Earth to Table Every Day

There are a few dishes that simply can’t come off Bread Bar’s menu or “there would be a community mutiny,” write Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann in their latest cookbook, Earth to Table Every Day: Cooking with Good Ingredients Through the Seasons. You can count the bread pudding (delectably stuffed with day-old croissants, broken cookies and brownie trim), the arugula and fennel salad and the apple bacon pizza among them.

Nine years after the first Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm was published, a lot has changed for Crump and Schormann, who now run two Bread Bar restaurants, in Hamilton and Guelph, and have plans for a third. “Our first book was more about the idea of eating local and all of its trials and tribulations,” Crump says. “We did not have a clear sense of our cuisine back then.”

For Schormann, a classically trained pastry chef, the second book came easily. Because so many customers were already asking for recipes, they were already written down. “It felt good to put them all in a book as a reference… and offer an opportunity to make them at home.”

Crump and Schormann, trained and experienced in kitchens all over the world, including The Fat Duck and Chez Panisse, began their local food journey that led to Bread Bar a decade ago, while working at the Ancaster Mill. “We had long wanted to provide a dining experience that would illustrate the journey of food from farm to restaurant,” they write. “As chefs tend to do during punishing restaurant hours, we fantasize about opening our own place: Crumb wanted to open a pizzeria; Bettina, a bakery. Push led to shove, then to a leap and — with some outside encouragement — Bread Bar was born.”

In 2010, the restaurant opened, but Crump also acquired farmland, which now sits at six acres and is planted with a variety of produce for use in the restaurants. As the community around the restaurant grew, Crump and Schormann realized a second cookbook was in order and enlisted members of the community to act as recipe testers. Their core base is reliable, but has strong opinions.

“As much as we want to challenge our customers with change, they ultimately tell us what they want and we are okay with that,” Schormann explains. “We then fight back by not having tomatoes on the menu in the fall and winter and taking Brussels sprouts off the menu in the spring and summer.” Customers now get it and start looking forward to the change of seasons.

Perennial favourites available at the restaurant (and now in the cookbook) include apple bacon pizza, which has been the restaurant’s No. 1 selling pie for eight years running; Schormann’s all-time favourite, buttermilk fried chicken, which Crump jokes is the reason he gets out of bed on Fridays; and General Tso’s fried cauliflower, a great vegetarian option. When it comes to sweets, the book delivers with blueberry scones, apple cider muffins and cheesecake — simple sounding, perhaps, but perfected by Schormann for more than a decade.

Earth to Table: Bread Bar
105 Gordon St., Guelph, Ont.
guelph.breadbar.ca | 519.767.2999 | @breadbar_guelph

258 Locke St., S., Hamilton, Ont.
hamilton.breadbar.ca | 905.522.2999 | @breadbar_hamilton