Conquered Bread gets creative
The thing about black sesame tomato bread, Alex Brown explained, is that you can’t find it just anywhere.
“To start with, I mill my own flour,” he said. “I mill some durum wheat that I scored in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and some spelt that was grown in western Mass. Then I use tomatoes from a farm up here in Warner called Kearsarge Gore, and they sell at the Concord Farmers Market. Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty friendly with the farmers there, so they gave me a bunch of really fresh tomatoes that couldn’t be sold — just ugly stuff that had been nicked and bumped. So I threw all of those on my grill with a wood fire and I fire-roasted them and simmered them down into a puree, so they were nice and smooth. That ended up being something like 25 percent of the hydration in this bread, and it was finished off with black sesame. I do a lot of that kind of stuff.”
Brown is the baker and owner of Conquered Bread, a from-home bakery in Concord. He said that his bakery started as a hobby that got out of control.
“I’ve been baking bread as a hobby for several years even before Covid,” he said. “But it certainly accelerated during the pandemic, and I got in the habit of bringing bread to friends and coworkers.” Brown said that although people encouraged him to start selling his bread, he wasn’t interested in selling his bread as much as he was in baking it. “But then, a couple of years ago, a colleague suggested the idea of doing like a CSA, where customers would buy a share, kind of a subscription, and pick up what I baked.”
“My original idea was to bake 12 loaves of bread a week and sell it to friends and neighbors. I have pickups and you can sign up for them and pay for the month in advance. But by October of 2024 I had sold out all of my spots through the following February, and at that point I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really sort of onto something here.’ So I bought an oven that’s small by brick and mortar bakery standards but can fit nine to 12 loaves at a time. So now I bake probably close to something like 90 loaves a week”
Brown said most of his bread is fairly conventional, but working at the scale he does gives him some freedom for experimentation.
“I’ve got a few sort of standard rotating loaves and then at least one week of every month,” he said, “sometimes two, I do a special, um, something that’s like baker’s choice — a surprise bread that I develop. I try to be pretty creative. I usually develop recipes around local ingredients that are available”
One of the breads that Brown has been working on for the fall, for instance, he said, will probably combine olives and fresh herbs.
“One of the farms that I’m in touch with grew a bunch of caraway and they’re going to give me some fresh caraway — the herb part of it, not the seed — and so I was thinking about doing a buckwheat hearth bread with caraway. I’ve been sitting on the idea of doing something like a Scandinavian rye. Because rye flour doesn’t have much gluten, in Europe it comes in a square loaf. It’s baked like that because it can’t sit up and support itself because there’s no gluten. So it has to be baked in a pan. And Scandinavian rye is usually baked with seeds and some other whole grains. They’re dense and super-nutritious.”
“The last thing that I’ve been thinking of,” Brown said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to squeeze it in this season, but I’ve made a Normandy bread, Pom Normand, which is a French apple bread from the Normandy region. Once we get apples on the trees, that will be sort of a no-brainer.”
Conquered Bread
Conquered Bread (19 Laurel St., Concord, conqueredbread.com) is sold by subscription and can also be purchased at the Concord Food Co-op (24 S. Main St., 225-6840, concordfoodcoop.com) and Revelstoke Coffee (100 N. Main St., Concord, 715-5821, revelstokecoffee.com).
Featured photo: Roasted Tomato Durum. Photo by Conquered Bread.
