If at an early hour of a Thursday or Friday you happen to walk east along 28th Street and cross Guilford Avenue – if you’ve been living right and your timing is good — you might catch Russell Trimmer putting the finishing touches on his classic rye at Motzi Bread.

You can watch him take a scoring razor to the top of each of 12 loaves just before sliding them into an oven set at 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

The corner shop, a former pharmacy and liquor store, has a large window because, when he designed his bakery, Trimmer wanted lots of natural light pouring into his workspace.

He wasn’t thinking about putting on a show for passersby. But the result is a kind of public performance venue, a window into a baker’s laboratory.

I say laboratory because Trimmer, who bakes only with freshly-milled whole grain flour, talks about his craft in a way akin to a scientist describing chemical reactions.

Here, for instance, is how he explains the role of porridge in his sesame rye loaf:

“I make rye porridge by cracking and toasting rye berries and then scalding them with boiling water. The resulting porridge gets incorporated into the dough toward the end of the mix. The toasting amplifies the flavor of the rye so that, even though it’s only about 15% of the dough, the nutty flavor of the rye is very pronounced. The presence of the porridge in the dough also means the loaf keeps for a few days longer.”

Here’s how he explains the need for ovens that allow him to set different temperatures below and above the loaves:

“Whole grain flour requires more water to hydrate the dough because the bran [the outer layer of a wheat kernel] absorbs several times the amount of water as the starch. So, a fully baked loaf needs more heat to drive out that moisture and fully bake it. The bottom heat transferring directly from the stone hearth is a much more efficient way to do this than top heat, which is likely to burn it before it’s fully baked through.”

Classic rye loaves ready to come out of Motzi Bread's 500-degree oven. (Dan Rodricks)

Classic rye loaves ready to come out of Motzi Bread’s 500-degree oven. (Dan Rodricks)

A Favorite Source

Trimmer’s knowledge of baking, his devotion to the science of it, goes back to the source – a Southern Maryland farm where grain was not a cover crop, but something to be harvested and turned into food.

It was at Next Step Farm, in Newburg along the Potomac River in Charles County, where Trimmer worked after college, developed a gastronomic appreciation for locally-grown grains and saw their potential as a sustainable cash crop for farmers.

Instead of getting tilled back into the soil, Next Step harvested the grains, then milled and sold flour. It still does.

All these years later – after a stint in a bakery in Richmond, after coming to Baltimore to bake bread for Woodberry Kitchen, and after he and his wife, Maya Munoz, opened Motzi – Trimmer still uses flour from grains grown at Next Step Farm.

The sesame seed on his sesame rye comes from there, too.

He and his wife are doing what they set out to do – put down roots in an urban setting, make and sell nutritious bread from a neighborhood bakery and source all their ingredients from regional farmers. They get grain from farms in Pennsylvania and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. They spent $45,000 on regional grains last year.

Located on Guilford Avenue for the past five years, Motzi Bread has become a Charles Village fixture. (Dan Rodricks)

Located on Guilford Avenue for the last five years, Motzi Bread has become a Charles Village fixture. (Dan Rodricks)

700 Pounds of Grain

Trimmer, a 35-year-old Virginia native, bakes between 500 to 800 loaves a week, depending on the season – summer is slowest, late fall the busiest – plus 400 to 480 English muffins, 120 bialy, up to 400 croissants and danish, and 300 chocolate chip cookies.

That requires about 700 pounds of grain a week.

The work begins on Tuesday and grows more intense by the day on the way to baking loaves for sale at the bakery, at the Saturday farmer’s market in Waverly, at the Wine Source in Hampden and for the tables in a few restaurants.

NOTE TO PANIPHILES: Motzi Bread will be closed in August. Its last day is Saturday, August 2. It will reopen on Thursday, September 4.

Flour does not arrive as flour, it arrives as grain. In a small, windowless room in the rear of the bakery, Trimmer lifts and dumps a 50-pound sack of grain into Zentrofan, a German-made stone mill that gently grinds the grain, circulates air through the resulting flour and blows it even more gently into a cloth sack. The process takes a few hours.

The milling by stone, an ancient method, is what Trimmer wanted when he set out to establish his bakery.

The fresher the flour the better, and that’s critical, he says, for whole-grain flour.

Early on a Friday morning, Russell Trimmer mixes a batch of dough for weekend rye bread sales. (Dan Rodricks)

Early on a Friday morning, Russell Trimmer mixes a batch of dough for weekend rye bread sales. (Dan Rodricks)

Hooray for Whole Grains

Trimmer had no interest in baking with white flour.

“That would have been hard for me,” he says, “since I started on [Next Step Farm] and saw their whole process.”

He developed a deep appreciation for bread that could be more nutritious and still taste good. That was the ethic he developed at Next Step, took with him to Richmond and took eventually to Baltimore.

Trimmer believed that, even as people count carbs, they will buy bread that delivers on taste and nutrition. It seems to be working out for him and Munoz, who works the retail end of the business.

“I took a class in the fall with cereal scientists, a continuing education class for nutritionists,” he says, while mixing dough on a recent Friday at 6 am.

“One was talking about a study that was recently done on dietary-related causes of mortality around the world,” he explained. “Number one was sodium intake correlating with processed food. Number two was lack of whole grains . . .”

If you’re thinking “whole wheat bread,” what Motizi sells is not that.

I purchased the sesame rye a day after Trimmer baked it. It had a nice bite and rich, tangy flavor; it was moist but not soft. In my house, with three people in the kitchen, half of the loaf pretty much disappeared during breakfast.

As the oven heats, last night's loaves are set out on the counter. (Dan Rodricks)

As the oven heats, last night’s loaves are set out on the counter. (Dan Rodricks)

A Mild Tang

I asked Trimmer about his formula: Are all his breads on the tangy/sourdough side?

“We shoot for a mild tang to compliment the flavor of the grain,” he said. “Just like a little acid in cooking can bring out the flavor of a dish, the sourdough helps bring out the flavor of the grain. Our challah on Fridays is the only bread we make that isn’t sourdough.”

Timing is everything in comedy, love and baking. So Trimmer and Munoz are careful to only sell bread that has had time to set.

For a while, Motzi loaves were being sold too soon after coming from the oven; some customers found the bread soft in the slicing. Trimmer switched his schedule.

That business with the oven temperatures — having the bottom temperature a few degrees hotter than the top — is key to getting the moisture out of whole grain breads. Letting them cool on a rack is important, too.

“Much of the bread for Saturday now gets baked on Friday night,” Trimmer says.

“We try to give six to 10 hours between baking and sale for the larger loaves so the crumb [the inner part of a loaf] has time to set. Smaller things like bialy, English muffins and pastries come out of the oven throughout the morning. We also usually have baguettes coming out around noon on Saturdays.”

The bakery’s sign with its “pay-what-you-can” message. HaMotzi, by the way, is Hebrew for the blessing over bread. (Dan Rodricks)

He and his wife take Sundays and Mondays off. Then on Tuesday, it’s nose to the grindstone again. Speaking of which . . .

In reporting this story, I discovered, among many other things, the possible origin of that common expression: “Nose to the grindstone.”

According to Michael Pollan, author of popular books about food and nutrition, the phrase came from millers who were careful not to let grinding stones overheat and damage their flour.

“A scrupulous miller,” Pollan wrote, “leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. So the saying does not signify hard work, as much as attentiveness.”