Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris MacLeod.
Hi Chris, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Laune Bread is co-owned by Chris MacLeod and Tiff Singh. Chris is responding to this, so all “I-statements” are from Chris.
Laune Bread (pronounced lao-nuh) began in 2015 after I moved to Minneapolis from the west coast in pursuit of local grains. Originally, it was a challenge finding our local grain economy. It’s quite small and has improved drastically in the last 8 years, but I connected with Askegaard Organic Farm in Moorhead and Lonesome Stone Milling in Lone Rock, WI. It was an arduous process of getting local flour, driving four hours to pack my car with as much as it could handle. I baked under a bike delivery subscription model (like a CSA, but bread) for about two years, closed up shop, and moved to Switzerland to bake there. I eventually returned and restarted the business with a former colleague and friend, Tiff Singh, in the summer of 2019.
We rented space at Baker’s Field Flour and Bread for 2.5 years until we opened our retail shop on East Lake Street in January 2022. We believe in creating healthy bread with local ingredients, inspired by our baking history and travels, so our bakery is a cross of German-European influence and west coast American. Our bread has more than 60% whole grain flour, is sourdough, and is 97.5% Minnesota sourced. I like to think of our bread as hearty, whole-grainy but with a soft, custardy crumb packed with flavor and nutrition. Across the board, more than 75% of our ingredients budget remains in the upper midwest. Our pastries are 50% whole grain and are adaptations of foods we’ve baked or eaten in Europe and across America. Classic croissants, a puff pastry roll filled with curried lentils and veggies, Bienenstich – “bee sting,” a Minnesota version of an Almond Croissant, substituting almonds with locally grown gold flax. Although we have retail store hours, we also use a subscription model or baking to order as a way to reduce waste and honor our work and the work of our farmers. Bakeries are notorious for waste, and we are trying to flip that system by baking less and promoting subscriptions and pre-sales.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest challenge is maintaining consistency with local, fresh milled flour. When you purchase commodity flour, it’s the same every time. Mills blend different wheat varieties to create flour with the same parameters, so consistency is very easy to obtain. When you use local mills and flours, you must learn how each variety of wheat behaves, from mixing, fermentation tolerance, water absorption, and ultimately texture and taste. The challenge changes each year when a harvest runs out, and we have to switch wheat varieties for our products, or the new wheat harvest comes in but has different traits due to the growing conditions – soil, water, seasons, planting, and harvesting times. It means we must be adaptable, flexible, fluid, and most importantly, observant of how our doughs look and feel. Our bread recipes change all the time to meet the same results.
The biggest challenge in this regard is changing our more delicate pastry recipes. We are currently on our last 50lb bag of Ingmar wheat, which has been a successful grain for making croissants. We will probably need to spend a month testing new recipes to determine which alternate wheat can achieve the same results. Teaching intuition is hard. It simply takes time. Growing our business from just Tiff and myself to having four employees means constantly asking questions and explaining the reasoning. “How does the dough feel?” is the daily dialogue. Besides that, we feel like we are in a special place. We have an extremely wonderful staff, and the people who frequent our new shop, or have been eating our bread since 2015, are incredibly kind and generous.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
What sets us apart from others is how we try to incorporate locally. It’s not just vegetables but the breadbasket we are trying to create an identity in a product that has been commodified and made anonymous. We know and visit our grain farmers and our millers. We are working on bridging this gap with our bread community.
We are supporting our farmers by trying to include their whole crop rotation in our products, not just wheat but rye, golden flax, millet, barley, and buckwheat. Baking is incredibly time-consuming and laborious; most products take three days to make. Visiting our farmers, we see, to an extent, all the work they put into growing organic grains through regenerative practices. So by employing a subscription system and baking less than demand, we are working to honor our and our farmers’ work and bodies.
But it has to be more than that. Our bread and pastries taste so good because of the quality of our ingredients, mainly our grains. It’s a simple idea lost through commodification—fresh, local, organic flour. And when you use whole grains (our bread is 60% + whole grain), you reduce waste there, but you incorporate more flavor and nutrition, which is healthy and wholesome. Then throw in sourdough as your leavening agent and additional flavor, and the bread becomes more digestible, easier for your gut, and offers nutrients that the bacteria unlock in grains. Making bread with whole grains, sourdough, and a lot of water makes bread that lasts a week unless you eat it up in a day.
It is really exciting for us to find ways to recreate bread and pastries showcasing local ingredients. One product I am especially proud of is our Twice Baked Croissant – a Minnesota version of the Almond Croissant. Instead of making frangipane, or almond cream, we make ‘flaxi pane,’ a golden flax meal cream, with gold flax grown by Mark Askegaard. Our subscription is a very flexible and easy-to-use system. We home deliver in 55406/55407 and have various pickup locations around town. You can skip weeks, add extra goodies to your order, cancel at your convenience, and it recurs on a 4-loaf cycle. We offer two main subscriptions, Bread Bread (an everyday loaf) and Baker’s Whim (changes weekly, examples include Alpenlaib: german spiced bread, Apple Flax, Multiseed, Squash Sour), and have many other pieces of bread and pastries as add-ons or one time purchases. We offer sandwiches! All vegetarian (limited vegan available, too) with local produce.
We currently have three to choose from:
> pretzel sandwich with house mustard, butter, gouda, radishes & lettuce
> simit sandwich with house romesco, prairie breeze cheddar, roasted carrots & lettuce
> focaccia sandwich with herby quark & cream cheese, cucumber, radish, beets, carrots, greens, preserved lemon
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love seasons. I grew up in California and lived mostly on the west coast and Germany until I moved here, and I love the cold, heat, and in-between. The access to local parks is wonderful. I enjoy our food scene and the variety of bakeries people have to choose from. I wish that more bakeries used the local offerings of flours and thought about the positive impact that would have on our local farmers and millers. I hate summer construction; it drives me insane. You have the slow season in winter with snow and the slow season in summer with construction everywhere.
Pricing:
- Bread Bread $6.75 subscription / $7.25 retail
- Croissant $4
- Rhubarb Turnover $4.25
- Twice Baked Croissant $4.75
- Sandwiches $7.50-11
Contact Info:
- Website: www.launebread.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/launebread/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/launebread
