Maximilian Fuhrer says when he first baked real bread some customers complained it was stale because it had a hard crust.

You get a couple of surprises eating a fresh baguette from a quality bakery.



First there's a little jaw ache from the chewiness of fully developed gluten. Next there's the odd sensation of eating bread which is immediately filling and sustaining.



Real bread, made how it used to be, is light years ahead in texture and flavour to the soft, milky white, melt-away sandwich bread that lines supermarket shelves.



This secret is becoming less so all the time as more and more Kiwis turn to artisan bakers.



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Baking Industry Association president Kevin Gilbert says craft bread baking is going from strength to strength. One good sign is how a quality baker is now an essential part of the booming farmers' markets.

As demand soars, bakeries are popping up like mushrooms in cities and towns, joining the pockets of hardcore faithful.



The irony is this exciting new bread is really, really old bread.



It's bread that earlier generations enjoyed before we industrialised its production.

AROBAKE BAKERY Sunflower sourdough from Arobake in Wellington. You can see the life in the loaf.

Our soft white supermarket bread appeared after the 1960s English invention of a super-fast process.



By thrashing the flour and gluten, and chucking in additives, the slow yeast fermentation and dough proving process could be bypassed.

It meant a factory could go from flour to a bagged loaf of bread in just a few a hours. And that's roughly how most of our standard bread is made now.



But real bread's advantage is how much better it tastes and how much better it digests.

It's like taking the leap from generic cold brown fizzy mass production beer to complex craft beer. Or the leap from cafes serving instant coffee to today's barista culture.

DOMINICO ZAPATA/STUFF Volare's Ryan Simmons says real bread has a great story.

Arobake's Maximilian Fuhrer was in the vanguard of the movement 29 years ago when he arrived back in Wellington determined to make crusty bread the way Europeans made it.



"I started doing sourdoughs and people seemed to love it. Mind you, you got some in the early days coming in saying, 'your bread is stale, it's hard' because it had a crust on it."

Only one other baker was doing something similar. Now there are craft bakeries dotted all over Wellington.



He has 30 staff, is flat out and is considering finding a bigger factory site to cope with the demand for 400-500 loaves a day.

Fuhrer says real bread's flavour comes from giving bread the time it needs.



Yeast is left to ferment for about 18 hours and when added to the bread dough "it produces all these flavours and gives it all these qualities".

EWAN SARGENT/STUFF Copehagen's John Thomsen believes real bread is much easier to digest than short-cut mass production bread.

"If you have one of our baguettes, you want to rip it apart because it 's quite hard work and when you eat it it has a real substance to it. It's just that the gluten has had so much time to fully hydrate. "

One of the best examples of a bread business booming on the back of making it properly is Ryan Sisson's Volare in Waikato.



In 2009, he was a one-man band making sourdough loaves as a hobby for farmers' markets. He was joined by co-owner Eddie Hemmings and they cranked up production and started selling wholesale.

Sissons says education was a big part of growing the success. "Every person who bought a loaf, you'd tell the story to. People really took that on board."



The story is the same as all the others. Bread made using a proper fermentation is far superior to shortcut bread that uses additives. Real bread might cost more but it's better in every way.

EWAN SARGENT/STUFF Old school is a selling point for artisan bread.

"We are definitely converting people to real bread. With that other stuff, a big loaf is about 450 grams while ours are 900 grams and the smallest slice will fill you up."



He says people get hooked by having a little try, they think it's interesting, then they try again.

"Then they get hooked. Next thing they can't get enough of it."

Volare now has more than 50 staff, it is about to open its sixth retail outlet and it supplies quality bread to restaurants and cafes across Waikato and Bay of Plenty.

EWAN SARGENT/STUFF Rye bread from Copenhagen is made from a 15 year old starter and weighs nearly 1kg.

Sissons says Volare uses 3.5 to 4 tonnes of flour a week - New Zealand milled flour from Canterbury.

"For an artisan bakery, that's a decent amount," Sissons says.

His business expansion is even more impressive in a world where many people are turning away from bread because of gluten intolerance fears.

AROBAKE BAKERY Honey ciabatta and sunflower sour dough from Arobake in Wellington. Maximillian Fuhrer baker there for 29 years.

Christchurch's Copenhagen bakery sits on the outskirts of the city on Harewood Road, where it reopened after the 2011 earthquake wrecked its inner city premises.

It remains a hands-on operation run by husband and wife team John and Donna Thomsen.

All its bread comes from a properly fermented starter that - as in all real bakeries - is a living, breathing thing fed daily. Part of the starter is taken away each day to add to dough to launch the magic that makes the loaves.

AROBAKE BAKERY Arobake's beautiful flowing honey ciabatta.

In Copenhagen's case, the rye starter, a big beige yeasty smelling mound in a white bin, is about 15 years old. The white sourdough starter is even older at about 25 years old.

John Thomsen is dismissive of mass-produced white bread.

"When I was brought up in Denmark, we were allowed to eat as much rye bread as we wanted, but we were only allowed one piece of white bread afterwards. For a treat."

He says that's how white bread should be regarded. He blames much of the current gluten intolerance on bread made the fast way and also from the extra gluten which has been introduced to modern baking because it makes products look good. He says the stomach can't digest it.

Thomsen says the fermentation process in real bread breaks down gluten and many people choose Copenhagen's loaves because they don't affect them the way ordinary white bread does.

"When we started 30 years ago, the Kiwis really liked their white loaf. Our rye and wholemeal and sourdough, not so much," he admits.

But Thomsen says things have come a long way and real bread sales continue to rise, the big sales days being towards the end of the week.

He says real bread is filling and a lot more tasty.

"It's like fruit, the more ripe fruit is, the more flavour it gets. That's the same with bread. The longer you let it ferment, the more flavour it has."