Their daily bread

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This article was published 04/02/2018 (2828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Are you familiar with the old adage about the cobbler’s kids who have no shoes?

That’s the first thing that popped into our head when we learned about the baker’s wife who was forced to make do without bread.

Frieda Brandt and Andi Ingenfeld own the Crusty Bun Bakery & Cafe, a European-style establishment with two locations in Winnipeg.

On Christmas morning, Brandt was in the mood for some toast, but when she went looking for a couple slices of rye, there was nary a crumb to be found anywhere in the house.

“Ordinarily what we do is bring home whatever loaves don’t sell on a particular day, but I guess somebody forgot,” Brandt says, giving her husband a playful poke in the ribs.

“It wasn’t really my fault,” Ingenfeld says in his own defence. “The problem was, we were so busy the week before Christmas we were literally selling out every day, and there was never anything left to take home. It all worked out in the end. I think I ended up making some oatmeal instead.”

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Ingenfeld grew up in Germany, in a village near the Dutch border. Brandt was born a few hundred kilometres away, in a small town close to Hannover. The pair met in 1997, when they were working in Kumamoto, Japan — Brandt as a translator for the mayor’s office and Ingenfeld as a baker, a profession he fell in love with at age 14, when he began helping out at his uncle’s bakery.

‘People are so friendly here, so open andhelpful. I don’t thinkwe could have chosena better communityto put down roots’– Andi Ingenfeld

One of Brandt’s duties was hosting monthly get-togethers for transplanted Europeans who wanted to practise speaking Japanese. One evening, Ingenfeld attended a session to see what it was all about.

“To be completely honest, no, we didn’t get along at first, not at all,” Ingenfeld says, when asked if sparks flew the moment the pair set eyes on one another. “But because there were maybe five Germans in all of Kumamoto, we eventually ended up getting together for a couple beers after work, and that, how you say, was that.”

In 1999, Ingenfeld and Brandt returned to Germany, where Ingenfeld had accepted a production manager’s position at a large bakery run by a friend. After a while, though, he realized that position, which he now refers to as a “glorified babysitter,” wasn’t his bread and butter.

“I love working with my hands — that’s why I became a baker in the first place — but there, I was mostly involved with staffing, and making sure the place ran efficiently,” he says. “I ended up staying on for six years, but as time went by, I became more and more convinced what I really wanted was a place of my own, somewhere.”

Ingenfeld grins when asked how much he knew about Manitoba in 2005 when he and Brandt began discussing whether this part of the world might be the “somewhere” they were looking for after reading about the province’s nominee program for skilled workers.

“A friend of mine is a hockey fanatic and when he heard we were travelling to Winnipeg to look at an available bakery an hour out of town, he said, ‘Oh, Winnipeg, that used to be the home of the Jets.’ But other from that, no, we didn’t know a thing.”

Brandt and Ingenfeld arrived in Winnipeg in October 2005, checking into a bed-and-breakfast in Charleswood run by a woman of German descent. On their second day here, they rented a car and drove to Carman to check out the for-sale bakery. Underwhelmed, they returned to the B&B, only to have their host tell them they should set their sights on Winnipeg instead.

That day, she set up an interview for them with a friend of hers who runs a downtown catering company, noting he would be a good sounding board for the type of operation they had in mind.

The following afternoon, Brandt and Ingenfeld spent 30 minutes discussing their plans with Dave Bergmann, of Bergmann’s on Lombard. Ten days later, when they were shopping at Polo Park hours before their flight back to Germany, they received a call from a person to whom Bergmann had given their contact information. The question on his mind: would they be interested in running a bakery at a seniors’ residence he owned and managed?

“We went back to Germany, got our papers in order, quit our jobs and informed our families we were moving to Canada,” says Brandt, mentioning her mother wasn’t “too happy” with the news at first, but has since come around. “We returned six months later and started working at the Dakota House in April 2006. “

The couple’s primary duty there was preparing food for residents, but they also willingly accepted outside orders. It didn’t take long for word to get out there was a certified German master baker in town.

Soon, lengthy queues were a common occurrence, which explains why — when they eventually opened a place of their own three years later at 1026 St. Mary’s Rd. — they barely had to advertise, thanks to the steady clientele they built up during their time at the assisted living centre. (About Crusty Bun, the name they chose for their biz: Brandt says it was a running joke at Dakota House for regulars to say, “Hey, nice buns today” to her hubby, so, in the end, they decided to go with the cheeky moniker.)

The Crusty Bun opened in March 2009 as a three-person operation (they’re now up to 34 staff) offering preservative-and additive-free bread, buns, pretzels, soups and pre-made sandwiches as well as a mix of German pastries such as croissants and hazelnut twirls. What they didn’t offer — and still don’t — was muffins and doughnuts.

“We would get people coming in for the first time, asking what kind of bakery doesn’t have cinnamon buns,” Brandt says with a chuckle. “We do make jambusters — they’re a traditional, New Year’s Eve treat back home, and we have them here year-round — as well as apple fritters, but about the only non-German products we do are hotdog and hamburger buns.

“Because we use the same, slow, multi-day fermentation method for those as we do for our bread, they have a bit different taste to them than what Manitobans are accustomed to.”

Note she said Manitobans: on a routine basis, Brandt and Ingenfeld greet customers from the Winkler-Morden area, as well as Steinbach, Altona and the Interlake. That’s the primary reason why they took a call from Cam Miller in December 2016, when the longtime owner of Miller’s Meats approached them with a proposition.

Miller, whose parents opened the first Miller’s Meats in 1971, was considering opening a fourth Winnipeg outlet in a strip mall at 925 Headmaster Row. Already a fan of the Crusty Bun, he thought an adjacent bakery would complement his operation perfectly.

“At the time, we were actually thinking of expanding our original store, because we were so maxed out space-wise, trying to keep up with demand,” Ingenfeld says. “So when Cam called us, we thought maybe by opening up in the north part of the city, it would take some of the pressure off this location, which it has. Traffic at the St. Mary’s store has gone down about 10 per cent since we opened there last summer, which has made things much more manageable.”

Although Ingenfeld went into his chosen field largely because he wanted to have the freedom to travel at a moment’s notice — “When I started, there was a shortage of bakers all over the world, and I thought being able to get a job practically anywhere would be the greatest thing.” — Winnipeg definitely feels like home, he says.

“People are so friendly here, so open and helpful. I don’t think we could have chosen a better community to put down roots,” he says.

“Now that we’re Winnipeggers, we bristle along with everybody else when people back home say things like, ‘You live in Winnipeg? Isn’t that some backwater in the middle of nowhere?’ ”

Brandt pipes in. “What I answer is, there are so many nice things about Winnipeg that I don’t even know where to start. I talk about the wide-open spaces, the parks, the amazing restaurant scene… I mean, it’s beautiful, we love it and it definitely works for us.”

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric businesses and restaurants.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca