Slice of life: How Scandi bakeries are turning leftovers into delicious treats

It’s made purely from leftovers, but that hasn’t stopped the Lemon Wave becoming one of the most popular pastries at recently opened Collective Bakery in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district. Leftover croissant trimmings are put on a wooden skewer and proofed, giving the pastry its signature wavy shape. Then, the lemon wave is glazed with a syrup made with the skins of organic Sicilian lemons, cooked into a tea, and reduced with sugar into a sticky glaze. The result is a buttery, flaky pastry with a burnished surface and a seductive, heady aroma.

Minimising waste, it turns out, can be tasty. And while the Lemon Wave is a great pastry, it also serves as an example of how Copenhagen’s plethora of new bakeries are being driven for- ward by innovative foreign chefs from the city’s best restaurants. Collective Bakery’s Glasgow-born head baker Michael Craig worked at restaurants across Europe, including three years at Copenhagen’s Amass – a trailblazing restaurant and a world leader in gastronomic sustainability, deftly incorporating byproducts such as spent coffee grains, kale stems and surplus bread into a forward-thinking menu.

Naturally, Craig brought this mindset when he joined the bakery, owned by leading speciality coffee roaster Coffee Collective. “At Amass, I was experimenting a lot with bread made with spent grains from our beer production. Here, we have the same approach to waste. Any surplus brewed coffee is used in the dough for the rye bread, where we have found that it greatly enhances the malty flavours,” says Craig, whose interest in baking drove him first to Gothenburg and then back to Copenhagen and master baker Richard Hart’s hugely popular Hart Bageri, before joining Collective Bakery.

The no-waste approach runs throughout the operation, explains his Canadian assistant head baker Meagan Murray – another former chef – while she deftly weaves dough into cardamom pastries. “If there are any sourdough rolls left on the day, we cut them up, soak them in water and make a porridge that we incorporate into the dough for next day’s rolls,” she says.

Barely a decade ago, great bread and pastries were hard to find in Copenhagen. But just over ten years ago, Noma’s founding father and gastronomic serial entrepreneur Claus Meyer laid the groundwork for a new era of chef-driven bakeries when he opened Meyers Bageri. A few years later, celebrated New Nordic chef Christian Puglisi followed suit with the Mirabelle Bakery, beloved for its sourdough.

That set a template for chefs- turned-bakers, who have revolutionised a once-stagnant scene. Take the insanely popular Juno the Bakery, opened by former Noma chef Emil Glaser, or the recently opened Bageriet Benji by Rasmus Kristensen, who used to work the sourdough at Noma. Noma’s René Redzepi is also financially involved in Hart Bageri, helmed by former Tartine head baker Richard Hart.

With Covid-related lockdowns shutting down the city’s restaurants for months on end, the bakery revolution has gained extra momentum of late, driven by high demand and scores of locked-down chefs. On weekend mornings, long lines of people can be seen queueing for their daily fix of sourdough bread and perfectly flaky glazed Danish pastries.

“The lockdowns forced chefs to take time off, and maybe that time off made some of them switch their priorities,” says Craig. “Maybe it’s also a generational thing, with people turning 30 and wanting to start a family. Some may have found out that they like having evenings off and seeing friends and family. For me, the strict brigade-like hierarchy found in many restaurant kitchens suffocated my creativity. I don’t want that here. As opposed to most restaurants, bakeries have a better work-life balance, but you can still source and work with great products all while you’re being challenged professionally.”

Back in his chef days, Craig used to get the chills if he was lagging behind during dinner service. Now he gets his kicks from the ever-changing and moist Danish weather, which can greatly affect the proofing of the doughs. “We’re all adrenaline junkies. In a restaurant, you have this slow build-up, where you go all day and prepare for everything to culminate during service in the evening. In a bakery, the routine is reversed, so early in the morning you go into service straight off the bat. And if the proofer hasn’t been warm enough during the night, you know you are in trouble.”

It’s not only in the middle of the city that things are proofing. Further up the coast, at wind- swept Sjællands Odde – Zealand’s northernmost point – former Noma pastry chef Louise Bannon has founded Tír Bakery. Since the beginning of summer, the Irish chef-turned-baker has been working out of two shipping containers that provide her with a makeshift solution while a permanent bakery is being set up in the adjacent farmhouse.

Until then, Tír – which translates as ‘land and region’ – is a solo operation. Making roughly 200 rye and sourdough breads and 300 pastries a day is serious work for one person, and Ban- non admits she has only slept three hours a night for the past six weeks. Sjællands Odde is full of summer houses, so things have been particularly busy. “I usually finish at midday, before I get up again to bake at 3am in the morn- ing,” she says. “But after this week, I will close for the season and get a little bit of rest while the proper bakery is being set up.”

Bannon is no stranger to hard work. As a pastry chef, she spent five years at Noma, where head chef René Redzepi got her heavily into both foraging and baking with biodynamic grains from small-scale producers. Working with old varieties of wheat and rye, Noma was also where she learned the importance of using fresh-milled grain. Not all bakeries – and certainly not all restaurants – mill their own grains, but she says the process is key to maximising nutritional content, aroma and flavour.

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“At Noma, 20 per cent of the grains were milled fresh, and for the first time, I could taste the flavour of the grain in the bread. Since then, I always believed in baking with fresh flour.” Today, a 140kg mill stands as the white-dusted centrepiece of the shipping container, along with heavy bags of local grain. All of the flour at Tír is milled fresh daily.

Being a Noma alumnus, the influence from the great mothership of Nordic cuisine is also evident in Bannon's approach to pastries. At all times, she makes use of whatever the surrounding fields and nature have to offer. “These days, I go to the beach to pick wild roses, which I use to make wild rose and wild plum danishes. At the moment I also like to use fig leaves for pastries. I dry them, which gives them a very interesting coconut flavour. I like to use what’s generally available around me. It makes sense,” says the foraging baker, before running to check the batch of rhubarb and wild plum tarts in the oven.

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Although working at the very top level as a chef, she always knew that, someday, she would have to open her own bakery. “I liked the atmosphere in the restaurants I’ve worked at. But bakeries are more relaxed. I’ve never felt the need to be angry in a bakery. If something goes wrong, you just fix it.”

Sjællands Odde is sparsely populated, but people come from near and far to get their hands on Tír’s offerings, which usually sell out fast. “I’ve had people telling me they’ve driven 45 minutes to get here,” says Bannon, who plans to triple the production volume when the real bakery is up and running. Clearly, the demand for good bread is no longer an inner-city phenomenon.