Press Releases and other Notes of Interest

B&R Artisan Bread

Best of Boston 2008 Bakery, Bread

Quoted from August 2008 issue of The Best of Boston 2008

"Seeing as how first impressions are everything, a restaurant's bread-basket is serious business. Boston's finest eateries, including T. W. Food and Troquet, order their loaves from Sel de la Terre alum Michael Rhoads, who bakes crisp baguettes, hulking sourdoughs, and authentic ryes in his two-year-old Framingham shop. City-dwellers, meanwhile, can fight over B&R's pain levain at Cambridge's Formaggio Kitchen or the Union Square farmers' market."

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/best_of/detail/best_of_boston_2008_bakery_bread/

New York Times Magazine (09/28/2008 )

By Amanda Hesser

2008: Challah Revisited 

"B & R Artisan Bread, a bakery with a devoted following in Framingham, Mass., occupies a space that was for decades a Jewish bakery well known for its challah..."

"...Rhoads’s version is stunning, a peony of challahs, with petals of sweet, puffy dough, braided and shaped in a taut circle..."

The link below is to the article in the NY Times about Michael Rhoads' bakery and how he duplicated an old Challah recipe.  The second link is to the recipe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28food-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28Food-recipes-1.html?fta=y

MICHAEL RHOADS OPENS UP IN FRAMINGHAM

-posted: 01/27/2006 - @ Boston Chefs.com

"Baker Michael Rhoads, whose breads have graced the tables at some of the best restaurants in town (think: L’Espalier, Sel de la Terre and, most recently, Via Matta), reintroduces his artisan breads to Boston (well, technically, Framingham) with his new bakery, B & R Artisan Bread. The bakery, which will specialize in hand-crafted artisan breads and morning pastries, is slated to open on January 30th. The retail store will be open Monday through Friday from 7:00am-6:00pm and Saturday from 9:00am to 2:00pm, so drop by 151 Cochituate Road in Framingham for breakfast and look for Rhoads’ wares on tables around town. Call B & R Artisan Bread at 508.370.7730 for more information."

From the Boston Globe March 22, 2006
French bread, Framingham location
A former Sel de la Terre baker opens shop in the suburbs
By Emily Shartin, Globe Staff

"FRAMINGHAM -- Finding B&R Artisan Bread is a little like looking for buried treasure. First you have to locate the nondescript shopping plaza on Route 30. The one with Taco Bell, a barbershop, and a convenience store. You have to know that the new bakery, with no prominent sign of its own, is in the storefront previously occupied by Zesto Bakery Kafe.

And even if you venture inside, you won't always be greeted by counter help. For a while, just after the bakery opened last month, sometimes a sign read simply: ''Please just call out for help. I am in back making bread."

The ''I" in this case is Michael Rhoads, best known locally for turning out brioche and baguettes as the bread maker at Boston's Sel de la Terre, where he worked until last year.

Long before that, he knew he wanted a spot of his own. About six months ago, Rhoads scrapped plans to open a bakery in Somerville and settled on a space about 20 miles to the west. As he sees it, the Framingham area, with its thriving retail scene and increasingly food-savvy population, is a natural place for the operation, which is modeled after the bake shops of Europe. Recalling visitsabroad, Rhoads says, ''Bakeries were small. The main piece of equipment is the oven, and everything else is done by hand."

B&R offers classic French breads and croissants, plus a range of American-style confections, including scones and muffins, all baked on-site. (When the bakery first opened, Rhoads rewarded customers who managed to find the place with free cookies.) The centerpiece is, naturally, the bread. On recent mornings, the shelves were stocked with pain levain ($8), a large, crusty, naturally leavened bread; light caraway rye rounds ($2.75), a European version of the New York classic; and buttery brioche baked in rectangular pans to make Pullman loaves ($6.50).....

The store, which has no tables but a small counter for standing while you eat, serves coffee and juice. Rhoads hopes to expand the menu to include cheeses and meats, as well as sandwiches. But nothing too fussy or expensive, he explains. His favorite sandwiches are simple: half a baguette with butter and ham, for instance (a French cafe specialty).

Most of Rhoads's breads are made with three ingredients -- King Arthur flour, sea salt, and water -- and are baked in a massive Bongard oven, manufactured in France. Commercial yeast is added only to baguettes and the Italian ciabatta. Most begin with one of two carefully tended starters, either wheat or rye. ''It's just one style," Rhoads says, transferring fistfuls of starter into bins marked ''country," ''caraway," and ''wheat," preparing them for their pre-fermentation stage. ''It's the old way of doing things."

Rhoads, 31, like an increasing number of young bakers, prefers this hand method. ''Everything we do is about trying to coax as much positive flavor out of the grain as possible," he says.

Artisan baking has seen a resurgence over the past 30 years, says Gina Piccolino, executive director of the Pennsylvania-based Bread Bakers Guild of America. Consumers are looking for something besides industrially made bread. Bakers who adopt the old way know their ingredients and their equipment, she says, and also how breads react in different environments. ''From our perspective, artisan baking is a craft," says Piccolino, who met Rhoads at the guild's national baking competitions.

Rhoads learned to make bread from Alan Scott, who also builds ovens. In an e-mail from his home in Tasmania, Australia, Scott writes about allowing bread time for natural leavening agents to do their work, emphasizing the importance of proper fermentation. ''Bread is not bread until the flours or grains are fermented," he writes. ''For example, you cannot call grape juice wine until it has been fermented. . . . The fermentation in a lot of foods does so much to boost the digestibility and availability of nutrients."

Bakers who gravitate toward a more traditional style of bread making often open their own small bakeries, says Scott, describing these places as ''quiet studios" where the process takes on an ''intuitive," rather than assembly line, approach.

Peter Merrill, who took over Rhoads's duties when he left Sel de la Terre, says the variables of baking loaves this way can be difficult to control, and the process isn't always uniform. ''The bread doesn't wait for you," says Merrill, who is now an apprentice on a New England farm. But he believes there is a clear demand for bread made naturally. ''The plus side to doing it the old-fashioned way is the flavor is so much better."

Mike Geldart, Sel de la Terre's current pastry chef, also learned from Rhoads. Geldart has done little to change the system Rhoads helped establish and says the two now have a ''friendly competition."

Rhoads, who worked briefly at the Boston restaurant Via Matta after leaving Sel de la Terre, says he wanted an escape from the stress of the restaurant world. Dividing up a cloud of baguette dough, which will make about 30 shaped loaves, he says that the new gig offers a much more consistent schedule, even though he is at work by 2:45 a.m. and often doesn't leave until evening.

In Framingham, he works alongside his wife, Jen Bones (the ''B" in ''B&R"), who handles the bakery's business operations. The couple has a 1-year-old son, Everett. ''Just to be in the same space is great," says Bones. The demands of the restaurant business didn't give them time together.

Rhoads, who so far has about 10 employees, sells his bread to several stores and restaurants around Boston. He hopes that his spot becomes a place for suburban dwellers to shop at regularly -- just as Europeans do. ''You go and get your bread every day," he says. ''You make it a stop along the way."

If he's in the back baking, just holler.

B&R Artisan Bread is at 151 Cochituate Ave., Framingham, 508-370-7730. Breads are available at Formaggio Kitchen, 244 Huron Ave., Cambridge, 617-354-4750 ; Lionette's Market, 577 Tremont St., Boston, 617-778-0360 ; and Salumeria Italiana, 151 Richmond St., Boston, 617-523-8743 ."

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2006/03/22/french_bread_framingham_location/

Your daily bread could get very expensive   

-Posted Mar 22, 2008- The MetroWest Daily News

Article Excerpt below:

""The prices are going crazy," said Sid Brasil, manager of Silva's Bakery in Hudson. "We used to pay $18 for 100 pounds, now it's $57. We raised prices, but we cannot increase them more than that, because the customers are not going to buy. It's very hard right now."

"It used to be, it would go up 10 cents, or 25 cents, but then it would back down," said Michael Rhoads, owner of B&R Artisan Bread in Framingham. "(But) last July I started noticing it was going up every time I ordered it, and it was going up by a dollar or two every time. That was pretty unprecedented in my decade as a baker."

Sensing a price spike was in the offing, Rhoads did something many other bakers thought was foolish - he negotiated a contract with his flour supplier to buy the product at a set price.

"No one was signing contracts," he said. "I'm lucky...my rep was telling everyone to sign a contract, and I said, 'Sure, I'll get in on that.' "

Many other bakers, though, haven't been as fortunate.

"I've gotten to buy a lot of used equipment in the last year, and that's because a lot of places have gone out of business," Rhoads said.

Even larger bakeries are feeling the cost crunch."

The full article can be viewed at:

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/homepage/x1432036746

The link below is to a youtube video of Michael Rhoads discussing the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIHehc1f22Y

B&R Bakery

from This is Framingham

November 9th, 2006

"B&R Bakery is I guess what you’d call an artisan bread bakery. They make breads for some “finer” restaurants in Boston and they opened up shop in the Cochituate Road/126 plaza earlier this year.
They don’t have a sign and you probably wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you already knew about it. I think they really concentrate on the wholesale since there is just a lone employee working the counter, that sometimes you have to ring a bell to get to come out from the back. Not a bad thing, it’s almost like it’s a treat for regular non-restaurant-owning people to be able to buy stuff there.

In addition to breads they have cookies, muffins and croissants too.
They also have a lot more than what is displayed. On the wall are chalkboards that list off their inventory.

I went in there Saturday and asked for a recommendation for sourdough bread. The girl at the counter was very friendly and suggested one of the sourdoughs listed on the board and went out back to get one and show me. They sell these giant loaves whole or by the half so I just got half.

It’s a pretty hearty loaf.

Nice to have a bakery like this in Framingham, I think we lucked out since these types of places are usually in Cambridge or somewhere trendy."

http://thisisframingham.com/?p=141