Barak Olins’ ZU Bakery gives meaning to life

UPDATE: ZU Bakery moved to 81 Clark St., Portland, in 2022.

BIG UPDATE: The James Beard Foundation named ZU Bakery its 2024 “Outstanding Bakery,” defined as “A baker of breads, pastries, or desserts that demonstrates consistent excellence in food, atmosphere, hospitality, and operations, while contributing positively to its broader community.”

Barak Olins is passionate about bread. Every Friday, he handcrafts 200 loaves, using traditional French bread-making methods and certified organic ingredients, including whole grains that he mills just before mixing the dough. Then, he bakes the loaves in a brick oven he built on his South Freeport, Maine, property. (Update: He moved to Portland in 2022)

ZU Bakery: Bread & Life

Olins’ ZU Bakery breads are as beautiful to behold as they are delicious to eat.  That each loaf is a work of art is not surprising for a man who is an artist as well as a baker. He’s also the grandchild of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and that leads him to some disquieting questions.  He writes:

My artwork is derived from the unsettling recognition that my wood-fired brick oven is in many ways indistinguishable from the crematoria of Auschwitz. This observation, as it turns out, is not simply one of frivolous similarities. Indeed, J. A. Topf, the company that designed the crematoria also designed grain roasting ovens for breweries and bread ovens for bakeries.

Strangely, I have found myself working next to a machine that so closely resembles an icon of vast destruction. What would it mean to bake bread in these ovens? How might I consider the space between the life-providing and life-reducing potential of such machinery? How do the mechanics of memory and its inevitable blurring with the present further complicate this quandary? What it means to be a Jewish-Artist-Baker is unsettled — it offers and perhaps even insists on its own questioning.

Is he driven by the desire to bake bread, something deeper and innate, or a combination?

Olins’ breads reaffirm the goodness and sanctity of life.

Making the miche

Here’s a photo sequence depicting ZU Bakery founder Barak Olins work the dough and shape loaves of miche (I was fortunate to watch him at work way back in 2011).