57-year-old Daniel Jordà looks tired: he’s been working for a while bread since quarter to two in the morningwhen the world is protected by sheets.
At that time, in the Barcelona workshop Creative Breads, ran the bread called Ancien, a sourdough bagel, with a very high hydration of 90 to 95%. It’s impossible to knead a liquid, but if you’re looking for lightness this is what you should do. That “real bread” I’ll eat later, Ancien, has the texture of air.
I see the tiredness in the eyes and in the eyes. floury beard and a gentle and calm mouth. Yes, she’s smiling, but it’s lunchtime: “My lunch is dinner. I sleep between five and six in the afternoon.”
This is not the usual program – with just one more hour of sleep, although daily life is still very difficult – but the one the ‘panettones’ forced him to do. This is currently slave of Italian origin dessertHe says he is “addicted”.
This 2022, his candied fruit classic won a driving award: The best ‘panettone’ in Spain the result is dream and happiness, “the award saved our lives.” And it’s about to take off because it plans to bake in December. Between 6,000 and 8,000 units!
Daniel breaks seasonality and sells “about 200 per month” all year round, even in the summer. He specialized in this architecture ten years ago.
Recognition a rback to dessert after “batacazos”: her youngest daughter Rita has already recovered from cancer; increase in the cost of energy and raw materials (furnaces at full speed); Farewell to the pandemic, which halved the team from 14 to 7, and the expertise that made it famous in the industry: Design of bold breads for restaurants with top chefs among the customers. The catalog was as comprehensive as possible, success was ruined: boxes, shipments, customization. If it continued, it would “sink”.
When I ask if creativity has worn him out, someone who studied Fine Arts and added color to his bakery career replied: “You are always creative, yes or yes. But a lot has happened.”
Daniel didn’t want to cook a ‘baguette’, but the locals wanted it, and you should listen to the neighborhood. Because Panes Creativos is not a ’boutique’ bakery on Paseo de Gràcia or Eixample, it is an establishment next to Meridiana, in the “modest, working-class neighborhood” of Plaza de Garrigó. “I can’t be tough. Because the neighborhood still doesn’t need it,” he explains honestly. The locals ask for ‘baguettes’. He also gives them seed bread and Japanese buns called Hokkaido.
Because here? “Because that’s what I could afford, and because it’s not far from home.” The house is the Trinitat quarter at the entrance to Barcelona, even further away from the gastro circus. Forn de la Trinitate, On the way to the centennial, the bakery of the parents and now the brothers, is where it began.
“The idea was for people to come here. you know that movie Kevin Costner The Field of Dreams, where he built a baseball field and walked around saying, ‘People will come’? I see him tired and I don’t know if it’s because he got up early or because he’s still waiting for the ‘gourmet shop’. People will come. Panettone is a catapult.
The process is slow: three days of patience before taking it to the store. Complexity, maximum. “I fight for the dome”: the hemisphere does not collapse. “Panettone is the Sistine Chapel of the furnace. Sometimes I picture myself inside, looking up.”
I cut it open, amazed: I see Daniel in a honeycomb. Filled with fat (“800 grams of butter per kilo of flour”), it is fresh, steamy and soft on the palate. Daniel: People will come.