Real Story真故事23-面包师的故事

Life is full of surprises, passion, beliefs and all the down time we experience. It seems we’re tested by the society all the time. It’s becoming more important to find a moment for ourselves. This is Real Story, we’re on! 生活充满我们经历着的惊奇，热情，信仰与所有低迷的时期。似乎社会总在考验我们。找寻属于自己的那一时刻变得愈加重要。这里是真故事，我们准备好了！

关于cake的俚语有a piece of cake小事一桩，You can’t have the cake and eat it too.鱼和熊掌不可兼得；以及文中提及的 icing on the cake-icing是指蛋糕上面的奶油装饰，此俚语指“锦上添花”之意。本文主要讲述新西兰面包师Dean Brettschneider 在新加坡(Singapore)开面包店的故事和经历，以及美国移民的一家故事，以及早期维多利亚时代英国面包师的故事，系统要求无法上传全部文本，大家可以访问老师 xin lang 微。博即可：疯狂的80猴。任何问题，包括文本内容及老师口语课的信息请私聊吧。

今日词汇：

 baker面包师

bakery面包店，糕点制品

flour面粉

pastry糕点

refreshing提神的; 使人耳目一新的

accessible and affordable容易得到的及便宜的

pizzeria披萨店

 I’m Frank X for Real Story. Stories today are about some bakers and cakes, that’s right, the bakers who bake cakes, cookies, bread, and so on. They somehow live in everybody’s life. Who says he will never have a piece of bread in life. Isn’t it nice to have a slice of pizza sometimes? Anyway, every child loves birthday cakes, all over the whole world.

In the first hour of opening, bakery shops fill with customers who buy fresh bread and traditional ‘breakfast’ baked goods. While the breakfast bakery items are being bought, the bakers begin making and packing the lunchtime food. Just before 12pm, the kitchen is rushing to prepare for the lunchtime. Hygiene is of crucial importance in a kitchen, so dishes and utensils are also cleaned.

Depending on the size of the bakery, the afternoon is spent preparing ingredients and products for the next day, freezing selected stock and cleaning the kitchen – again! Smaller bakeries close their doors at 2.30pm with most staff leaving by 3pm. Larger bakeries can remain open for quite a bit longer, with staff working until after 7pm.

Bakery employees normally get two 15 minutes breaks during the day, plus an hour for lunch. Bakers also have to be fit and strong – those heavy bags of flour don’t lift themselves! And don’t be fooled in to thinking bakers get to work in a nice warm, oven-heated environment all day. They have to often go to the freezers to store products or get ingredients – this might be refreshing in the summer, but it’s not so nice on a cold winter’s day! As you can see, bakery life is a hard, but it’s interesting, it’s sociable and, let’s not forget, you get to work with delicious bakery cakes, pastries and bread. What a tasty job! Listen to a baker talking about her day and her shop….(baker’s day)

In different parts of the world, people like different bakery, for example, pizza is more popular in Europe and America than in Asia. If you hear a person say: “I’ve got a sweet tooth.”, he means he loves eating sweet things, for example:John eats candy all the time. He must have a sweet tooth. Another similar idiom is “icing on the cake”- You use the expression the icing on the cake to refer to something good which is added to an already good thing or situation. Example:It is great to see my team in the final. And now I've got tickets to watch the match in the stadium - this is the icing on the cake! Next is a conversation between a mother and her 33-year-old daughter, talking about “icing on the cake”:Blanka Alvarez immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1972.She came with her husband and son, while she was pregnant with her daughter-the one she’s talking with now, Connie. When Blanka first arrived in the US., she worked as a gardener and cleaner.(Icing on the cake)

New Zealand baker Dean Brettschneider had no doubt from the beginning that his bakery in Singapore, Baker & Cook, would succeed. Since 2012, Baker & Cook founder Dean Brettschneider has rapidly opened seven bakeries, two pizzerias and a cooking school in Singapore.

His confidence was based not just on the taste of the variety of baked goods it offered - from Australian and German bread to Italian and English bread - but also on his carefully crafted reputation as a "global baker".

Without pride in his voice, the 47-year-old says: "I was really confident about success because I had a brand behind Baker & Cook and that is Global Baker Dean Brettschneider."Although he never owned a global bakery chain before Baker & Cook - he had one store in New Zealand, in the early 1990s and helped to set up the popular Baker & Spice chain in Shanghai in the late 2000s - he was sure his business in Singapore would take off, based on his brand and business skills.

"It's not just about doing great breads," he says. "There's lots of great stuff around the world and in Singapore. But we've got the healthy mix of what makes it accessible and affordable every day - it's what you need to be in the neighbourhood."

And he has proved he is worth his money.Since 2012, he has opened seven Baker & Cook stores, two Plank pizzerias and a culinary school in mostly residential neighbourhoods where customers cannot get enough of his best-selling carrot cake - baked goods filled with nuts and grains that appeal to his Singapore customers who want healthier breakfast options and treats.

Before that he lives in Denmark with his Danish wife, Vibeke, 46, who works in insurance, and he has a son, Jason, 20, from an earlier marriage in New Zealand.It was Mr Brettschneider's first trip to Singapore and he was visiting a friend, a fellow cycling enthusiast who lived in the Hillcrest area.The lack of a bakery-cafe in the neighbourhood left him hungry for a bite after the ride and also hungry to open a shop there.

The casual business idea grew on him as he talked about it over dinner at a pizzeria in Hillcrest with his friend and another acquaintance, also a resident in the area; both of them supported his idea.

On their way home after dinner, they passed by an old furniture shop in Hillcrest Road and Mr Brettschneider told the other two, who work in shipping: "If you can get that corner shop, then why don't we put a bakery there?"Three months later, they took over the furniture shop and made it the flagship of Baker & Cook.

He grew up in a farming community in New Zealand - his father worked in the meat business, his mother in machinery and his older brother is a butcher - and cooking was a part of family life, which he enjoyed.

He was the only male student in home economics class in school and when he was offered a baking apprenticeship, he grabbed the chance.

Later, he travelled to Europe to hone his baking skills, doing internships in the kitchens of various establishments, from supermarkets to hotels to artisan bakeries, for three years.

Eager to put what he learnt into practice, he returned to New Zealand and ran a bakery in Dunedin for three years before taking up a job offer with a baking ingredient company as a manager overseeing areas such as product development, customer service and sales.

He says: "Even then, I was known in the industry for being a bit of a maverick and the company brought me in to raise the profile of its business."

It was there that he learnt about the importance of marketing and authored his first cookbook, The New Zealand Baker (2000), which opened the doors for him to star in food programmes on a New Zealand television channel and publish 11 other cookbooks.On whether he met any failures along the way, his answer is a quick "No". It is a question others have asked him before.

"What's your biggest failure - making a cake or something, some people ask. I say I have no idea. Even failed cakes are not failures to me, they're just experiences.""People would sometimes say, 'That Dean guy is a bit arrogant' and maybe in my younger days, yes. But I think some people confuse arrogance with confidence," he says plainly. "I think I'm very confident and that's partly the reason for my success."

That self-belief helped him "box on", he says, when it took almost six months for the first Baker & Cook to open because of delays caused by the extensive renovation required. When it finally opened, the overwhelming response from customers was a surprise."As soon as we made something, we were selling out of it," he says, adding that things sometimes got so busy he would sleep on the floor of the office rather than commute to and from work.

He says candidly: "Are we looking at putting Baker & Cook in other IHG hotels around the world? Yes. So it was important for me to establish it here where we have control, where we have a presence and where we have the relationships."

As the business grew, he gained new partners. He remains the majority shareholder and he has three other partners - two investment companies, Commonwealth Capital from Singapore and Richardson Capital from the United Kingdom, and Mr Anders Boye, who works in a ship broking firm and helped to open Baker & Cook in the beginning.

The group managing director of Commonwealth Capital, Mr Andrew Kwan, 50, says he was introduced to Mr Brettschneider through a mutual friend and he was impressed with how the baker was "a total professional".

The growing number of stores has made it difficult for Mr Brettschneider to bake much, except when he teaches at the baking and cooking school he opened in April in Greendale Avenue.

Still, he continues to help in the bakery when he can. He is so committed to the business and his team that he cancelled his 47th birthday celebrations in Denmark in April to help out at the newly opened school.

"The school was going so well and my team was under a lot of pressure and so was I, so I decided to cancel my flight home," he says. "It's not right if I just walked out of there because I have a birthday celebration and things were booked."

Does he ever take a day off?"No. I can say that today, speaking to you, is a day off, but my mind's constantly moving, thinking," he says.When he is less busy, which is on weekends when he has no business meetings lined up, he tries to visit the stores in person - "yes, still working" - as well as hit the gym or go for a run.

That’s New Zealand baker Dean Brettschneider’s story. Next is something about the Victorian bakers:There were no female master bakers in 1900 at that time.The Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.See how the bakers of that time worked with limited ingredients to bake.(Victorian bakers)

Here are some interesting facts: Bread was first baked over 3000 years ago and it was in Qing Dynasty that bread and cakes first appeared in China and became popular among Chinese people in 1970s.Anyway You are listening to Real Story, I’m Frank, a professional English teacher. Let me hear your voice, you can leave your comments and questions here if you like my show, and you can subscribe for more updates, my class information and answers to your questions. That’s for today’s show, see you soon.

  #Written and edited文字作者：Frank X老师，转载请注明出处;

#voice and tech-work:语音录制：Frank X;

 #Background music背景音乐: Chad Mitchell Trio - One Day When I Was Lost (Easter Morn)

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