How Chabaso Gets Bread To The Table

At 6 a.m., Willie Bell was already at work at Chabaso Bakery, measuring and mixing flour, water, and yeast to make a preferment known as a poolish.

Bell distributed the poolish into buckets, where it would ferment for 15 to 16 hours. He paid close attention to the time, because it is key to baking flavorful loaves.

Each batch of dough that Bell mixes contributes to the roughly 25,000 loaves of bread made by Chabaso every day for markets throughout the region. The operation has become a staple of New Haven’s food industry.

One of those batches was destined to become a loaf of Sesame Seminole bread, served up as a Classic Italian Sub at Atticus Market.

Before then, the dough had gone through more than 15 steps over the course of 20 hours, including shaping, proofing, baking, and freezing.

Chabaso opened its doors the other day for a reporter to get a view of how one of those loaves comes to fruition and makes it out the door.

Chabaso Bakery was started in 1995 by Charles Negaro, the owner of Atticus Bookstore and Cafe on Chapel Street. Negaro hoped to satisfy the voracious appetites of the readers in his store and hired a group of Yale art students to make the baguettes and other baked goods. His son has taken over the business, and opened the Atticus Market on Orange Street as well.

Bell was one of those students 32 years ago. Today he is one of 120 people employed at Chabaso.

“Occasionally other employees would ask me, ​‘How did you manage to stay here for so long?’ I’d say that when I was younger I had a lot more going on,” said Bell, who makes abstract constructions and sculptures in his free time. ​“Art shows, other jobs like teaching kids — for years I even had a radio show. I can split my other life from this easily.”

Bell said that his favorite part of the job is the dough-mixing stage, because it allows him to see the fruits of his labor.

That occurs after the preferment goes through a process called autolysis, which involves mixing the flour and water together for around an hour before adding other ingredients.

The final mix takes ten minutes once it is placed in a large automated machine (pictured).

Over the years, Chabaso has managed to automate much of their bread-making process to increase the speed, volume of production, and accuracy of their product.

“Our goal in automation is never to lose jobs,” said Peter Adams, Chabaso’s director of baking and innovation. ​“It’s to give people better and higher-skilled jobs so they’re doing value-added things like machine operation.”

After the final mix, the dough is measured out by weight and enters the shaping line. The shaping line involves putting the dough through a series of stretchers and rollers to reduce it to the desired thickness.

Then it is cut on a guillotine and shaped. The automated guillotine cuts according to the weight of the dough, ensuring high precision in terms of size. Ciabatta is sent under a series of chains, which gives the bread its rolled shape.

“The more gentle you can be with the dough, the better,” said Adams. ​“You’ve built up a lot of gas in the dough here — which you want.”

Adams has been working on product development, improvement, and production at Chabaso for ten years. Prior to that, he went to pastry school and worked as a pastry chef. For him, the appeal of Chabaso lies in the creative process and watching the transformation of raw ingredients into bread.

Adams said that Chabaso mixes around 50,000 pounds of dough each day.

After the dough is shaped, it is placed onto racks and pushed into a temperature and humidity-controlled cabinet called a proofer for two hours.

“In the proofer, you’re rebuilding up some of those gases that you lost in your shaping process,” explained Adams. ​“You’re letting the gluten relax so we can get the size and the shape that we want.”

Each loaf is then sent into a tunnel oven, which is essentially a long oven with a conveyor belt moving through it. Around 2,500 loaves go through the oven per hour.

Finally, the loaves are sent down the cooling spiral, a circular row of racks. That takes around an hour. Every loaf goes through a metal detector to make sure there is nothing problematic in the dough.

Two thousand cases of the bread that Chabaso makes each day are put into a liquid nitrogen freezer at around ‑56 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. That locks in the flavors so that distributors and grocery stores can heat it up fresh once it arrives at its destination.

Chabaso loaves are distributed to grocery stores throughout Connecticut, New York City, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the Northeast. Some stores commission Chabaso to make store-specific brand, which differ mostly in packaging.

Two hundred fresh loaves of bread are sent to Atticus Market and Atticus cafe every morning. A separate section of the bakery is dedicated to Atticus products like brioche, pastries, and Sesame Semolina loaves.

The bread leaves Chabaso at 6:30 a.m. and arrives at Atticus Market by 7. Once the bread arrives, chefs like Matt Wick and Juan Benidez turn it into either hot sandwiches like the chicken cutlet and breakfast buns, or cold ones like the Classic Italian Sub on Sesame Semolina bread.

“It makes a huge difference to have fresh bread,” said Wick, who has been the head chef at Atticus Market for two years. ​“Our bread is always lively and springy. It’s subtle but it shows.”