Danny's Bakery

Danny was twelve when he first proved a dough. His mother kept a tin of sourdough starter on the windowsill in their Bateman's Bay kitchen, and every Saturday morning he would drag a chair to the bench, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and feed it the same way she had shown him. Half a cup of flour, half a cup of water, a long quiet wait. He has not stopped baking since.

By the late 1960s he was running the bread oven at his uncle's place on the coast. By the mid 70s he was teaching apprentices. By 1989 he had moved his young family to Canberra, found a shopfront at 6 Iluka Street in Narrabundah, and put his mother's starter back on a windowsill. The sign out front went up that winter. It has not come down.

Where it started

Anne and Danny met at the Sunday markets in 1965. She was selling pickles for her mother. He was selling the bread he had baked that morning, still warm under a tea towel, and he priced it forty cents a loaf because he did not yet know what bread was supposed to cost. She bought one. They were married eleven months later.

He worked four bakeries in nine years up and down the south coast. He learned rye from a Hungarian baker in Wollongong. He learned pies from his father-in-law, who had run the kiosk at Batemans Bay races since the 50s. He learned which flour to buy from which mill, which mornings to slow the proof, which afternoons the wind off the ocean meant you had to start an hour earlier or lose the rise.

Why Iluka Street

The shop on Iluka had been a milk bar that closed in 1986. The roof leaked. The oven they inherited had a cracked stone deck. The first batch of sourdough came out flatter than a doormat and Danny gave the lot away to a neighbour's chooks. He fixed the oven himself over a long weekend in October and tried again the Monday after.

The second batch was the one. Anne ran the counter that morning. By eleven the shelf was empty. By noon the regulars were already asking what time tomorrow's loaves would be out. Forty years later, that question has not really changed.

The bench, three generations deep

Jesse, Danny's eldest, has been beside his father since he was fifteen and bakes through the night so the morning bread is ready for slicing. Russell runs the slicer and the wholesale deliveries. Katie runs the counter and the wholesale book, the way her mother did. Justin and Travis, the grandsons, started at fourteen sweeping flour off the floor; one now runs the pies and pastry, the other qualified as a master baker at eighteen. Wayne, Katie's husband, slices and drives on Saturdays and fixes everything no one else has time for.

Six days a week, four o'clock start. Same recipe Danny's mother gave him. Same starter on the same windowsill.