The accidental baker and the rise of Sixteen Bricks

“Let’s just say I’m an idiot,” said Ryan Morgan when asked how much money he recently turned down to sell his Sixteen Bricks Bakery.

The artisanal bakery that provides hand-crafted bread to local restaurants has grown quickly enough to look very good to buyers.

But Morgan didn’t give up a good paying job, sell a beloved motorcycle and cash in a 40l(k) to get the bakery going just to turn around and sell it three years later. He is too deeply into the craft of bread-making, and the satisfactions of running a business, to want to hand it over to someone else. There are young bakers to train, fresh-milled whole grain flours to play with, and chefs to keep happy.

Keeping chefs happy is his favorite thing to do, as Sixteen Bricks is doing almost all of its growing in one niche: selling bread to high-quality-minded restaurants.

So, no, not an idiot. He’s one of the people around Cincinnati who are finding that the current appreciation for well-crafted food offers opportunities for a creative, interesting life.

It’s all been a little accidental. Baking isn’t something he’d trained for or dreamed about. Bread happened to him, like a blind date that turned into love.

“My brother and I were just trying to help out our mom,” he said. Carol Forbrigger’s bakery, Sweet William’s, was limping after she’d bought GTC Bakehouse and moved it to Fairfax. Then she had to quit to help her husband, Morgan’s stepfather, deal with multiple sclerosis.

At that point, in 2012, Morgan was working for Johnson & Johnson as a mechanic, which is what he’d always been. At 17, he worked for a motorcycle shop, paid in parts until he had enough to build his own motorcycle. (That’s the one he sold.) He moved on to cars, then medical equipment. He was making very good money, had a company car and work he liked.

He and his brother thought they could take over for their mother, and just keep things going through the end of her lease, without quitting their day jobs.

But they took bread making seriously. The first thing they did was scrap all the dough formulas, then bring in a successful baker and consultant, Jeff Yankelow. Morgan kept at it even after his brother went on to another job, learning as much as he could by doing and working lots of hours. “You learn how to make bread by making bread,” he said.

He visited bread makers around the country, including one he especially admires, Easy Tiger Bakery in Austin.

“I was in Easy Tiger with a friend and talking to the baker, Dave Norman. My friend was laughing at me, saying it was the first time he’d heard me talk so enthusiastically about something other than motorcycles,” he said. “Until that point, it hadn’t dawned on me that I was enjoying this. I’d always been a worker, that wasn’t a problem. But I started thinking about it and thinking I really, really do like this.”

He was hooked, and the day job had to go. So much for Plan A.

To a person with a problem-solving turn of mind, bread-making offers plenty of interesting problems. The first is: How do you make something delicious out of just flour, salt, water and yeast?

“It’s an artistic outlet for me,” Morgan said. “How to take a few raw ingredients, mix them and create something with real nutrition, real quality.”

There are many answers to the question, but the most important one is long, slow fermentation. Each bread is a little different, but they generally start with a sourdough, add flour, salt and water, which sits for hours, a process called autolysing. It’s bulk-fermented, shaped, left to rise in the walk-in overnight, slashed and then fired in a 12-deck steam-injected oven.

There are several machines that make their work more efficient, like a portioning machine that was essential when they were baking all the burger buns for Terry’s Turf Club. But Morgan is careful that steps to become more efficient don’t lose the basically hand-made nature of the dough.

For Morgan, one of the great rewards of the bakery is being able to work with young guys who are learning, including his son Jacob, who just graduated from high school. He said it gives him a chance to catch up with his son, after having spent a lot of hours away from home, getting the bakery started.

The bakery in Fairfax is a place of young-man energy, with an oven named Sword after a heavy-metal band and graffiti-inspired art on the walls. The bakers trade off music by days, sometimes putting up with NPR, other days with jock jams or classic rock. The original logo for the business featured a skull. “I gotta be me, I do what I want,” he thought. He was talked out of that logo by Ben Pipkin, owner of Pipkin’s Market, when Morgan went to him to sell retail.

He’s not the only person who’s helped out Sixteen Bricks with advice and support. Todd Kelly, food and beverage director of the Omni Netherland Hilton, and chef at Orchids, made the biggest difference by tasting the bread and then pushing him to market it. “That’s when Sixteen Bricks was really born,” said Morgan.

Delivering bread to chefs like Kelly is what Morgan likes.

“Selling to chefs keeps you razor-sharp,” he said. “The day you deliver something that isn’t how they want it, they let you know. Chefs call me out if my baguettes are a little flat. I like that. I like having high standards.”

Brad Bernstein, chef/owner of Red Feather Kitchen, who comes to the bakery to pick up his baguettes, said he enjoys the collaborative nature of buying from Sixteen Bricks. “My big schtick is a relationship with the people who grow and produce our food. He’s always there, creating stuff for us and with us. He really gets great flavor in his bread: the sours are spot-on. He’s constantly perfecting, working , and he’s just now coming into his own.”

Morgan’s newest project is making bread from 100 percent fresh-milled whole ancient grains like emmer, einkorn and quinoa, something that very few bakeries around the country take on. It’s a tricky endeavor that requires experimentation, research, and is far more expensive than regular bread. He’s selling it at farmer’s markets, where people are more likely to be interested in the health aspects of the bread.

Morgan didn’t sell his bakery, but he did take on an investor, and that’s going to allow him to expand. In December, Sixteen Bricks is moving to the old Klosterman’s Bakery in Bond Hill, where they’ll have double the capacity and the ability to streamline production, with such improvements as an automated oven loader.

But Morgan never wants to get huge. “I don’t want to be the biggest bakery, I just want to have the most integrity,” he said.

Where you may have had Sixteen Bricks bread:

Maribelle’s uses the baguette in an appetizer with tomato puree, manchego cheese, sea salt and extra-virgin olive oil, as well as the challah bun for a black bean burger

Deeper Roots uses bread, including some of the ancient grain styles, in their toast menu

Cheapside Cafe puts smoked salmon , cucumber, pickled red onion and herb cream cheese on salted rye for a smoked salmon sandwich.

Red Feather Kitchen uses baguettes for the bread basket and appetizers

Bouquet uses it in their bread basket. Also Jeff Ruby’s, Wildflower Cafe, Collective Espresso, D. Burnham’s, 20 Brix, Meatball Kitchen, Melt, Tela Bar and Kitchen, and many more.

It’s also available retail at a few places: Clifton Natural Foods, Country Farm Fresh Market, Hyde Park Fine Meats, Madison’s in Findlay Market, Picnic and Pantry in OTR, Pipkin’s, Sprout Market in Mount Adams. Two farmer’s markets, Lettuce Eat well in Cheviot on Friday and Fort Thomas on Wednesday also have it.