A BAKER’S FAVORITE BREAD:

SINCLAIR’S BAKERY

Words: JARKKO LAINEPhotos: MARK SINCLAIR

BREAD • 3/2015 2

On a Saturday morning, vendors are prepar-ing their stands for the weekly farmers’ mar-ket in Bozeman, Montana when a large dark green trailer pulls into the gravel parking lot. Mark Sinclair, a lean man with short, graying hair, steps out of his truck and sets up his bak-ery for the day.

Mark’s work began already many hours ear-lier, at typical baker’s hours, and he has been preparing for the market for most of the week.

But the day’s work is far from complete: The baker strives to sell the freshest possible product to each of his customers, so right after arriving at the market, he heats up his ovens. Then, just in time before the market opens, he slides in the first batch of baked goods.

Even though it’s raining, a line of people eagerly waiting for their fresh baguettes and Saturday morning croissants begins to form.

Returning buyers know exactly what they want and place their orders punctually. New-comers read the list outside the trailer—placed in a wooden frame like the menus you’ll find in front of French restaurants—and ask for ideas for products to try. Maybe a palmier? They peek through the window into the bak-ery where Mark spends every spare moment producing more bread and pastries, loading and unloading the oven.

Many of those looking in are surprised to find that the trailer is a fully furnished, real bakery.

“Even though it’s raining, a line of people eagerly waiting

for their fresh baguettes and Saturday morning

croissants begins to form.”

BREAD • 3/2015 3

The idea for a bakery in a trailer was born in 2011 when Mark was still running his previous bakery, The Back Home Bakery, in his basement in Kalispell, Montana. Waiting for customers at a farmers’ market, Mark and a baker who was spending the week as an intern with him were chatting—about bread and baking, naturally.

The intern asked Mark: “If you were to start from the beginning and do this all by yourself, how would you set up the bakery?”

Mark pointed at the man selling kettle corn near them and said: “You know what’s missing from how I do it now? I bake, bake, bake. I go to the farmers’ market, and I sit at a table with my stuff. If that guy just showed up with bags of kettle corn, he would sell nothing!”

Same for hot dogs and stir-fry noodles.“And in those jobs, compared to baking,

there’s a lot less skill involved.”He took a piece of paper and sketched a

trailer with a bakery installed inside it. The idea was simple and compelling: if you

could bring the experience of breadmaking to the market and show it to the customers, Mark thought, there would be lines.

What he didn’t know yet was that the fol-lowing year, he would be the guy doing just that.

THE LONG ROAD TO BAKINGMark’s journey to running his own bakery has been anything but straightforward. But it did start young: the first spark for a career with bread and pastry was ignited already as a four-teen-year-old on a ski trip to Switzerland.

At a time before coffee houses and Star-bucks, the small cafés in Switzerland and their relaxed atmosphere made a big impression on the young man.

“There was no concept of getting in and leaving and rushing—getting it to go, that sort of thing. It was a very different experience for an American.” Mark says.

Inspired by the experience, which was fur-ther amplified by subsequent visits to the area

in the next ten years, Mark began his college studies in a hotel and restaurant management program.

“It was kind of a culinary school and busi-ness school combined,” he says.

But two years into the four-year studies, plans changed and instead of becoming a restaurant manager, Mark went on to study psychology and teaching. And so, the idea of running a bakery was pushed to the back of his mind as he pursued a career in education.

But, as luck would have it, after earning his degrees, Mark got his second, this time much more hands-on, experience with bread and baking.

With a Master’s in teaching and no work ex-perience, in a tight economy, Mark found him-self overeducated for the jobs he applied for. And so, in 1993, after doing substitute teaching jobs and coaching for a while, he went looking for a permanent job—any job, pretty much.

Mark thought of his favorite bakery. This was before the artisan baking revo-

lution took on in the United States, and the bakery made a product that Mark describes as “hippie bread”, hearty whole grain loaves baked in pans.

“I had never made a loaf of bread before,” Mark says. But that didn’t stop him from asking for a job.

“[The owner] thought about it and two days later he gave me a call and said: If you want the work, you can start tonight. So I started just like that.”

“If that guy just showed up with bags of kettle corn, he would sell nothing!”

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A BAKER’S EDUCATIONThe newest member of the team was thrown straight to work. With nothing remotely like a training period, he had to learn the trade the same way others at the bakery had done be-fore him: by watching.

“They all had different techniques. I just watched them, nobody told me what to do.” Mark says.

Shifts lasted from 7 PM to 3 AM, and at first, he spent all of that time scaling dough for the other bakers to shape.

“They would be doing other things and then, once there were enough pieces of dough on the table, they would come and shape them quickly. And I’d just keep scaling the dough. For weeks, that was what I was doing.” Mark recalls.

Slowly, he got better at it, and the work started to become more interesting:

“As I got faster at it, then suddenly the ta-ble would be full of dough. And then you can shape a little bit.”

While the products were nothing like the ar-tisan products Mark makes today, he speaks about the experience appreciatively: the two years spent at this bakery were a school many of us amateur bakers never get.

“I learned my basic skills there. The basic handling of the dough,” he says and contin-ues:

“Sometimes, people try to skip that step. For instance, if you are an amateur artisan bread baker and you want to start a bakery... They have the knowledge of what needs to be done and they can do it on a small scale. But they don’t have the skill of doing it hundreds and hundreds of times.”

The dough is alive and when it’s “on”, you have to move fast. This, Mark says, can quick-ly become a limiting factor for how much you can produce. When making bread for sale, it doesn’t matter how beautiful a single loaf is if the rest overproof while you’re crafting it.

“They would be doing other things and then, once there were enough pieces of dough on the table, they would come and shape them quickly. And I’d just keep scaling the dough.”

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Another lesson Mark took away from this ex-perience proved its value twelve years later, when in 2007, after a career in teaching, Mark came back to professional bread making. This time to start his own bakery.

To prepare for the transition, he picked two books from Amazon: the Culinary Insti-tute’s book on Baking and Pastry and Jeffrey Hamelman’s classic, Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. He also started to frequent at the amateur baker hangout, The Fresh Loaf.

Reading Hamelman’s book, Mark was im-pressed by the quality and detail of the infor-mation. But he also found that people were complicating things more than what was nec-essary.

“I realized how different my training was than what I was reading. It was like night and day,” he says.

Mark’s training in bread making had been the old-fashioned kind, baking by feel with none of the technicalities such as checking the tem-perature of the water or the flour.

“There weren’t even temperature dials on the ovens! It was just like adjusting the flame on your stovetop,” Mark says.

“The way you knew the bread was done was by tapping it, by looking at it. And you knew it was ready to go into the oven when it looked like it was ready to go into the oven.”

The books and the community of bakers at The Fresh Loaf, on the other hand, were approaching bread making from an entirely different angle. Everything was carefully mea-sured and controlled—and documented—to get the best possible results1.

“It was so incredibly technical, and I didn’t think it needed to be that technical. Because I had baked many thousands of loaves and I didn’t know any of that stuff.” Mark says.

1 In his book, Cooked, Michael Pollan ex-plains this attention to detail with the fact that many of the site’s members are engineers.

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But while Mark felt that these bakers were getting too focused on the technicalities, he also saw that there was a purpose for all this information.

“It gave people who didn’t have the luxury of learning from their mother or their grand-mother something solid to hold on to,” he says.

“With Hamelman, I would bet that a lot of what he’s saying now is kind of reverse engi-neered. Because that’s how I’ve done it: I would make something and say ‘This feels perfect.’ And then I would check the temperature: ‘It’s 78° Fahrenheit. Perfect temperature.’”

Mark wanted to present this idea to the com-munity at The Fresh Loaf to encourage them to trust their feel. And so, while building his bakery in his basement, he shot his first video and posted it on the site.

“It gave people who didn’t have the luxury of learning from their mother or their grandmother something

solid to hold on to.”

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“It was to show that it doesn’t have to be baked in a certain kind of pot. It doesn’t have to be mixed in a certain way. It can be done. I was kind of trying to bring it back a little bit.” Mark says.

That first video soon led to more. “People started asking me questions, and

because I wasn’t being super technical, I think people felt comfortable around me.”

THE BACK HOME BAKERYMark finished his bakery with the community on The Fresh Loaf cheering for him. And by the fourth video, he was already broadcasting from the baking space in his basement.

“There’s a strong bond,” Mark says, talking about the group of bread lovers, many of whom have followed him all the way to where he is today. People like the professional baker from Hungary who sends photos of his products—Mark sends pictures of his work in return.

“He doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Hungarian. We don’t need to.”

The Back Home Bakery was active from 2008 to 2012—”four solid years”—and, just like Sinclair’s Bakery today, was mostly a one-man operation.

Selling at farmers’ markets, Mark quick-ly realized that the act of giving the bread to his customers was one of the most significant parts of what he enjoyed in baking. And so, it became essential to him that he was both the one baking the bread and the one selling it.

“Most amateur bakers bake more than they can consume themselves. They bake four loaves, and they eat one and then they give one to this person and one to this person. And that’s what they like about it,” he says and con-tinues: “That’s what I was getting as a profes-sional. But they were actually paying for it!”

Even though his wife, a teacher, helped on weekends and during the vacation, this was a lot of work. And Mark, in his early excitement, kept accepting even more requests.

The first year, he sold bread at two week-ly farmers’ markets as well as supplied restau-rants, retail stores, and supermarkets. People who had tried his products at the farmers’ mar-kets told about him to their favorite restaurants and requests kept coming in.

“I was excited that people really liked my stuff so I took on a lot of business,” Mark says.

This was too much, and so the next year, Mark scaled the production down a bit, accepting less wholesale requests. All the while, the hard work was also paying off and he kept getting more and more efficient at orchestrating the process of bread making.

By the fourth year in 2012, after further op-timization and learning, things were moving smoothly at the bakery.

“By the time the fourth year came, it was like this,” Mark says and snaps his fingers re-peatedly. He laughs and continues:

“I was good. I’d got the routine, everything was going good. The timing was really nice. I was really happy with the stuff.”

A BAKERY IN A TRAILERWhen the business finally started to run smoothly, things in Mark’s personal life took a turn for worse. And so, as he was splitting up with his wife, Mark found himself at yet anoth-er crossroads in his life, rethinking his options and what to do next.

“I was good. I’d got the routine, everything was going good. The timing was really nice. I was really happy with the stuff.”

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A food business license is based on the site and so, as Mark was going to have to move his bakery, that meant getting the new location in-spected and licensed.

“Moving across the town is just as big of a deal as moving to another state,” Mark says.

He remembered the drawing he’d made for the intern a year earlier.

“That’s your great idea?” he asked himself. “Let’s see how good of an idea it is!”

And so, the journey towards a new kind of a bakery had started. Mark drew a better version of the drawing, planning how he would best fit his existing bakery equipment in it.

Then, he went on to design the looks of the bakery. Instead of a “carnival look” with funny slogans and huge signs announcing discounts, Mark wanted his trailer to have a more classic, restaurant feel.

“My vision was more like when you go to a boulangerie,” Mark says.

He researched images of French bakeries on the internet and found they all had a lot in common: All of them had big windows, many of them were green. And the only piece of writing was often just the word “Boulangerie” written in large, bold letters.

At the end of the market season, in December 2012, Mark gathered all his bakery equipment and drove it to Double R Trailers in Nampa, Idaho where the company built the trailer for him.

Having built the Back Home Bakery him-self, Mark knew the requirements and rules for the health regulations well.

This helped a lot and now Mark’s trailer is the only one in the state that is licensed for both food retail and wholesale. If, for whatever reason, the town isn’t right, he can move and find a better location without getting a new li-cense.

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SINCLAIR’S BAKERYThe trailer was finished in February 2013. A few months later, after selling bread at an indoor market for a while, it was time for Mark to put the idea to the test and see how customers would respond to it.

It was a scary moment.“Here I am in a new place and I’ve invested

all this money into something I thought is a great idea,” Mark says.

The weather was perfect, the scenery beau-tiful. Mark had timed everything so he’d be ready when the market started. He was maybe ten minutes behind schedule, half of the prod-ucts were done and the baguettes were in the oven. Everything seemed alright.

Then, the first customer arrived, asking for a baguette. When Mark told that they were in the oven and would be ready in ten min-utes, the customer didn’t stay and wait but just turned around and walked away.

Mark still gets worked up when he tells me about the experience: “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe they’re pissed off at me because my baguettes aren’t ready. And they are in the oven right now! They’re going to be fresh, they’re going to be perfect. I was so disap-pointed.”

During the first hour, Mark sold one palm-ier. In the second hour, one pain au chocolat. The first market day’s sales could be counted in two digits, Mark recalls.

He remembers thinking that he just made the biggest mistake of his life.

“He remembers thinking that he just made the

biggest mistake of his life.”

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Mark brought his trailer to the market the next week. Same thing. And again. Things weren’t going well, and he wasn’t sure why.

Then something important happened.“I had done five markets at this place when

one of the vendors said to me: ‘Know what? Next week, this market in Big Sky is opening up. I think your stuff would sell really well at that market.’” Mark says.

The vendor was right: the market at Big Sky was nothing like the one Mark had been going to until then.

“It made the biggest difference, not just financially but also for my self-esteem,” Mark says.

At this market, again, a customer came up to the bakery trailer before the baguettes were ready (she was early) and asked for three of them. Mark had just put the baguettes in the oven so, afraid of how the customer would react, he told her that they’d be ready in about twenty minutes.

This customer didn’t walk away. “You’re baking them here?” she asked, ex-

cited. Then, she turned around and started telling other customers about it.

“I thought: this is the place,” Mark says. “I didn’t do anything different at that mar-

ket. The people were just more appreciative of it.”

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ORCHESTRATING A ONE MAN BAKERYThis was three years ago, and since then, Mark has been making bread to a receptive custom-er base, optimizing his work with every bake.

In the summer time, he bakes bread for two very different farmers’ markets.

On Wednesday nights, he takes his trailer to Big Sky, a ski and golfing community up in the mountains. It’s a beautiful market with grass to sit on, live music, and wine. People get some cheese from the store nearby, then come and buy a baguette and enjoy it with friends.

“Big Sky is more up and down. If the weath-er is good, I sell a lot. I sell out fast. But if the weather is bad or there’s another event going on or something, I don’t sell much,” Mark says.

Saturdays are market days in Bozeman, which Mark describes as “more like a regular town.” The farmers’ market takes place on a gravel parking lot, so it’s like going to the store. People come to buy.

“If the weather is bad, of course, I’m going to get fewer customers. But still, if they come to buy, they come to buy.” Mark says.

The market days—and the nights leading to them—are intense, with everything packed into one day.

“It’s like a musician preparing for a one hour concert,” Mark says. “Once it’s mixed, it’s going. You’re following it.”

“In my head, I have different ideas of what should be shown at the market to make it into a show. But you need to keep in mind that I’m the one selling the stuff too. So I can’t be do-ing too much or people are just going to be standing there watching me,” he explains.

To make his concert a success, Mark has a lot of preparation and planning to do. In summer time, this means working seven days a week.

“I make a lot of pastries on non-market days,” Mark says.

“I do my laminating and stuff like that, and then I shape them and freeze them shaped. On the market day, I just proof them and bake them.”

Bread is the pickiest, especially as Mark proves most of his loaves directly on baking sheets.

“There’s a really small—5-10-minute—win-dow for when the bread has to go into the oven,” Mark says.

That’s why, to make sure it is “just right”, Mark bakes most of the bread in advance right before he goes to the market.

Baguettes are the only exception. Mark shapes them right before going to the market, places them on a couche, and puts them in the fridge. The support provided by the couche and the slower fermentation give him more time so he can finish and bake the loaves in front of his customers.

When Mark arrives at the market, usually about an hour and a half before the market opens, he bakes the first batch of everything.

“In Bozeman, a lot of my customers are the other vendors, and they can’t stand in line when the market starts,” he says.

“It’s like a musician

preparing for a one hour concert. Once it’s mixed, it’s going. You’re

following it.”

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The second and third batches are for other customers: there needs to be something ready the moment they arrive, and then something baking in the oven so they get to see Mark at work.

“This way, everybody gets it really fresh. And everybody gets to see it,” he says.

One of the reasons why Mark decided to settle at Bozeman was the fact that there’s an indoor market. This way, even when the busy market season of the summer time slows down, he doesn’t have to move to doing wholesale or-ders.

The indoor market is open every other Sat-urday, and in addition to this Mark does some small scale baking—such as making puff pas-try to a local restaurant—and delivers orders to houses and workplaces every Friday.

“People love it, it’s like an old-fashioned milkman kind of thing,” Mark says.

“It gives people an option, especially when the weather’s bad and people don’t want to get outside.”

In all, this sums to one or two bake days a week. Enough to pay the rent, but not much extra. But in many ways, it’s the perfect coun-terpart for a busy summer.

Especially at the outdoor markets, there are many factors outside the baker’s control affect-ing how much you can make on any given day. On a beautiful day, bread sells out quickly, but when it rains, you can end up with lots of left-overs. That’s why Mark says he doesn’t mea-sure success by the amounts sold. Instead, he focuses on how well he did himself.

“Every time I’m making something, I’m kind of critiquing it myself. I’m always trying to make adjustments, to make it better. So that even if I have a lot of left-over, as long as I know that every single person that came got something that is great, that’s the best I can do,” Mark says.

This is important because a customer who receives the best possible product is much more likely to come back for more.

“Even if you sell out, but some of your stuff isn’t top notch, you may never see those cus-tomers again,” Mark says.

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A TRIP TO EUROPEIn September 2014, a baker from Honduras contacted Mark, asking him to come and help set up a bakery. As Mark was still busy with his own baking, the timing wasn’t right. But it got him thinking about traveling.

The indoor season ends at mid-April and then there’s some free time until June when the outdoor season begins again.

“That would be a perfect time for a trip to Europe.” Mark thought.

In his years of baking and partici-pating in the bread making commu-nities on Facebook and on The Fresh Loaf, he had been making connec-tions with bread lovers from all over

the world. Many of whom had invited him to stay with them if he ever came to their towns.

Now, he decided, was the time to see if something could come out of the address book.

So, in November 2014, Mark emailed a baker he knew in Amsterdam and proposed his idea for a baking trip. Mark would spend four weeks traveling around Europe and teaching bread-making wherever people would welcome him, using Amsterdam as his home base.

The plan was that by deciding on a home base and an actual plan for the trip in advance, he would make the idea seem more realistic to his potential hosts.

“I thought if I’d put it out and it sounded too vague then people wouldn’t be interest-ed,” Mark says.

The Dutch baker liked the idea and so, Mark started putting his plan into action: He bought a round-trip ticket to Amsterdam. And then, he posted a video to announce the trip.

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“The very next day, I got a message from someone who said ‘what about Russia?’” Mark says.

“Sure,” he replied, and already the next day, he got a long email from someone ready to organize the event.

Things were moving fast. After shuffling the schedules back and forth

for a while, Mark had a plan for a trip that in-cluded stays in Madrid, Amsterdam, Moscow, Madrid again, Prague and finally a small town near Pisa, Italy. Courses sold out quickly and so, this spring, Mark made his tour of Europe.

“[It was] a combination of teaching class-es and working in bakeries, helping them with their product lines and things like that,” Mark says.

As we chat, Mark mentions many places he’d still like to visit in the future: Middle East, Tur-key, Eastern Europe...

“A lot of the bread in Europe is more like a resurgence. And in a lot of the places, it’s not even a resurgence. It’s just been there. They’re still steeped in a lot of their tradition. And that really interests me,” he says.

The trip was clearly a success, and Mark is excited to do something like it again. He also already has many invitations for a second round, so there’s probably a follow-up coming soon.

Time will tell, but one thing is for sure: This is a baker worth following. As a former teacher, Mark enjoys teaching, learning and trying out new things. And he is still happy to share his knowledge with all of us online, through videos on YouTube and posts on Facebook.

Including recipes, such as a favorite bread Mark agreed to present to us today.

**

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As artisan bakers and artisan bread lovers, we often have a bit of a one-sided view of what a good loaf of bread is like. We like it crusty. We love sourdough. And because of that, it’s easy for us to look down on soft, yeasted bread.

This is why, during the European trip, when he was asked to choose what he wanted to teach his students, Mark always included his Potato Bread recipe in the selection.

“A lot of the people who are into artisan bread, sourdough, they don’t do soft bread,” he says. “I wanted to teach them something that was high-quality soft bread.”

This was also one of the two reasons why Mark chose to share this recipe with us. The second is that, in addition to the bread, he also want-ed to include a way to use it.

“A lot of the people who are into artisan bread,

sourdough, they don’t do soft bread. I wanted to teach

them something that was high-quality soft bread.”

While bread is great on its own, very often it’s a part or even an ingredient of an entire meal—this time, French Toast.

The Potato Bread recipe was born to answer a customer request.

“When I moved here, three years ago, one of the guys who just happens to work here in this building said to me: ‘Do you do potato bread?’” Mark says.

He already had a soft bread, a Portuguese Sweet Bread recipe he had developed during his years as a teacher. It was a recipe he liked a lot, and his customers at Kalispell had loved it.

But he got thinking.“A lot of potatoes are grown here. They

have a potato festival every year, it’s a big deal here.” Mark says.

“I decided I needed to do potato bread. And so, because of that conversation, I came up with a potato bread recipe.”

Since then, the potato bread has been a staple in his inventory. Sold as buns, it’s a customer favorite that is mostly used with meat: as burg-er buns, with pork, shredded beef, and so on. But the applications are not limited to burgers and other meat products.

The potato bread also makes an excellent French Toast, something Mark often tells his customers.

“Some soft breads—especially ones made with butter instead of oil—as soon as you heat them up, the flavor really comes out. I’ll tell people that too: I say they freeze really well. After you thaw them, put them on the grill for just a little bit, it brings out the flavor, and real-ly changes it.” Mark says.

“I tell them to cut the top and the bottom a bit off. Then it’s kind of a sponge. And it makes a cool round French Toast.”

MARK SINCLAIR’S POTATO ROLLS

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THE FORMULAMakes twelve 95-gram rolls.

Ingredients

Ingredient Quantity Bakers’ %

All-purpose flour 585g 100%

Milk 200g 34.2%

Potatoes, sliced and boiled 134g 22.9%

Potato water 47g 8%

Butter 58g 9,9%

Eggs 50g 8.6%

Sugar 48g 8.2%

Salt 14g 2.4%

Instant yeast 4g 0.7%

Instructions

1. Mix ingredients together and knead for 3 minutes until smooth. Place in an oiled bowl and cover for 20 minutes.

2. Knead for 30 seconds. Shape into a boule, place back in the bowl, and cover for 60 minutes.

3. Stretch and fold, boule, place back in bowl and cover for 60 minutes.

4. Scale. After scaling, the rolls can either be covered and refrigerated overnight or shape at this time.

Refrigerated rolls can be shaped di-rectly from the fridge the next day, or al-lowed to warm while covered for up to 30 minutes.

5. After shaping, let rolls rise until doubled in size, about 2 hours.

6. Bake at 176°C (349°F) in a convection oven or 190°C (374°F) in a standard oven for 14 minutes or until golden brown.

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POTATO BREAD FRENCH TOASTThe mixture is enough for four rolls. For the best French Toast, make sure to soak the bread well:

“I like the consistency to be more like a scallop. It has form, but it comes apart.” Mark says.

Ingredients

Ingredient Quantity

Eggs 3

Half and half, or cream 1/4 cup

Cinnamon 1/2 tsp

Vanilla extract 1/2 tsp

Nutmeg 1/4 tsp

Ground black pepper 1/4 tsp

Instructions

1. Beat all ingredients together with a wire whisk.

2. Cut the tops and bottoms of the rolls off, leaving a flat-sided roll that is about 3 cm thick.

3. One at a time, press the rolls into the mixture to absorb the liquid (first one side, then the other).

4. Place the soaked rolls in a medium heat skillet with about 2 tablespoons of melt-ed butter in it.

5. Cook for about 4 minutes on each side, or until golden brown.

6. Serve immediately with butter on top and maple syrup.

This article was originally published in the seventeenth issue of Bread

Magazine, the magazine for people who love and make bread.

Click here to read more