Kristina Ganea: With sourdough, ‘the more you fail, the more you learn’

Kristina Ganea moved with her family from Denmark to Japan in 2018. It wasn’t long until baking called out to her and she started BRØD, a 100% sourdough bakery. The bakery uses Nordic methods to create healthy and nutritious bread, and uses local and organic ingredients whenever possible. BRØD is committed to sustainable and eco-friendly methods.

1. When did you first start baking? We moved to Japan five years ago, and I started baking at a serious level four years ago.

2. Why did you choose sourdough? My daughter had some digestive issues from eating the bread from the supermarket here. I started doing some research, fearing she might have a gluten allergy, and figured out sourdough is quite healthy because it can be made without using any commercially produced items — just water, flour, salt and that’s it. And she was OK!

3. What should you pair sourdough with? In Denmark, the most typical combination would be a slice of sourdough bread with butter, ham and cheese for breakfast or lunch. However, I really love it slightly toasted with a luscious layer of butter and a sprinkle of flaky sea salt. This way, you can really perceive the taste of the bread without too many distractions.

4. How did you come to choose the location in Hiroo? I like that area, and we were familiar with it — my daughter’s school is nearby. Bakers work crazy hours so it had to be something close but also accessible for my daughter. When this soba shop came on the market, the simplicity of its style fit with what we wanted to do. It’s a good combination of Japanese and Scandinavian style. We wanted to merge those two things in one shop. It's a little back-alley, which I think is cozy.

5. What did you do before making sourdough? Right before we moved to Japan, I was a fund manager selector, so I was heading the selection team in Denmark's largest bank.

6. That’s quite a different job from what you have now. Have you found any similarities? Absolutely. When making investments you have to make a lot of assumptions, handle a lot of variables and be able to estimate how things will develop. Baking sourdough is similar because there are a lot of variables. We don’t use many mechanical or chemical elements that can be easily measured. It’s more up to nature. Every batch of flour is different, and your water might vary a few degrees each day ... you can do minimal calculations, but it’s a lot of estimates and guessing. Also, finance is heavily research based, and finding out how to bake in Japan took a lot of research as well.

7. When did you begin your first starter? It was around February 2019. I don’t have a precise day, but I probably should have recorded it! I never knew that my first starter would be the soul of my bakery.

8. How long does it typically take from starter to loaf? For our process, on the first day you feed the starter with fresh flour and water. The next day you mix the dough, and the day after you bake the bread. So it takes three days.

9. How often do you experiment with different recipes? Not enough! We all love what we do, and we want to experiment because we want to make it better and try new things. Every summer we run an experimentation week where we shut down the shop and just experiment for five straight days. But we do experiment constantly because we continuously develop our recipes.

10. Why is sourdough so dark in color? It kind of looks burned! I suppose you can bake sourdough lighter if you want to, but at our bakery we believe that caramelizing the crust adds flavor, which enhances the quality of our product. It may have a touch of bitterness, but it’s not burned. We stop the baking process before it gets to that bitter, black stage. In Nordic baking, the breads usually have a high water content so to keep the crust crispy for longer, you have to bake it a bit darker.

11. How do you stay low waste? First off, we try not to overproduce. In the beginning we operated on orders only, but business-wise it doesn’t make much sense — we can’t develop our business if we don’t have a storefront. We also try to repurpose any leftover bread into croutons, bread crisps or rusks.

12. Do you ever buy bread at the supermarket for yourself? Yes, I do! I also buy bread from other bakeries, it’s good to try something new or different. I’ll sometimes try Japanese bread with fillings, like ichijiku kurumi (fig and walnut). That was a new flavor combination, so I absolutely wanted to try it.

13. Do you ever do any events? Yeah, we try to participate when the Danish Embassy has something going on. We participate with other Danish companies or companies related to Danish things. We also did pop-ups before, and we are at the Aoyama Farmers Market almost every Saturday. We love that place.

14. How do you stay healthy with all this bread? I guess it’s a lot of work as well. On the busy days, we don’t have time to eat, basically. When you wake up at 4 a.m. I don’t think you feel much like breakfast, so I have a cup of coffee. Sometimes that cup of coffee has to last me until 3 p.m. before I have time to sit down for another cup of coffee or eat lunch. And when I’m not at the bakery, I try to stay as active as possible.

15. When you’re not baking, what else do you like to do? On Sundays, if I have enough time and I can postpone the administration, I like going hiking. Actually, I love it. I like Mount Mitake especially — there are a lot of trails there, and I haven’t explored them all yet.

16. If you could prepare one Japanese food as well as you do sourdough, what would it be? That’s a difficult one. Probably oyakodon (chicken and egg on rice). I can never get that right, it’s either too runny or too solid or the onions are not soft enough or not sweet enough. My family loves oyakodon — just not when I make it!

17. If you had to eat just one thing forever, what would it be? One thing forever? Bread. I'm sorry, it sounds cheesy, but it has so many different flavors and textures. I don't find it boring. The variation between different kinds of breads is so huge.

18. Have you ever had a failed sourdough experiment? So many! I find spelt difficult to work with. I’ve failed with it more times than I’ve succeeded. Maybe I’m trying to achieve the impossible, because we are trying to achieve the same texture and structure of our wheat dough with a 90% spelt dough. We fail often, but we keep at it. I think failure is more a lesson than a “failure” as people perceive it. The more you fail, the more you learn ... at least that’s what I think.

19. Do you have any books that you can recommend for budding sourdough bakers? I don’t know if Claus Meyer’s “Meyers Bageskole” is translated into English, but there is also a good book by Ken Forkish called “Flour Water Salt Yeast.” I think it's a very easy one to start baking with to understand what’s going on. And he has good explanatory chapters at the beginning of the book.

20. You say that you have to keep your starter with you all the time. What's the farthest distance it's traveled? Probably from Japan to Denmark, almost on the opposite side of the globe. We took it on vacation with us because we were away for three weeks. In the fridge, it might survive, but I wasn't sure if it would, and my family in Denmark asked, “Can you bake for us?” So I thought, “I’ll take it with me and feed it, and bake something for them.” It survived the airplane trip.

For more information, visit brod.jp.