honey-we had a following like you wouldn't believe.

Q: So how did you start baking bread?

A: I used to buy a hearty Italian roll, which was fine, but I couldn't buy a whole wheat bread thick enough for our big sandwiches. So, I decided to bake my own. Bread is a lot different than muffins because you're dealing with yeast and the effects of environment and of course our environment was out of control. The bread would come out big and fat or low and skinny-I would have all kinds of results. Even still, once I sliced it down, the fact that this 'nut job on a bus had homemade bread,' was all people cared about and we did great.

Q: Once you started baking, did the cooking take a back seat so to speak?

A: I always found baking to be a lot more interesting than cooking, on a personal level. The difference between the way something looked before it was baked and when it came out of the oven was so special to me, more so than making a roast or soup.

Q: Outside of your mom's kitchen do you have any formal training?

A: Eventually I went to The Restaurant School in Philadelphia to learn as much as I could, before we moved into a cafeteria space in 1986. But the big disappointment there was that the school didn't know the first thing about baking. I wanted to make everything from scratch: brioche, croissants, Danish, pies, layer cakes, and of course bread. It was towards the end of school, when we were getting a staff together and trying to train them, that I realized I didn't know sh--t. I couldn't do it all. I was coming up on the end of the program, coming up on finals, getting ready to open the restaurant, and I decided the restaurant was more important than a degree and I stopped going to class. But two weeks before the end of the year, I decided at the last minute to go to this lecture class on Moroccan cooking. I thought I might be able to learn a trick or two for a dinner menu. I walked in late and there was this woman up front. She had this thick Moroccan accent, her name was Esther Press, and she was demonstrati ng a type of phyllo dough. The way she spoke about and handled the food was just remarkable. At the end of the class I went up to her and said 'can you bake?' I told her everything we were doing, that I needed this, I needed that, that we're opening in a week, and I desperately needed help. She said, 'I'll be away tomorrow but call me on Thursday and we'll set it up. She told me to get all of my people together and we'd spend the day baking. On Sunday morning she came running down the steps, right on schedule at six o'clock in the morning, but not empty handed. She was laden with doughs that she had spent three days working on at home. It just completely floored me. She ran through the place all day working with people and did not leave for two weeks. She was there all day and all night working with us. Getting a croissant down in that kind of environment is something.

Q: How did you learn so much in such a short time?

A: I used to have a piano teacher that would say, 'David, if you can do the Chopin etudes-all of them, there is nothing in the piano repertoire you cant play.' And, my feeling is; if you can make a croissant, the baking repertoire is yours; it's that difficult. We got it down-it's probably the most perfect thing we make at Le Bus. Esther is still with us today as a mentor and one of our staff.

Q: How did your bread find its way into elite restaurants and hotels?

A: Esther had been to a restaurant in France where she liked the baguette. She found out where it came from and spent a few days with the baker learning how to make his baguette. She came back and said, 'okay, now we are going to make it!' It didn't come out exactly the same because of differences in environment, flour, and water but it was very good. We ran to Le Bec-Fin with it and persisted until we got to see Georges {perrier]. We knew he couldn't get good French bread in the city at that time. He took one look at it and said, 'When do I start?' That was in late 1985. He was our passport to every good restaurant in the city. Before we knew it our next biggest and most loyal customer was Jean-Marie Lacroix at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Q: Did you have a larger bakery to handle the restaurant and hotel orders?

A: No. But eventually, after fourteen years, we finally moved out of the cafeteria location and into a much bigger bakery with real French ovens and real mixers. We just grew and grew and grew. We went from a $5,000 weekly income to about a $90,000 weekly income in a matter of three years.

Q: When you made the move from bus to cafeteria to commercial bakery, did the focus switch from sandwiches and soups, to bread exclusively?

A: We opened up various stands around Philadelphia to sell the bread and then we opened Le Bus, a full service restaurant in Manayunk. But when we opened the new bakery facility in 1989 our focus and life went from food to baking. It's continued to move in that direction. There are so few people who really know artisanal bread.

Q: What is the difference between artisanal bread and the "other" stuff?

A: Well, I guess the definition of the word artisan is a craftsman who does things with his hands: a sculptor or a painter or a violinmaker. So, by definition I'd say you would have to call our product 'hand made bread,' that's really what it is. Even with the advent of all this wonderful equipment, and there is some wonderful equipment out there, you just can't make it on a machine. It's very difficult to find a [dough] divider that won't destroy the natural development of microscopic pockets of carbon dioxide and gas and the little stretched out strands of gluten. If you damage them in any way the bread doesn't recover. It doesn't recover in volume, it doesn't recover in cell structure, and it doesn't recover in flavor. It just doesn't. We used to divide the dough by hand until, after about ten years of searching, we found a machine that works much, much slower than any other commercial divider, it almost caresses the dough into a sheet about one inch thick, and it virtually does not harm the cell structure . After that, we round by hand and shape by hand.

Q: Does the same amount of research go into the ingredients you use?

A: Well, you need to research and select very carefully the flour that you use. We don't use bromated flour; it has a chemical in it that bleaches the flour and adds volume without developing flavor during the baking process. The use of bromates is against the law in Europe but allowed in the U.S. We don't use bleached flour because the bleaching process oxidizes the flour somewhat and adds to the strength of the gluten. It used to be, you would go after flour that was very, very strong, about 12% to 13% protein. That kind of flour is so strong that it becomes difficult to handle--it's too elastic after being mixed. It resists the oven spring because the fibers of the gluten are too strong and they'll break rather than expand; you want something more extensible. You also don't want flour that is too young; the gluten is brittle and the protein has no tolerance for expanding. I want flour that was milled a month or two ago. For our rustic style breads I go for winter wheat. It's planted in the late summer and becomes dormant in the winter, then comes back in early spring and is harvested in the early summer. It's got about an 11% protein content and is more forgiving. It will allow for a greater fermentation without breaking, give more volume, and is much more desirable when you are looking for irregularity of the interior crumb.

Q: How much bread do you make now?

A: About 40,000 pounds of flour are delivered every week, about 70,000 or 80,000 pounds of bread a week.

Q: Who buys your bread?

A: I would say about forty percent of our sales are to large markets. For instance, the Clemens Market here in Philadelphia is a wonderful supermarket chain and they have little kiosks in each of their markets where they sell the bread and pastries. There's also Fresh Fields who we sell our 'frozen croissants to, and they proof and bake them. I would say about another twenty percent of our business is to large Philadelphia hotels: The Four Seasons, The Ritz Carlton, Loews, Sheraton, and the Marriott Convention Center. We also have an outlet store, and I can't tell you bow busy it is.

Q: What do you do with day-old stale bread?

A: We don't really have stale bread because of our outlet stores. From time to time we'll make crostini and stuffing, but we have very little stale bread. When we do have leftover loaves, my daughter and I take a walk in our neighborhood, ringing doorbells and giving them out.

Five Stages of Fermentation at Le Bus

I Preferment 

The preferment or the sour dough starter at Le Bus is a liquid starter that goes for 24 hours. Biga, a stiff dough which ferments for 24 hours before being added to the entire batch of dough. It acts in the same way a sour dough starter works. "We've got various kinds of starters; we generically call our 'stocks."'

II Ferment 

After the ingredients are mixed, the dough is set aside to ferment for about three to four hours.

III Bench Time

The dough is cut and pre-rounded, then given what is known as bench time in which the dough rests for an hour.

IV Final Proof

The dough is shaped and set aside for five to six hours.

V Oven Time

The yeast ferments in the oven. It's more of an expansion of the gases than a fermentation, but there is a final burst of activity in the yeast until it hits 120-130 degrees.