A visit to Semifreddi's

August 14, 2003

I had the pleasure of visiting Semifreddi's plant in Emeryville yesterday. I was accompanied by my friend (and technical advisor) Alison, who is a professional pastry chef, and knows a lot more about baking than I'll ever know (or want to know).

Semifreddi's is located in an old factory building/warehouse in the heart of Emeryville (one nice thing about Emeryville is that it's so tiny, you're always in the heart of it regardless of where you are). The place doesn't look like much from the outside, in fact it's easy to miss it completely if you're driving. It's not that big at about 30,000 sq.ft., and I was surprised that so much bread can come out of such a relatively modest place.

We were met there by John Tredgold (who goes by J.T.), a lean, soft-spoken thirty-something with a quiet intensity, and a pronounced British accent, who gave us a complete tour of the facilities. J.T. is director of bakery operations, and we'll get back to him later.

The plant

The facilities (at 4242 Hollis Street) include a cafe where you can buy bread, coffee, pastries, and get a glimpse (but only a glimpse) of the breadmaking process. For obvious reasons, the plant is off-limits to the public, but fear not, curious reader: we've been there for you, and you will see it through our eyes.

The first thing you see when you enter the plant is a long row of photos of the 20 or so types of bread baked every day. These are for quality assurance. Each bread type is compared to the photos, and a lot of information is recorded on each batch: the amount of water, the temperature of the oven, the stiffness of the dough, and so on. That way, if a batch turns out to have problems, the logs can be analyzed and the issue resolved. Quality is pretty much the top concern here -- everything has to be just so, and J.T. is the man who makes sure of it. He has a sharp eye for details, and as we roamed the plant, he was always on the lookout for anything not up to par.

J.T. shows us the pictures and the logs for the various batches. Most production problems can be analyzed just by looking at these logs.

Ingredients

When talking about bread, of course, the first concern is the ingredients. Semifreddi's uses flour from Cook Natural Products in Oakland. They use a lot of it -- really a lot. About 90,000 pounds a week, in fact.

J.T. and Alison talk techie. You can see the silos behind them to the right, each contains up to 56,000 lb. of flour. You can also see two giant mixing bowls, the one on the right contains all the ingredients and is ready to go.

To keep it, they have two nifty collapsible silos, which get refilled by trucks from the mill. This is much more efficient than the old way of doing it, which was just to have sacks and sacks (and sacks and sacks) of flour. The silos mean no more wasted paper, less flour in the air, etc... The flour is specially ground for Semifreddi's, and is whole-grain, non-genetically modified. One challenge is that the exact consistency of the flour tends to evolve from week to week, and they have to take that into account when making dough.

The water comes straight out of the tap, thanks to EBMUD's excellent quality. I wouldn't want to do that in San Francisco, where the water tastes terrible (too much chlorine). Of course, the temperature of the water is critical, so Semifreddi's has a pretty fancy apparatus that mixes the water to just the right temperature.

While J.T. and Alison were talking about protein content in the flour (evidently a spellbinding topic in the business), I wandered around a bit and took pictures of the various stages of breadmaking. The crew moved about without hurry, and I got the sense that everyone knew what they were doing, and were doing it at a reasonable pace. It's good to know that Semifreddi's is not a frantic assembly line. Everywhere on the plant, the floor (and pretty much everything else) is covered with flour. The whole plant is sweeped after each shift, and everything edible that is picked up is given to a feed maker, who comes by regularly to pick it up. Thus nothing is wasted. Even the paper bags (used for shipping salt, special flours, and other ingredients) are recycled -- so this place has a conscience.

The crew making baguettes. Not a good job if you're allergic to flour.

Making dough

To start any bread, of course, you'll need a starter. Semifreddi's uses fresh starter -- and J.T. was rather clear that the whole business of having 150-year-old starter ( Boudin makes a big deal of it) is pretty much bogus. Semifreddi's creates the starter and lets the naturally occuring micro-organisms such as lactobacillus san francisco work their magic. The starter then rises (so rapidly that it often has to be refrigerated when it's warm), taking up to four times its original volume. This is quite fascinating to see, and I had never gotten such a feel that the dough really is alive.

J.T. checks the consistency of a batch of dough. It is surprisingly resilient and elastic at this stage.

The starter is then used when mixing the dough. This is done by large automatic mixers (made, like much of the machinery here, in Europe). When the mixing is done, the giant bowl is lifted by a small elevator and dumped onto a table, where it is cut in large pieces, which are stored in plastic containers to rest for an hour. Then comes a crucial part of the process : every hour, the dough is folded several times, to wake it up, so to speak. J.T. demonstrated that process, and I was amazed to see the dough going from an inert mass to a clean, almost pulsating blob. Once again, we are dealing with a living, and (literally) breathing thing.

How much time the dough is allowed to rest depends a great deal on the type of dough (and especially its sugar content). Thus sweet dough rests only for 20 minutes, whereas sourdough can take as long as 3.5 hours.

Semifreddi's makes a few specialty breads with ingredients such as walnuts, but J.T. emphasized that this is not a major direction: they prefer to concentrate on the bread, rather than the exotic fruits and whatnot.

The baking

Once the dough has risen enough, it is then divided into the right sizes for whatever type of loaves it is destined to become. This is done (for most loaves) in a small machine that gently divides the dough. The result is put in baskets, each lined with linen. Those baskets are then taken to proofing boxes, which are special rooms with tightly controlled temperature and humidity, where the dough is allowed to rest one final time before facing the oven.

When ready, the baskets are taken out of the proofing boxes, each loaf is scored by hand (scoring is when the top of the loaf is cut so that the expansion during baking results in a pleasing appearance). Then the loaves are taken out of the baskets. At that point, the type of bread dictates which oven will be used. Soft breads such as deli and challah are baked in air-pulsed ovens, and for those the loaves are put in racks which are rolled straight into the oven.

The top of the loaves are scored before going into the oven. This allows the top to expand gracefully and crack in an esthetically pleasing manner. These are soft breads, the racks go straight into the oven.

The more traditional breads (such as batard, ciabatta, country levain, etc...) are baked in stone ovens, which are much trickier to use because the heat is not necessarily evenly distributed. For these, the loaves are put on a sort of long conveyor belt which rolls them into the oven, where the hot stone will give them that crusty bottom. We saw a batch being taken out, and noticed that the worker then took three loaves from the batch and put them back in the oven.

A fresh batch, just out of the oven. To the left are the racks of baskets where the raw loaves are stored. The loaves are carefully put on the conveyor belt, and rolled into the oven.

That, said J.T., is the sign of an experienced baker who has noticed that the three loaves closest to the oven door were not quite done yet, and decided to give them a little more time. The loaves then go through final inspection, and if anything is wrong with them (and, frankly, most of the problems seemed rather minor and cosmetic to me, but what do I know?), they are tossed into large bins, eventually to become cattle feed. In a typical batch, as much as 5% of the loaves don't make it past that stage. The rest are then wrapped and moved to shipping. Semifreddi's employs 20 people just to deliver the bread to the Bay area.

Conversation with J.T.

After our tour of the plant, we sat down with J.T. in his office and got a little more personal.

As his accent betrays, J.T. was born and raised in west London, and worked in a small bakery when he finished high school. He started by cleaning ovens and doughnut friers, and moved his way up as he gained experience. For a while, he got restless and backpacked around quite a bit (in Turkey, Yugoslavia, and other places). By a long and complicated process, involving a girl, a green card, and even a job as golf caddy, he eventually found his way to San Francisco, where he found a job at Semifreddi's through a newspaper ad. He has been there for ten years now, and he is clearly a round peg in a round hole. He runs pretty much the entire baking operation, and keeps a very close eye on things. J.T. is a perfectionist, and admits to it freely. When I asked him what the toughest part of his job was, he pointed to the fact that, sometimes, he can't get things to be as perfect as he'd like them to be, simply because of practical reasons.

J.T. checks the quality of a fresh batch of challah.

Bread making is a competitive business -- Semifreddi's tests the competition every week. J.T. was a little uncomfortable when I asked him to rank his competitors, but he eventually said that Acme is probably the second best (after Semifreddi's of course). He would not, however, tell me who is the worst (although I have my suspicions).

The best part of his job, he says, is when he sees people get excited about the bread they are making. There is nothing quite like the smile on the face of the employee who has just baked his first batch.

Although J.T. loves his job at Semifreddi's, he hopes that someday he may be able to start his own bakery, on a smaller scale. He is passionate about bread, and very specifically about good, excellent, nay, exceptional bread, and this would give him the opportunity to do everything his way.

Final thoughts

Overall, my impression of Semifreddi's could not be more positive. Everything looks good, the people seem competent and friendly, the ingredients are wholesome, and, most important, this is a company that cares a great deal about quality. In fact, more so than quantity. There is no doubt in my mind that this is truly the secret to long-term success.

Acknowledgments

P.S. I'd like to heartily thank Semifreddi's John Tredgold for spending time with us and answering Alison's pointed queries, and my own (often inane) questions. He is an intense and dedicated fellow, and exemplifies the kind of passion for bread that I think is so sorely lacking in the industry. May he live long and prosper.