“Will you hold the line there, Aoife?” says Orla Gowen, on the phone from her Cloghane bakery on the Dingle peninsula. “I just have to take something out of the oven.” Interrupted phone conversations are par for the course when speaking to a busy baker. In addition to running the bakery, Gowen opened Bácús cafe on Green Street in Dingle last June.
The cafe is pastel pink on the outside with a navy blue door, behind which lies a bread-lover’s paradise. Freshly-baked breads are brought in daily from Cloghane, including soft yet crusty plaited loves (€2.40) dotted with poppy or sesame seeds, wholemeal spelt soda bread (€4) and fat multiseed loaves (€3).
Baking for the day can start at 2am or, in the summer months, midnight, with sleep a luxury in Gowen’s life. “Because of the limitations of space in our Cloghane bakery, we have to be really organised about how we mange the baking. Luckily, I’m a very organised person,” she says.
Skills she gleaned over many years working in conference management are now applied in the bakery. The transition to baking, however, really began after Gowen and her husband decided they needed more space at home.
In 2001, Gowen went back to work as a conference manager in Dublin after the birth of her fourth child. Juggling parenting and a demanding job soon proved unsustainable, however, so she took a year off. She and her husband Neil, an artist, began to plan to build an extension onto their house in Dublin but then they realised what their family needed was more external space, not internal space. They had been holidaying for years in Brandon, Co Kerry, so they decided to move there.
After completing a professional bread-making course at the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2003, Gowen began to bake in a converted garage at their Brandon home. She then sold her handcrafted bread at farmers’ markets in Dingle, Listowel and Tralee.
Demand meant she quickly outgrew her space so, with the support of Comharchumann Forbartha an Leith Triúigh and Údarás na Gaeltachta, she converted a premises in Cloghane village, shared with Siopa an Phobail, into a bakery in 2009.
Bácús bakery supplies restaurants, cafes and a few shops around the Dingle peninsula, such as Bean and Out of the Blue, both in Dingle, and Ballygarry House Hotel and the Bookshelf Coffee House in Tralee.
“Word of mouth has been really incredible for us,” says Gowen. “Chefs move around constantly and every time a chef has moved I’ve picked up a new client.”
When a premises became available in Dingle, Gowen enlisted her sister, Muirín Gowen, to run operations for her there and the cafe opened earlier this year.
Gowen has been working on her new-found love of sourdough bread, taking courses with the respected Joe Fitzmaurice at Riot Rye Bakery and Bread School in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary.
“The brilliant thing about sourdough is its long fermentation,” Gowen explains. “Loaves take eight or nine hours to prove, which takes the pressure off the oven and the baker a little bit.”
That’s good news for her Dingle customers, who can buy her loaves of sourdough, plain or seeded (€3 each) and rye sourdough (€3) in the cafe.
There are also sweet treats, such as Bácús’s truly delightful cinnamon buns (€1.50) and petite brioche buns (€1.50) speckled with chocolate chips. The coffee (€3 for a milky coffee, €2 for filter), made with beans from local roasters Roast House in Tralee, is mellow and smooth, a good all-rounder.
The cafe sources local wherever it can, such as from butcher Jerry Kennedy, free-range chicken from Paudie and Kim O’Connell at Ballinskelligs, fruit and vegetables from Kingdom Fresh and O’Connor’s in Dingle, and dairy from Lee Strand in Tralee. These products go into their daily selection of sandwiches, salads and quiches made by Muirín and the team.
They bake a dry-cured ham and shred it up, to pair with Hegarty’s Farmhouse cheddar and their own cucumber pickle. Sandwiched between griddled slices of Bácús bloomer (€6.95), it’s perfection. Though sleep may be scarce for now, Gowen can rest easy knowing that her baked goods are making people happy.
