Exclusive: Chad Robertson Talks About His New Brooklyn Bakery

This episode is brought to you by King Arthur Bread Flour.
So many of our bread recipes and pizza recipes call for bread flour, and here's why.
With a higher protein content than all-purpose flour, bread flour gives you strong, stretchy, elastic doughs that proof and bake gorgeously.
Buying bread flour on our website or grocery store shelves, just look for the blue flour bag.
From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know.
I'm David Tamarkin, King Arthur's editorial director.
And I'm Jessica Battalana, staff editor at King Arthur Baking.
And today we're doing something we have never done before.
We're popping into your feed with a very special bonus episode.
Ding dong! We're here.
When our friend Chad Robertson, star baker of uh Tartine Bakery, joined our sourdough episode in May.
He also gave us some insider information about a new project that he is opening in New York City.
And when that episode aired, we weren't at liberty to share all the details of that project, but we are now.
So we are sharing that segment of the interview with you here today.
Yeah, this is the most exciting bakery news of the year by far.
I mean I think so.
It's exciting for me because you know it's just down the street in Brooklyn for me.
Yeah, I mean it's also exciting because like have we ever broken news?
Have you ever in your career broken news?
I I've broken news many times, but it has been a while.
Yes.
I started in hard news.
CGS.
Um yeah, but it this is exciting, and I I just it's important enough that we wanted to share it.
And I love uh I also just love just sneaking up on our listeners to say hi.
I was in New York in April when we were launching the Book of Pizza, and I had an opportunity.
Chad is an old friend of mine, um, and I had an opportunity to go see the new space in Brooklyn.
Um, and it's just a stunning freestanding building in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, which I feel like is sort of a unicorn.
Giant windows flooded with light, beautiful walnut floors, and just like a very beautiful space with an upstairs that they'll use for education.
It has a pastry room, it has a bread room.
Um, if you have been to any of the tartines, the tartine manufactory, um, you know just like that they also have beautiful design in addition to beautiful breads and pastries.
So the space is very stunning, and it's always fun to see a construction site and just see, you know, a bakery emerge out of that.
So um I'm super excited.
I'm also very envious of you.
Not for the first time and not for the last time.
Well, uh, I was about to say it's great that you got an inside look because I suspect there will be lines and uh you'll never get in again.
Yeah, and I know how you feel about lines.
So I'm never going.
I'm just I'm gonna live vicariously through this interview.
So enjoy this interview because it's yes, let's hear it.
So I think that I probably speak for a lot of your fans um in asking, like, what's happening now?
Like you've relocated from the West Coast, the East Coast.
What's going on?
What do you up to?
Yeah, you know, um, yeah, it's been quite the journey, you know, kind of looking for new projects to do on my own.
And I was connected with uh someone who's an investor, and this guy was in New York, and he's like, you know, I need someone to help me.
Um I need someone to help set up like a sourdough pizza thing.
And I was like, that, you know, that could be fun.
I mean, no big deal.
But, you know, we found we were looking around um sh in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and we found this building in Brooklyn that was just a very special building.
Um, but it was much bigger than you know, what the original idea of a small egg pizza place was.
Um and we're not doing pizza.
We'll do some we'll do some version of something, but it's not a pizza place.
Um there's so much good pizza in New York.
It's just like it's really an incredible time to be here.
And it is uh, you know, kind of an all-day cafe bakery thing on the ground floor, like what you might expect, although I'm really trying not to repeat anything I've done before.
Um just because I feel like there are a lot of people doing stuff really well that that you know we maybe popularized a long time ago.
And yeah, and you know, it wasn't there really.
There wasn't like everyone wasn't obsessing over the crumb of their loaf and the long fermentation and and the honeycomb.
Yeah, the croissants.
I mean, like croissants are just like insane.
Like everyone's just you know battling trying to make the most perfect, you know, and it's beautiful.
Um, but I, you know, it's kind of like I want to add something to the already amazing food culture that's here.
So I'm I'm really trying to do some different things.
And and a lot of it honestly is is in the the vein of what um book three was, which which we worked on together.
Yeah.
And a lot of that stuff that was in that book, I mean, that was just sort of a free-for-all in my brain of like whatever.
And some of it, you know, that's sort of threw a lot of the wall, some of it stuck.
Um, but none of it, except for the oat porridge, really is ever gone into production at Tartine.
So, you know, there's a ton of um kernels of ideas there.
Um, and then, you know, going back to this, the the roots that really influenced me when I first started, which is I've written a couple of pieces, one for food arts, um, sadly, no longer with us.
You know, you see all these chefs just doing really interesting things around the world, and bread was just kind of bread, you know, like you get it free in a restaurant.
It's like wow, like that's kind of a bummer, you know, like no one even wants to pay for it.
But um I was like, I was really inspired by what I saw going on around the world, the chefs sort of pushing out of the boundaries of just, you know, Italian or French or whatever traditional food that that we all love.
Um, and you know, just having a little more fun with it.
But that wasn't really happening in bread.
And I feel like, you know, I was always saying, like, let's let's have a little more fun and like experiment a little more and and just try to explore um the diversity of the grain world, you know.
And so the TLDR is that instead of uh consulting on a small sourdough pizza place, you're now opening an ambitious new all-day bakery cafe in Williamsburg.
It's it's an all-day thing.
Um, it's the thing that I'm most excited about.
I mean, we're gonna be making a bunch of good food all day long, and you know, as we do.
Um, I mean, that was another thing I'll say that because um I trained as a chef before a baker, like when we opened Tarte, I mean, traditionally bakeries would bake all night, right?
And then put it, fill the shelves up and the bakers went home and the shopkeepers came in and they sold the stuff for a few hours and then start over again.
Um, we didn't we like I don't like working all night.
I I just I just refuse to do that.
Um also because I had a restaurant that was a dinner-only restaurant, and I was there a lot.
So it's like, you know, if I'm making croissants and bread, you know, at 6 a.m.
and then going into bar tartine at seven or eight at night and working on stuff with them, and then there's like no time to sleep.
So we're not as young as we used to be, Chad.
But the you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So but the other thing is like I would rather hand someone a hot loaf of bread.
I mean, when people would say, like, how did tartine get so big or whatever?
And it it it didn't for a really long time, by the way.
But eventually it did, and a lot of it was just me traveling around, like learning from other people and being kind of an ambassador for whatever, but whatever it was I thought I was doing, it was a lot of fun and and I learned a ton going around.
But a lot of people knew about tartarine because I was doing a lot of that, and even though it's just this tiny place on the corner.
But for me, I was always like, let's just bake in real time, you know, small batch baking, like all that stuff that's very common now.
That wasn't really the way most American bakeries operated.
And then even like when I have chefs come and, you know, like when bread baking became more popular and lots of cooks and chefs wanted to make the transition to baking, they would come in and they would be like, Man, this is like a restaurant, but like dinner service is 10 hours long and just non-stop.
Like, this is way hard, like you're not getting orders, you're just constantly making stuff and people are in line, you know?
So, but we we kind of approached when we opened Tartine, we kind of approached it like a restaurant without, you know, just like kind of giving people fresh stuff all day.
And that's that what you're thinking about for the new spot too.
That's same sort of yeah, it'll be it'll be that.
And then I mean, the the part that I'm most excited about actually um is upstairs is where we built like a kitchen, the mills upstairs.
Um, it's basically a teaching space and a space that I can host friends from uh the city, friends from here, and friends from around the world.
Um, which, you know, we've always done that with tartine and bar tartine.
And that's just because it's kind of like the most fun thing for me is just to bring other people together and and learn from each other.
But that was always like sort of um doing it after hours or um, you know, on a slow day or whatever.
Now we've we've built like a space that's dedicated to that.
And I'm super excited to just invite all my friends to come and do wonderful things together.
So so it's for me, it's um you know, it is an all-day cafe bakery, but you know, even that part, like I said, I'm everything is gonna be new, everything's gonna be sort of I'm trying to push it, you know, push everything in a in a direction.
Like I said, I want to keep it in the the sweet spot where people want to, you know, come three days a week and and get their their staples, but um, but something I want to add, I want to add to the RD mode, really inspiring um the community here.
So exciting.
I can't wait.
Um, and I think a lot of people will be excited to you know to hear this news and to come and see you in this next chapter in this new place.
I think it's fun to see creators who just keep pushing forward and and you're definitely one of them.
Um and can you tell us the name of the new spot?
Uh the name is Alt Bau, which means old building.
And when you see the building, you'll understand sort of why we were really smitten with the building, and then, you know.
Um but also it's like I feel like, you know, I'm kind of an old building myself, and I I have a real I it just feels like the right name.
We got friends in Texas did the branding, and um, it all just kind of came together very um sort of sort of naturally.
Like part of the inspiration in the beginning was the Bauhaus.
I've always just loved it, it was a very short-lived movement, but I always loved how they sort of just smashed together art and craft and kind of made, you know, made no no distinction between the two.
And this is just your life.
And you know, I live a couple blocks away, it is gonna be my life, and I want it, I want to have like Tartine always had a ton of musicians and artists, you know, like making coffee in the morning.
You know, it's like I wanna I want to have that kind of a hub where it's just you know, people are there doing interesting things all the time.
And so yeah, there was there was some inspiration there.
Um, it's also a word that's easy for people to pronounce, like, you know, like it's a it's a little bit, you know, foreign, but like tartine, but easy enough.
Yeah.
So I was trying to strike that balance.
But my partner was the one that actually he's he spends a lot of time in Berlin and he he loved that word.
And I didn't know what it meant when I heard I was like, that I like that.
I like that word.
And then um it all kind of made sense once we start.
And we're restoring the building.
It's an old building, it's it's gorgeous, but you know, we're putting like reclaimed uh old growth walnut floors that came from a bakery in Long Island City from the late 1800s.
So it's it's like we're really honoring the building.
And you know, it's it's just a very central location in in Brooklyn.
So uh it's gonna be fun.
It's gonna be fun.
Um, I can't wait to come see you there.
Uh thanks for being so generous with your time and your knowledge um for for our listeners and and for me personally, and um come break with bread with you in Brooklyn real soon.
Looking forward to it.
Thank you, Jess.
Thanks.
Bye.
All right, bye.
Man, I love breaking news.
I hope we can do it more often.
We are.
We're a breaking news podcast now.
Yeah, this is we're basically CNN.
Yep, exactly.
CNN at baking.
And, you know, I know it is surprising that we hopped on with this bonus episode, but you know, when you've got news to share, you gotta share it.
So um appreciate as always our listeners for listening.
Yep, yep.
Remember to like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts, because you never know when we're gonna be popping in with a special breaking news episode.
You never know.
And you could leave us a review while you're there, or you could share this episode, this breaking news episode, or any of the other episodes with a friend.
And in the meantime, still advice holds.
Forever, follow the recipe.
Follow the recipe.
Things Bakers Know is hosted and executive produced by me, David Tamarkin.
And me, Jessica Batalana.
Rossi Anastapulo is our senior producer, Chad Shennai is our producer, and Marcus Bagala is our engineer.
Original music by Megan and Marcus Bagala.
And also big thanks to Chad Robertson, who's just the GOAT, for joining us on this week's episode.
You can learn more about him and his new projects via his Instagram at TarteenBaker.
Things Bakers Know is a King Arthur Baking Company podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Broad and Taylor.
Broad and Taylor is an independent, family-owned company that builds tools for all bread bakers at every level to transform complex baking challenges into simple pleasures.
I love Broaden Taylor.
I mean, they are so passionate about bread and baking.
When I talk to those folks, it really feels like I'm talking to someone at King Arthur 2.
There's that synergy there because we only have one thing on our minds.
It's baking, baking, baking.
I love their tools.
They really truly are an asset for every home baker.
And you and I both have quite a few of them in our own kitchens.
You know, my favorite, I think, is the uh countertop proofer.
I don't know, you're into the baking steel, but they have a lot of great tools.
I love a baking steel.
Whether you're a first time baker or you're like in deep like us, there's something for you at broadandtailor.com.
That's B R O D A N D T A Y L O R dot com.