On a bright and sunny late summer Saturday morning, the door of a house on a pretty terrace in Dublin 8 is flung open wide. There are enticing smells escaping on to the street, and they’re not from the front garden roses, but something even more evocative.
It’s the unmistakable aroma of freshly baked bread. From the interior, there comes a hum of chatter, and the sound of coffee being poured. Is it a brunch party, or a birthday breakfast? It’s neither, but it is a celebration, a gathering of like minds with good food at its core.
Inside, in a kitchen extension so clever, so stylish, that it stops an architect in his tracks the minute he walks through the door to join the gathering, Gerry Godley, a musician turned baker, is handing around little samples of a focaccia he has been recipe testing. It is inspired by the chicken wings with blue cheese and celery made famous in Dublin by a certain Temple Bar restaurant. He is also passing around a bowl of bright green olive oil, carried back in his suitcase from a recent holiday in Crete.
Sunlight, streaming in through the folding glass doors that make the patio garden part of the kitchen, bounces off rows of bulging bright orange paper carrier bags lined up on the dining table, waiting to be claimed. Cups of coffee are passed around and there is chat about summer holidays, in Italy and France. This is order collection time for Godley’s new venture, a microbakery called Breadman Walking.
A commercial bread oven, imported from Belgium, massive sacks of flour, a giant steel fridge, and banks of bannetons — the baskets in which bread loaves have their final rest before hitting the heat — somehow manage to look completely at home in the context of a domestic kitchen.
'I get to work with my hands, and I get to interact with people in my community. Every Saturday, it’s like a little series of dopamine hits’
“When we renovated this kitchen, even though it wasn’t in my head at all to do this, I realised that I could see this kitchen to be sort of quasi-industrial, to allow me to do stuff,” Godley says. A piano had to find a new home within the house, but otherwise the space has absorbed the bakery seamlessly.
Each week, he produces a range of sourdough loaves, focaccia, brioche and pastries, that can be ordered via Instagram (@bread_man_walking), by Thursday evening at the latest. The doughs are then mixed, shaped and left to prove over the following 24 hours, and baked in the early hours of Saturday.
As his kitchen gradually fills with customers, many of whom have become friends, Godley admits hasn’t really slept, rising before dawn to start baking at 4am to fill that week’s orders, for four varieties of sourdough loaves, plus focaccia, sausage rolls, cinnamon buns, Ottoman buns, babka, and leek and Taleggio brioche, along with raspberry brioche.
His wife Élish and their daughter Amalia are part of the Saturday morning production line too, packing the individual orders into those signature orange bags as soon as they’re baked and cooled on the massive kitchen island, arranging them alphabetically, according to their purchasers.
“It’s busy, I’m still baking, and we’re packing ... and we might be screaming at each other,” Godley says, dispelling any notions of baking bliss at that crucial moment in the process.
Having been a professional saxophonist, a music impresario, and more recently the principal and managing director of the Leeds College of Music, a position which involved commuting to the UK every week, the pandemic made Godley rethink his life. “I had been doing that for six years and I didn’t want to commute to the UK any more. I didn’t particularly want to be in the UK after Brexit happened.”
What he describes as “long periods of reflection” led him to conclude that he wanted to work with his hands. “I also wanted to acquire a new skill, and I didn’t mind if it was going to take me 20 years to acquire, I quite liked the idea of that.”
During his late teens and early 20s, he did an apprenticeship and worked as a chef in Dublin and London, so he knows his way around a kitchen. During Covid, he was one of many who took a deep dive into breadmaking. “Everybody has a tendency to go, ‘Oh, not the Covid bread thing’. But actually, it was pretty profound, because it has massively accelerated awareness and dialogue about the place of bread, the role of bread in our lives. I got caught up in that just like everybody else did.”
In his quest for a new direction in life, Godley went in search of “something that would interest me, historically, geopolitically, socioculturally, economically, and bread is all of those things and more”. He started baking commercially in January, having thoroughly researched his new calling. “One of the really interesting things about bread is that it really feels like a proper commons. People are incredibly generous with their knowledge, even if it might not be in their commercial best interest at times. So accessing information is incredibly easy.”
Now, his weeks in the microbakery follow the same routine, even though the menu of breads and pastries changes each week. “We’ve a lot of regulars, so it’s nice to rotate things a little bit. I guess I’m constantly trying stuff to keep my customers interested. I carry a mental list of things around in my head that are like super concentrated flavours, anchovies, olives, capers ... things that are small and pack a punch, but at the same time won’t corrupt the quality of the dough or the pastry.” The cut off time for orders is 9pm on Thursdays, then Godley gets to work calculating how much of each dough he needs to make.
Fridays are mixing and prep days, and he works from 6am to 6pm. When I visit on a Friday afternoon, the bulk of the day’s labour is already resting gently in the fridge, undergoing the long cold fermentation process that gives good sourdough its character. There are a few porridge loaves still to be shaped, and having seen and felt the dough at this stage in its evolution, it is with renewed appreciation that just under 24 hours later, I cut and slather with butter a slice of this incredible, moist and flavourful bread.
“When I started this morning, I started with flour and water, which is nasty, it’s a really horrible substance to work with, it gets everywhere, it’s impossible to handle, it’s sticky. Then, after a few hours of coaxing it, asking it nicely, the dough starts to co-operate,” Godley says. “Now you’re here at this stage where these are lovely things to handle. When you get to this part of the process, there is finesse and touch and feel.”
After his strenuous 12-hour Friday shift, Godley will cook dinner for the family, “maybe a bowl of pasta something really easy”. “Then I have a little routine that I go through the night before, just getting everything ready. And I make sure all of the tools are there, there’s a lot of moving parts to it. There’s a lot can go wrong, if I’m not concentrating. It’s really absorbing work, as absorbing as any kind of work I’ve ever done actually.”
He’s back in the kitchen on Saturday morning at 4am, with the oven having been switched on by a timer two hours earlier. While the loaves are baking, in batches of 12, there is still shaping, twisting and braiding of the various buns to be done. These then have a final two-hour proofing, before getting their turn in the oven. And then there’s the sorting and packing, before the door opens to customers at noon. “I wouldn’t sit down between 4am and noon. In fact, the first time I usually sit down on a Saturday is when I go for a beer after I’ve done a few deliveries — the baker’s pint.”
Among the first to arrive to collect their order on Saturday afternoon are Ed Brophy and Sarah Murray, regular customers from the start, who walk over from Inchicore to collect their order, with their dog Alfie. “We always buy the bread, and the cinnamon buns are a bit of a favourite in our house,” Murray says. Their vegan daughter is a fan of the sourdough loaf, and wrote about Breadman Walking in her Leaving Cert home economics exam, much to Godley’s delight.
Bryan Patten arrives with his children Ruairí and Mae. They’re about to catch a ferry and head off on their holidays, but have dropped in to collect their order and will be bringing Irish bread and pastries to France with them. “Sure there’s no bread in France,” Godley laughs. As well as appreciating knowing where the bread comes from, Patten likes the sense of community that supporting the microbakery brings. It’s a sentiment echoed by another regular customer, Jane Babb, who says: “I think if ever there was an example of where a creative act becomes an act of community, it’s this. You kind of feel like you’re in a tribe. There’s a community around it.”
Godley confirms that this has been his experience since starting to sell his bakes. “It’s such an unbelievably direct route into your local community, into who your neighbours are, of all shapes and sizes, and all colours and creeds. All sorts of people turn up at our doorstep to get their bread. Some of them are old friends who’ve become customers, and some of them are customers who are becoming new friends.”
With no immediate plans to scale up his business, apart from a desire to be able to teach breadmaking classes, Godley seems to have found the perfect answer to his midlife career crisis.
“I get to work with my hands, and I get to interact with people in my community. Every Saturday, it’s like a little series of dopamine hits, of interacting with people in a lovely way, or people being just genuinely, really happy to see me with their bread.
“I’m 56 years of age, I’m in good health, and I like work. I want to keep working, I’ve no plans to retire, but I want to do something that fulfils me, something that challenges me, stretches me, and takes me out of my comfort zone.”