This rack is actually the everything Philly muffin , which is definitely our best seller , everything seeds , garlic , onion , poppy and sesame .
This is pretty much my baby when it comes out .
Well , I'm very happy perfect breakfast .
Eight years in , I still eat more or less a muffin a day .
It's the only way to start a day .
We have vents , you know , that vent out of an exhaust and people will just kind of like wander around until they find an entrance and like come in like you guys sell bread .
Yeah , I don't think every food does that , but bread does is a wholesale artisan bread bakery .
We make like maybe 10 to £12,000 of dough every week .
I'm pretty much at the bakery almost all day , every day .
The baking starts at like 4 35 in the morning .
Most of my day to day is like just support jumping in on a delivery , helping out in the production shift on a busy day .
We might do like 100 deliveries or so as you grow , you kind of hold on to some of your own customers .
Like the people who have been with you for 67 years and you have a personal relationship with them .
Does it make sense for the owner to like , hop in his car and drive across town to deliver two dozen mus , maybe not .
But they're my friend and they'll probably give you a free sandwich .
Share some bread next up .
We are heading to , to drop off the Gold rolls .
Brist is a version of a classic Philly cheesesteak for both of you .
I got the rules .
Ari was like , I'm gonna take it upon myself to obsess over a cheese steak .
I'm gonna find the best roll .
I'm gonna find the best cheese .
When Ari tells you that he wants a cheese steak roll like this like he has thought about it .
He has tasted every cheesesteak roll out there .
Uh And he knows what he wants .
My favorite thing about peat bread is that it hits all the notes that I need it to hit .
The bread does what it's supposed to do and it does it deliciously .
So like this cheese steak doesn't really work without this roll .
And a Hoy roll has to have a chew on the outside and it has to be fluffy on the inside .
The structure of the chew of this , of this roll is really what holds it all together and then the inside is what soaks up all of that .
Like meat juice .
You need a roll that's gonna like be a sponge and then also be a container and it does that with a lot of flavor .
The roll needs to be part of like a , a composition , but I kind of like being a little bit behind the scenes .
The cheesesteak was great for a lot of reasons .
The roll was really good .
The idea with this sandwich is really like to give some honor and integrity to a san .
That's like the definition of Philadelphia .
It's not fancy , it's greasy .
There's other great roles in the sense of like they do the job it's supposed to do , but they're not made in the same way .
They're not made with the same level of care and integrity and ingredient that this role is .
So this is six fris whip here .
We have probably about 100 and £50 of toasted cornmeal .
And that is one of the things that give our gold roll just like a very subtle but noticeable kind of flavor .
It's almost like the flavor of the crust ends up in the dough almost .
You know , like when you pull a baguette out of the oven , some people will say it has like a popcorn .
Y kind of smell .
Well , that's like now in the dough .
Yeah , on any given week we go through about 6000 , 500 to £8000 of flour .
So the gold roll formula is , it's basically flour , water , salt , yeast .
I added a little bit of malted barley flour to it , but that's pretty much it .
That's fermented .
It's called , it's spelled Pool , but it's pronounced like a foolish , like , baguettes tastes different than pancake batter because it's got pre fermented white flour in it .
So this is like the secret , not so secret anymore .
The toasted cornmeal .
I've been like a dishwasher .
A line cook , a farmer .
So I started making sourdough bread at home instantaneously .
It was more than a hobby .
Like I touched the dough and it was just like a click kind of a moment .
People make fun of me .
But I'm always kind of like squatting here in looking at it just to observe and see if it's getting over mixed or if it's fixing .
Well , I had no experience in bread before I started the company , which was pretty stupid .
So I wouldn't say I'm a very scientific person , but I'm a very curious person .
So any time something went well , I learned from it and I would try to perfect it and get it better .
So I've just messed up hundreds of batches of dough honestly to start to kind of figure it out .
So you can kind of see it's got like an elastic and extensible quality .
So as I'm pulling , it's kind of pulling me back in , it's like snapping back .
That's a good thing .
But I'm also able to kind of pull it and get like a more kind of extensible quality and then I just give it a fold to make it more cohesive dough baby , a little chubby dough baby developing means you are helping the gluten form a network and that network will help trap the gas that is produced during the fermentation process .
This will sit for about an hour and a half .
The business of running an artisan bread bakery is coming up with new products , engaging your appetite and curiosity , but also asking yourself like , how can I make this artisan craft consistent ?
You know , that is the name of the game in bread , especially wholesale bread , putting out a great product consistently every single day .
So I have a £13 cut of dough in this hydraulic dough divider here .
So these are the gold rolls .
They're about 17 inches in length designed to be cut in half for a Hoy cheese steak .
I'm gonna put it through the deck oven .
Now things are just going to change so regularly in a bakery , the temperature , the size of the mix the composition of that day .
Like you never can get it down to a perfect science .
You have to kind of like touch the dough and ask yourself how does the dough feel outside of that dough ?
All the environmental factors , those are always changing .
So to get it to feel the same when everything else is different , that's really the hard part .
The bread game is all about consistency .
You mean like quality matters a lot .
But people would rather like solid bread .
That is the same every day than bread that is sometimes like gourmet and perfect and other days really inconsistent .
So got to make sure everything is just right .
I talk to the restaurants , if it's the wrong size , they'll call me personally and let me know .
So we have visual standards , that kind of document .
So if I take off the gold rule , but I'm like , I'm right there .
So it's a perfect size bread to share is like an ethos for sure of the company .
Like bread is a vehicle for transporting like condiments and protein into your mouth .
But it's also like a tool for bringing people together , you know , like let's break bread .
I very much enjoy getting a call from Ari and him being like the bread is not quite right today , Ari cares and he wants to delight his customer and I want to delight him and I go back and I tweak it and make it better steam it for six seconds , set a timer for nine .
And by putting the steam in there , it can kind of expand without cracking and simultaneously that steam is like gelatin the dough a little bit .
And then once you pull the damper and the steam escapes becomes a crusty Hoy rolf , check on them and Oh yeah , those are perfect .
So you're just wondering kind of how I know they're done .
They have the right color kind of pale where it burst , but like a little bit of darker caramelization where the ear opened up and then it just kind of sounds hollow and cooked out , roughly speaking , like pretty much uniform from end to end .
Very good , very good small delivery .
Today we have six of the original muffins , four of the multi grain pre pandemic .
Our business was based on restaurant sales , maybe 75% .
80% of our business was restaurants .
Now , it's closer to 50 50 restaurants and groceries .
We're in the bread aisle .
And what's interesting about finding MERS BAERs here is , it's surrounded by national brands , conventional breads that nobody would really describe as being artisan .
But giant really took a chance on us and put us in this aisle .
And what I'm trying to do is make a great product accessible to more people , whether you live in Philly or in the suburbs .
And MERS BAERs has like the and the scale to kind of keep up with box stores like this .
Obviously , in the beginning of the pandemic , there was a lot of panic buying and everyone would just rush the stores and clear out all their bread .
So they would get cleared out and they would call all their vendors like we need more bread .
We need more bread .
Interestingly , the more corporate bakeries were not very well equipped to keep up with the demand .
In the first couple of weeks , we were ready and we had all this capacity and flour .
So we really got our foot in the door and they started to see me as like the reliable vette .
Yeah , I used to deliver those muffins on a bicycle actually .
Uh , and then once I graduated from the bicycle , I , I moved on to Zipcar and then delivered all my bread on Zipcar .
Now I have a truck and a team and a number of giant supermarkets .
So , pretty , pretty crazy .
Here are our sweet potato for the sweet potato bun .
And what we're going to do is stick them in the oven .
Mhm Like potato goes are often kind of soft and tender .
It's like a natural sweetener .
So it gives the bun kind of like a a subtle sweetness .
I mean , you can see how much like syrup is in there and like all the little caramelized bits there like that is all great flavor .
Um Almost all the ideas that I have are uh kind of me asking myself what I want you , you figure out all the logistical stuff later , but I think you start with a question like what is the burger bun that I want to eat ?
And then you start tinkering at the end of every mix .
You want to take a temp of the dough .
Dough is at its core , a balance of like time and temperature .
And so if it's too cold , it will take too long to bulk ferment .
If it's too warm , it will ferment too quickly .
Like microorganisms will just be stressed out the heat really kind of angers them .
So if it's like 100 degrees or more , it'll start like burping out off flavors .
Now , it's just one kind of continuous network of gluten .
So this dough has gone through the bulk fermentation , the sweet potato dough .
So we mixed it , we let it rise for a couple of hours and now we're cutting it into a pre shape .
So the next step after these get divided is to run them through the divide around her blades will come through and divide it into 24 equally weighted pieces .
And then the bottom platform kind of shimmies and gyrates and kind of mimics me having 24 hands and around it really quickly .
So this machine that I'm using here is called a divider rounder and it does exactly that it divides it rounds it and you have more or less two dozen perfect ones .
And here are the sweet potato buns .
When I created MERS Baker , I really wanted like the logo and the whole ethos to be like that's a bakery .
I can trust .
It looks like they've been around for a long time .
They look trustworthy .
Uh They have like a , an element of surprise and , and good energy , but like at its core , it's a bread bakery .
They're baking stuff that I can like , enjoy any day of the week with anyone and you don't have to be like a guru to , to enjoy it .
I've been doing it for 78 years now .
And so there were people I'm sure who had their first Philly muffin when they were 10 years old .
And they're now , you know , nearly an adult if I asked you like , what your first , like real bread memory was that moment when you realized how good bread could be .
I remember making pretzels with my dad when I was a very young kid .
Um , and , uh , and do I remember like the recipe ?
No , but do I remember like the , the joy of like doing something with my family ?
Yes .
Very much so .
I remember like eating pizza and watching movie with my family .
Very much so .
But , but I haven't gotten sick of , of bread yet .
I go home smelling like it .
My car smells like it .
My bakery smells like it .
Like my shoes are covered in flour .
Like bread .
Bread is with me all the time and I'm pretty cool with that .