Baking & Snack - August 2019 - 62

CHABASO

Chabaso's wheat seminar meets 'ag in the middle'
While the food supply chain affects and is affected by
everyone, it's often hard to see. For Charlie Negaro
Jr., owner of Atticus Bookstore Café and son of Charles
Negaro, founder of Atticus and Chabaso in New Haven,
CT, that relationship was eye-opening when he visited the
Bread Lab at Washington State University.
"This was a point of incredible inspiration for me," he
said. "I grew up with great bread all around me; we'd been
making it all my life. But for me, it faded into the background as something that could create meaningful change
for a community and food system."
After a decade working at Chabaso, where the bakery deals
with 100,000 lb of dough a day, Charlie Negaro visited a
wheat farm for the first time, and a switch flipped. "I left there
knowing this is something I want to be a part of," he said.
After several more visits to Bread Lab and a trip to
Ecotrust in Portland, OR, he discovered "Ag at the Middle,"
a report published by Ecotrust. "There's small ag which is
a farmer raising enough organic chicken for the farmer's
market, and there's big ag, like Purdue," Charlie Negaro explained. "But if Chabaso or Atticus want to do something
between those, we have to solve this 'agriculture in the
middle' chunk. You have to vertically integrate or solve the
problems from start to finish because no one else is going
to do it. There isn't enough demand in the middle."
During the 18 months that followed, Charlie Negaro
began working with two farmers, one who grows a few
thousand pounds of rye and wheat, and another who
grows hard red winter wheat in a varietal called Redeemer.
"It became a cornerstone for our bakery," he said.
Since then, he's been dedicated to seeking out and working with Connecticut farmers to increase wheat production
in the state through methods such as crop rotation.
To perpetuate a positive cycle, Chabaso is partnering
with the Yale Landscape Lab to host a grains conference
on Oct. 8 to promote and develop the local grain economy
in Connecticut and the Northeast region. "It can impact
tourism, branding, marketing for food businesses in the
region, not to mention giving farmers an opportunity to
grow a premium product," he said.
On the macro level, through the conference and by
working in that "ag in the middle" space, Atticus and
Chabaso can influence Connecticut's struggling economy.
"Working in the middle can create demand for jobs at
every point in the economy," Charlie Negaro suggested.
"There will be farmers getting more money for varietal
grains. It can impact transportation, packaging, processing.
And then bakers and brewers can command a premium
for what the farmers are growing."
For information on the seminar, visit www.chabaso.com.

62 Baking & Snack August 2019 / www.bakingandsnack.com

has changed ... but the tradition stays the same.
The bakery relies on the same poolish for its signature
ciabatta. But today, the poolish, autolyse and final dough
are all mixed in five 500-lb VMI spiral mixers, one for
autolyse, one for preferment and three for the dough.
"Everything we do - all batches - use some sort of
preferment," Mr. Abrams noted, adding that some of
the breads among the bakery's 100 or so SKUs may use
levain, sponge or biga as well.
"Could we get away without these things?" Mr.
Abrams pondered. "Probably. But we choose not to because it makes our process better. When we make the
bread, the flavor is coming from time and fermentation.
The longer we can ferment each part of the process, the
more flavor we build."
For the Chabaso ciabatta, life begins at the poolish
when it ferments in buckets, 56 lb at a time, for around
15 hours overnight before entering the final mix. Then
flour is automatically loaded from one of two Contemar
Silo Systems 50,000-lb indoor silos, and all other ingredients are hand-scaled.
Due to the high volume of buckets used in the fermentation process, Chabaso recently invested in an automated washing system from Douglas Machines Corp.
"We go through a lot of buckets, and this will cut down
on time and labor," Mr. Abrams said.
After mixing, the dough is hand-scaled into more
buckets, where it enjoys 2 hours of fermentation before processing on either a WP Bakery Systems artisan
bread line for smaller products such as cut rolls, sticks or
square ciabatta rolls, or a Rheon stress-free makeup line
for most all other ciabatta products, which were running
during Baking & Snack's visit.
On the Rheon line, dough is measured by weight,
which reduces waste and requires less labor. The line's
checkweigher also ensures weight accuracy while providing the handmade look that artisan loaves are known
for. "Our bread is inherently inconsistent," Mr. Abrams
said. "Once it's at a high hydration, there's a lot of gas, so
there will always be variations. The checkweigh system
really helps with that."
Once the small dough chunks enter the line,
they travel as gently as possible through a series of
stretchers and rollers (with the checkweigher underneath). After being reduced, the dough sheet is cut
vertically, two at a time via adjustable circular cutters
before running through a guillotine to create the final dough pieces.
Next, the pieces go through extra steps under a
chain roller and pressure blade roller to set up the
loaves. According to Mr. Abrams, Rheon would say
this is technically not a "line" but a series of makeup
components. But after more than a decade of doing

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