Rolling Dough into a Paycheck

Rolling Dough Into a Paycheck

The Bread Project opens doors to employment

By Rachel Trachten

 

 

Rebeca Rangel often noticed a delicious aroma of baking bread or sometimes a whiff of chocolate in the air outside her Central Berkeley home. Following the scent, she came to a sign that read “The Bread Project” painted in large letters over a University Avenue doorway. She received a warm welcome and soon joined a dozen other students in the Bread Project’s free five-week program.

“I love to bake for my family,” says Rangel, a young mother who had emigrated from Mexico City and was having trouble finding a job, held back by her lack of work experience and struggles with English fluency. She had been trying to sell her cakes to friends but never imagined that the scent of baking bread would lead her to a breakthrough. What she found at the nonprofit Bread Project was a training program geared toward lifting employment barriers for immigrants, refugees, low-income residents, and people re-entering the community after being incarcerated.

 

Left: Trainee Molly Pham takes pride in her knife skills as she prepares cherry tomatoes. Right: Rebeca Rangel (left) is an immigrant from Mexico City who has found employment and new friends thanks to the Bread Project. Here she is with co-trainees (left to right)  Dakarai Bailey, Mebrhit Gebreaman, and Olena Kucherenko. (Photo courtesy of the Bread Project)

 

“Everybody over there is so kind and ready to teach you many things, like how to make the dough, how to bake some brioche,” Rangel says. “It was a great opportunity for me to take that training.”

Studying under French-born chef Alain Delangle (former owner of Le Charm Bistro in San Francisco and La Bedaine in Berkeley), Rangel’s group learned knife skills and kitchen safety along with breads, pastries, basic sauces, and eggs.

“I want to share my knowledge of cooking with the ones who need it most… teaching them how to make bread so they can find employment,” says Delangle, who joined the Bread Project as Chef Instructor in 2023.

Each day during the training, the group prepares a lunch that they eat together. Bread Project Executive Director Usha Gongal says that such sharing adds value to the program. “The students learn about the others’ experience, culture, and food.”

 

 

English language learners like Rebeca Rangel get help from translation apps or words printed on food photos. For an Algerian immigrant, Chef Delangle translated classes into French.

It’s only fitting that the Bread Project was co-founded by a refugee. Lucie Buchbinder was an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis when she was 14 thanks to the British Kindertransport. She later moved to San Francisco, where she became an advocate for low-income people and joined forces with Susan Phillips, a social worker specializing in affordable housing. The duo needed employment options for low-income clients and sought help from the San Francisco Baking Institute, which agreed to provide training along with a space and equipment at cost. The Bread Project incorporated as a 501(c)(3) public benefit nonprofit in December 2000 and later moved to the East Bay. Approximately 2,200 people have completed the program.

The Bread Project continues to leverage collaborations with other nonprofits. For instance, many of the ingredients used in the kitchen are donated by the Alameda County Food Bank through the Berkeley Food Network. Participants who arrive needing housing are connected with Berkeley’s Dorothy Day House.

Central to the Bread Project’s success is a flexible, accommodating approach to participants’ life circumstances. If someone has to drop out mid-training, they can resume during another session. When Chef Delangle learned that a 19-year-old student was leaving early each day to pick up his younger siblings from school, Bread Project staff tracked down a nighttime security guard job that would free that student to fulfill his daytime family duties. And when one formerly incarcerated graduate struggling with life outside of prison admitted to Chef Delangle that he thought reimprisonment might be preferable, Delangle helped him see how freedom was a better way to meet life’s challenges.

Employment services manager Rebecca Solomon helps participants build job readiness and financial literacy skills, setting up mock interviews and developing relationships with employment partners like Semifreddi’s, Whole Foods, and Safeway. She encourages participants to stay connected for a year after graduating, so she can help them refine their resumes and cover letters. Solomon’s work with the Bread Project has helped the program attain not just an 80–85 percent job placement rate, but also an 80–85 percent job retention rate.

The mixing of immigrants and formerly incarcerated individuals is an approach that Director Gongal is sometimes asked about. She says, “Having a diverse group of students from different backgrounds is always good. In our classes, people from the two groups bond with each other and they learn from each other.”

 

 

An immigrant herself, Gongal, while still in her native Nepal, founded an organization dedicated to bringing more “green” practices into Nepalese clothing manufacturing. When she came to the Bay Area, she signed up with the Bread Project, completed the training in 2013, and was eventually asked to stay on as an instructor before working her way up to a leadership position.

Another successful graduate is Algerian immigrant Wafa Aouadj, who gained focus through La Cocina’s incubator program and then came to the Bread Project for more skills development. She describes how Chef Gram Gould (Delangle’s predecessor) helped her revise a puff pastry recipe that had worked perfectly in Algeria, but not in San Francisco. The trick was to understand how butter produced in different regions can vary in its liquid content. She now owns Kayma Algerian Eatery in San Francisco with her husband.

“Once you finish the program, you stay in touch,” she says. “The door is always open.”

The Bread Project does more than train students and advise graduates. The kitchen prepares food at cost for Project Open Hand—a local nonprofit that helps feed unhoused or food-insecure locals—and they also help local businesses that need to rent kitchen space. Squabisch pretzel company owner Uli Elser has relied on the Bread Project for backup space as well as advice. “I had some specific questions on equipment or dough, and [Chef Gould] was quite helpful,” says Elser.

Rebeca Rangel, the woman who followed her nose to the Bread Project, found employment doing food prep at Whole Foods. She left that job when the schedule conflicted with her childcare needs, but a friend from the Bread Project told her about a training opportunity at 1951 Coffee, where Rangel is now a barista. She hopes to own a café or bakery someday, but for now she’s content and grateful for her experience at the Bread Project.

“Sometimes when I got there, I was a little bit stressed or sad, and they made me feel much better,” she says. “That’s why I talk about them like family, because they helped me to learn new things. They lifted my spirits.” ♦

breadproject.org

 

Rachel Trachten writes about food, farms, and gardens. Find her stories at clippings.me/users/rachel_trachten.

 

 

Chef Alain’s Brioche

During the five-week Bread Project training, Chef Alain Delangle teaches a total of 35 recipes. He starts with muffins, scones, pizza dough, and focaccia, then moves on to brioche and puff pastry, and finally teaches the more complex items like croissants, baguettes, and sourdough. 

Makes four 5¾-x-3¼-inch loaves | Prep time: 20 minutes + next day | Cook time: 25 minutes

Tools & Equipment:

• Stand mixer with hook attachment
• Measuring cup for liquids
• Scale
• Plastic scraper
• Loaf pans/brioche mold

For the dough

• 6 eggs
• 100 milliliters milk
• 98 grams sugar
• 5 grams salt
• 14 grams dried yeast
• 482 grams bread flour (plus more for dusting the table)
• 311 grams unsalted butter (soft)

For the glaze

• 1 egg yolk
• 30 milliliters milk
• Pearl sugar

Add eggs, milk, sugar, and salt into the mixer bowl, then place the bowl into a warm water bath until ingredients are lukewarm (100–110°F). Add the dry yeast.

Put the bowl into place on the stand mixer and add the flour. Mix on a low speed for a few minutes. Add the soft butter to the bowl and mix for a few minutes more.

Pour the dough onto a flour-dusted table. (Stainless steel, butcher block, or marble countertops work well, but try to avoid tile.) Work the dough by stretching it out, then folding it back over itself and repeating the stretching and folding until the dough is shining and less sticky. Do not add extra flour.

Put the dough back into the mixing bowl and cover it. Let it ferment by sitting at room temperature for approximately 2 hours. When the dough rises to three times its original volume, push it down and refrigerate it overnight.

The next day, divide the dough evenly into 4 rectangular cuboids. Divide each cuboid into three balls rolled in your hand. You will have a total of 12 balls.

Prepare four 5¾-x-3¼-inch pan loaves, using either nonstick pans or pans lined with parchment paper. Place 3 dough balls into each pan and allow the dough to ferment by sitting at room temperature for 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

To make the egg wash, whisk egg yolk and milk in equal parts. Brush the top of each loaf with egg wash and sprinkle with pearl sugar.

Bake loaves for 25 minutes in the preheated oven.