It’s 4am on Middleton Road, and the front of the Heaton Park Shul is slowly revealing itself, though the sun is still at least an hour away. Opposite, there’s light and the sound of clattering trays coming from behind the plastic curtains at Manchester’s oldest kosher bakery.
While most of us sleep, or some of us are stumbling back from the pub, this lot have been up for a couple of hours already, their shifts starting around two every morning. They’re used to it of course. Few more so than Steve Kelly, head baker at State Fayre, who’s worked here for 42 years.
He’s among the long-serving bakers who worked for the Rosenfield family, the previous owners of the bakery, who made State Fayre’s name through generations and more than a hundred years of kosher baking - since opening in 1905 - flooding North Manchester and well beyond its huge Jewish community with bagels, challah and kichels, the sweet, sugar-coated biscuits traditionally served in synagogue after the shabbat service on a Saturday. Not to mention cheesecakes, muffins, savouries, barm cakes, anything you could imagine.
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Steve is wise and weathered, faded tattoos inked on his forearms. He’s patient with the endless questions about the complexities of kosher food. He’s ‘made in Salford’, born and raised, though he lives in Irlam now. He’s Church of England himself, though he’s worked in kosher bakeries for most of his professional life.
As the giant mixer - it really is, you could climb into it - works the dough for dozens of plaited challah loaves, he shows me a chart on the wall. Each batch mixed has to have a chunk pulled off it. In ancient times, these pieces of dough would go as a gift to the Jewish tribe who looked after the temple, but now the hunk of dough is placed in a divided tray, and each is blessed by the Rabbi, who comes in every day. Sometime multiple times a day.
Pete Rand, working opposite, though a fair bit younger than Steve, has been working here just about as long, and he and Steve have the kind of easy relationship worn into them by years together. Pete’s dad, who passed two years ago, worked here too, and for lots of the other Jewish bakeries in the city - MH, Jacobs, Bookbinders, owned by Elkie Brooks’s father.
His grandad worked for Jacobs too. Pete started coming in and helping out when he was about nine-years-old, scraping trays and cleaning, and then started properly when he left school. Pete’s daughter used to do the same, years ago, and he smiles at the memory of it. She was seven or eight, and would dip the chocolate cakes for him. He remembers the old State Fayre bakery too, on Empire Street behind Strangeways, where they’d make barm cakes and bread for the sandwich bars all across the city.
Another Rabbi arrives just as the sun is coming up. He’s brusque, and business-like. It’s his job to find out how many eggs are being used in the day’s baking, because he alone has to crack them all, no one else. It’s done over a mirror, 28 eggs at a time, to ensure there are no blood spots. If blood is found, it's deemed ‘asur m'derabonon’, forbidden by the rabbinic ordinance, and the egg is discarded.
The eggs are cracked after dark, and have to be used before dark the next evening, and there are so many to break, it’s generally counted in litres. But today it's between 700 and 800 eggs, with each and every one of them having to be checked. And this is without the matter of keeping dairy apart from meat, not to mention away from bread. Some loaves have to be made with apple juice instead of water -mezonot - so that, for convenience, ritual washing before eating isn't necessary. These are complexities unique to the kosher bakery.
Steve picks out pieces of dough from the mixer to see if it’s there yet, and pours in a little more water. The amount of time needed to mix and fold the dough has a lot of moving parts - humidity in the air, the time of year, the differences between batches of flour, which is strong Canadian and has in recent months gone up in price by 30%. Some batches take more water, some less. There’s no way of knowing if you’re on the right track other than touch and feel, and that only comes with experience.
There are no digital scales here either, just old fashioned weights and a balance scale. Steve still works in ounces, of course, and he weighs and separates the huge dough batches - one would fill a wheelbarrow - in no time at all, while someone else uses an ancient looking press to cut the separated dough into small two-ounce pieces, which are then fed through a roller ready to be plaited into challah. There’s an autonomous rhythm to it.
When the plaiting begins, it’s hypnotising, the ends of six pieces pressed together, and then the lengths folded one over the other. They’ll plait around 250 loaves over the next hour. While we're on numbers, the amount of challah produced each week is tricky to quantify, as there are a few different varieties, and demand can vary. But bagels? That's easy enough. It can be between 15,000 and 18,000 every week.
Each process segues into another, so some of these loaves will be proved and baked, others will be frozen for a couple of days and baked later in the week, so that they’re constantly ahead of themselves. Often these timetables will have to be in lockstep with the Jewish festivals, when production needs to either ramp up or slow down accordingly.
Some of the rolls made today will be headed for Parklife next week. They’ll be frozen, and then thawed and baked for Eat New York, which will be using them for its hotdogs. Some will also be heading to the Ed Sheeran gig at the Etihad. I see the challah, and small challah buns being made, as well as hard and soft bagels, but there are dark and rye breads too, sandwich loaves and everything in between stacked on trolleys in every spare inch of the bakery, and spilling outside to the delivery vans.
Paul, 45, and with startlingly pale eyes, is a delivery driver for State Fayre, but was gradually brought in to the baking side of the business, and now has what is surely one of the most important jobs - the bagel making. Steve and the others taught him how to mix the dough, richer than the challah, and to know just when it’s ready.
It then goes upstairs in a rickety old service lift to the second floor, where he feeds the dough in huge lengths, as thick as your arm, into the bagel press, which cuts and rolls them, before shooting them out onto a revolving platter. The cutter is playing up, though.
There was talk of getting something 3D printed to replace the part inside the old machine, but it’s not materialised yet. After that, the bagels are boiled in a slightly terrifying stainless steel vat, before being dipped through sesame, poppy seeds or kept plain, and baked until golden. You’ve not truly lived until you’ve tasted one fresh from these ovens.
While some see the night work as cumbersome, Paul likes it. After he finishes at State Fayre, he delivers for a fish and chip shop for an hour or so, and then he can get back home to look after his grandchildren and walk the dog. When the football is on, sometimes he’ll catch the first half, but then it’s off to bed so he can be up at two. And then it’s rinse, and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
Krystian, from Poland (‘in the middle, a small village between Poznań and Łódź’), has worked here for about 12 years, a new boy by comparison. He learned how to make bread the old way with natural leavens, sourdough style. His wife works in the front of the shop, and they have a young daughter. He’s a colossus, with a weightlifter’s physique and a dense beard like a circus strongman.
He carries huge pails of water from the sink, one in each hand, lifts and pours the contents into the mixers like it’s nothing at all. He and the other three bakers from Poland are quiet, methodical. Steve goes around the group - Daniel is from near Krakow, another, I don’t catch his name, is from Łódź. “Tomas, where are you from in Poland?” he shouts over. “2012,” Tomas shouts back, and everyone falls about. To be fair, it is noisy. “You’ve had ’ard life, kid,” Steve cracks back.
Things calm for a bit around 7am. Breakfast is perhaps a toasted bagel with some cheese melted on it, or a chocolate cherry muffin still warm from the tray, eaten standing up or sitting on a crate outside with a cigarette.
But while Steve and Pete remember the old family, and the old bakery on Empire Street, things move on. 35-year-old Isaac Stefansky bought the bakery with his business partner Jonathan Fagleman in 2017 from Robert Rosenfield, and though he’s not the new boss, to some he probably still feels a bit like it. The bakery had been in the Rosenfeld family since the early 1900s, after they arrived in the UK from Poland. Through generations it eventually became the largest and oldest kosher bakery in Manchester.
Isaac - Yitzy to those who know him - always had his eye on the place, though. When he started high school just a few doors down at Etz Chaim, he would be the one to sneak out at lunchtime - strictly forbidden, of course - and return to school with pastries which he’d then sell on to his classmates. The stakes were also rather higher, what with his father being a Rabbi.
Rabbi Stefansky, originally from Canada, via London and Israel, lost his father in a plane crash when he was 11. His mother, Isaac’s paternal grandmother, then remarried to one of the biggest kosher meat producers in the UK, so food is in the Stefansky lineage. Isaac’s father is currently the Rabbi of North Salford’s Vine Street Shul, and prior to that was a Rabbi in Whitefield, though as a young man he was all set to be a doctor. The religious calling was perhaps on the cards for Isaac at one stage, but instead he began working for an international kosher food distributor.
“School was a few doors away, so I would walk past the bakery every day. And then I’d sneak out of school at lunchtime, buy some sausage rolls and sell them back to schoolmates, so I suppose I started working for State Fayre when I was about 13 years old,” he says in the upstairs office. On the wall is a bank of CCTV monitors, fitted due to a spate of break ins, always on Saturdays when they are closed for the sabbath.
He was not a baker, yet he was deciding to take on one of the most storied in the city. “It was a bit daunting, but what’s life without jumping into things?” he says. “Robert Rosenfield, after he left, he stayed around for a few months, to help us out. Whatever we needed, he was always there. But hats off to all of our staff who stayed on too. Having these people who have all these years of experience here, they were essentially who trained us up. They keep it going. They’re the most important part of the business, and we’re lucky to have them.”
“Bakeries have always amazed me,” he goes on. “How things can turn from flour into so many other things. In the kitchen, chicken just becomes cooked chicken, meat just becomes cooked meat, a salad is just chopped. I love the way that with just a handful of ingredients you’ve got bread, you’ve got cakes.”
Last year, the bakery decided to take on stricter supervision from the Machzikei Hadas, a Hasidic synagogue, as well as the slightly more moderate Manchester Beth Din, meaning that the bakery’s products can be consumed by the Orthodox community, which is growing rapidly. “It’s not that our Jewish community is getting more orthodox, it’s that a lot more Orthodox people are moving here, and we can now cater for them, and it helps us expand the business,” Isaac says. "It just allows more people to buy from us."
Is it complicated? "Very," he says without a beat. "There's a lot to think about. So many aspects to the business, so many laws. At the end of the day, we have to operate on trust, however strict kosher certification we have. It's about trust. People rely on us, and our good faith."
He’s also just taken on a new bakery, beneath the 3 Bakers restaurant on Bury New Road, meaning output can increase too, with all the sweet items soon to be made there, freeing up space for more bread-making in the current bakery. Isaac is particularly excited about the Hanukkah doughnuts, which they’ll now have more room to make. “We make the best doughnuts, honestly. By a long shot,” he says.
Baking is hard, sometimes monotonous work, and there’s not a baker who feels like they’ve not sacrificed something for their trade. Steve has certainly sacrificed more than he’s happy with. He says he feels like he missed his children growing up.
“It’s hard. You have to work your life around it. I didn’t see my kids growing up,” he says. “It’s a great regret of mine. I was never there. But I see more of my grandchildren now. The hours are not as long as they used to be.”
Depending which shift he was on, Steve’s wife would wait up, and have dinner ready for when he got back at two in the morning. He regrets asking that of her too. He’s missed weddings, 21st birthdays, anniversary parties, and because he wasn't there, she missed them as well. “I know quite a lot of marriages that have been broken up over places like this, over the hours. The job doesn’t just affect you, it affects your family too. People don’t realise that.”
It may serve us all well to remember that sometimes. Something as fundamental to everyone as bread, whatever the religion, requires people getting up when most of us are going to bed to make it. And make sacrifices to do so. Throw in laws as ancient as those observed here, and something seeming as simple as bringing together water, yeast, flour and salt isn't so simple after all.
But still, they get up every day, and they do it again. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
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