Roll Calling

Why former Hare Krishna devotee Nick Bronson needs to knead.

by Trey Popp

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Published: May 29, 2007

If you believe that Philadelphia's bleached-flour, soft-crust, plain-Jane bread culture is in dire need of a whole-grain bitch slap in its flabby white stomach, Nick Bronson is your man.

A Jersey kid who landed at Chestnut Hill's Baker Street Bread Company by way of the Hare Krishna temple on nearby Allens Lane, Bronson is not your run-of-the-mill baker. For one thing, the exceptionally friendly guy spent his adolescence as a hardcore punk rocker who found Krishna Consciousness back in the '90s by way of straight-edge bands like Shelter and 108.

For another, there aren't many bakers who can make an industrial-size four-deck cyclothermic oven look petite. The bottom of Bronson's fuzzy brown beard would barely tickle an average man's bald spot, and he's got hands that could make a grapefruit look like a mandarin orange. More importantly, as he paces between the oven's steam levers and a nearby shelf that holds a noontime cup of hot coffee, the currently agnostic Bronson gives the impression of someone who'd rather break his front teeth on a dense loaf of rye than suffer the spongy blandness of yet another hoagie roll.

"This is a sandwich town," he says with a broad smile as he swings a 9-foot-long bread peel in and out of the hearth in wide arcs. "Hoagies, hamburgers ... people want rolls, and that's about it." Nothing against Sarcone's, but Bronson's tastes run in another direction. He likes ryes that come off the scale at cannonball weight and unleash aromas like the home-fermented apple cider he built his favorite bread recipe around. That one had a limited run last year, but he's hoping to resurrect it a few months down the road.

"We're playing catch-up here," says Bronson. He should know. Holding court during his Sunday shift at the oven, where racks of French boules crackle as steam escapes through the crust, he lays forth an oral history that ricochets from one master baker to the next. (A sharp ear will pinpoint the name of the Catskills' Daniel Leader, whose Bread Alone is gospel truth in organic flour, but it's off to the races from there.) Even when Bronson takes off for towns like Toronto and New York, he ends up in bakeries, hunting down secrets for coaxing the gluten from rye.

If you listened to him with your eyes shut, you might think he had decades worth of yeast aromas sunk into his palms. But it wasn't that long ago that the 27-year-old was stocking Acme dairy cases and didn't know a torpedo loaf from a batard.

The transition from punk life to temple life introduced him to cooking. "If you're already straight-edge, anti-this, anti-that and vegetarian, it's not that big a step to go Krishna core," he points out. Bronson started out learning the basics of Indian and Bengali cuisine, but soon began to tinker with the temple's "crappy old Vulcan oven" and some quarry tiles to improvise a proper baking hearth. "The problem was, the oven wasn't meant for anything but keeping stuff warm." By the time he transitioned out of his religious phase, he was ready for the heat on offer at Baker Street.

He's been trying to pump up the city's bread profile ever since. In contrast to Philadelphia's beer scene, which rewards offbeat creations like Victory's Hop Wollop and Yard's Poor Richards Tavern Spruce Ale, the city's flour-based culture seems to be stuck in a rut. "The problem is, you can go to Super Fresh and get 'artisanal loaves,'" Bronson says, hooking his fingers into floating quotation marks. "But they're not made by artisans — they're made by machines! It robs the term of its validity."

It's no small affront to a man who advocates mixing walnuts and rosemary into a sourdough and whose ongoing journeys through the world of fermentation have ranged from homemade Gouda cheese to "a mead that's getting prepped in my mind."

"Bread can get very complicated if you want it to be," says Bronson. He points to the hardened bubbles on the crust of a baguette, as if to underscore where he stands. "Look at these fermentation blisters," he says. "If it's done perfectly, they almost look like stained glass." And then he wheels back around to check on the oven.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

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