New York has $40 cheese pizza and a $28 corn dog, but are we ready for a $60 loaf of bread?
The answer would seem to be yes. Rye bakery opened last week at 285 Lafayette Street with $60 loaves of rye bread coming out of the oven. On two visits, I watched curious customers snatch up loaf after loaf.
Rye’s the work of Austrian-born owner Martin Auer. The clean-lined, 3,000 square-foot storefront could be mistaken for a modern furniture showroom. Instead, it’s a bakery that takes breadmaking to a new level of artisanal craftsmanship — and time-consuming patience.
Auer’s hand-shaped, round and low-rise 3.3-pound loaf is neither a publicity stunt nor another exercise in culinary conspicuous-consumption. Rather, it’s proof that while we don’t live by bread alone, life’s better when the bread’s great.
At first glance, the flat-topped loaf resembles a holiday pie, its unscored crust a mound of mottled brown and white.
The bread is made from nothing but salt, water and imported organic rye flour grown in what Auer calls “ancestral soil.” Unlike sourdough products at other high-end Big Apple bakeries such as Breads Bakery and Ole & Steen, there are no sugar, seeds or spices.
The only other “ingredient,” as Auer calls it, is time. He should know as the scion of an Austrian family that’s been baking acclaimed loaves for four generations.
Each loaf is naturally fermented for 24 hours before it’s baked, yielding a flavor complexion that’s slightly nutty, slightly malty and almost-but-not-quite sweet.
The sourdough bread is moist on the palate when it comes out of the oven, so it “rests” on wooden racks for at least eight hours before sale.
“Otherwise it’s a challenge to slice it,” said Tim Auer, Martin’s son, who runs the business with him. It will stay fresh at home for six days, he said.
The crust is firm but not crunchy. It’s chewy beneath the surface — a quality I found appealing but which some tasters in our office called “gummy.” It’s a matter of taste but nobody can deny the care and attention that went into it.
If you take the plunge on a whole loaf, ask them to slice it first. “You need a really good bread knife which not everyone has,” Tim Auer said with a chuckle.
The Auers know that $60 is a heavy lift. So they offer it in quarter- and half-loaf sizes for $15 or $30. Customers can also sample the bread by ordering a single slice topped with a choice of fourteen sweet or savory toppings, priced from $6 for butter and chives to $14 for “roe on rye.”
“It’s the playful part of our menu,” Tim said. “We want to show what’s possible with rye.”
One enchanting option is liptauer ($8), a creamy Austrian cheese spread tinted with paprika and studded with chives.
I enjoyed peanut butter and jelly ($6) as well, even after Auer told me the P.B. is Skippy — my least favorite brand. It somehow works well paired with Staud’s jam, a Viennese brand. (Tim said that after we discussed it, they decided to include the exact source of each item on the menu.)
But how about pastrami? We’re in New York, after all.
“We’re thinking about it,” Tim said with a “wry” chuckle.
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