From Croissants to Community with Centerline™ by Hobart Mixers

For Sean Hannam, the path to becoming a baker was a culmination of experiences — traveling, working front and back of the house in fine dining and enrolling in culinary school for a formal education, to name a few.

“I'd been cooking for about 10 years before I even got into the baking side. I started cooking when I was living in Australia. And then I came back to Canada and I was serving fine dining and doing proper wine service before going to The Stratford Chef School where I learned pastry work and how to run a business,” he explained.

After culinary school, he spent time in the Niagara Escarpment, Ontario’s wine country, where he started making sourdough bread — a skill he put to work later at a sourdough production bakery in Stratford, Canada. It was his work at a hotel in the French Caribbean that set the groundwork for baking croissants.

Today, he is the director and owner of Artisan Bakery in London, Ontario, Canada, which he opened in 2021.

“I was actively looking for a space when I found Artisan Bakery. The owners were closing it down, but the space was already set up as a bakery, so it was a pretty easy walk into it for me,” said Hannam. “It’s a gorgeous space across from a farmer’s market and in a great neighborhood. It just made sense to make the move.”

Artisan Bakery has since become more than a brick-and-mortar location. It’s part of the community.

Keeping it local

According to Hannam, community is at the heart of what makes Artisan Bakery successful. Not only do regular customers support the bakery, but the bakery supports local vendors — from honey producers to flour mills and more.

“We've been able to really build a very strong community there, both with our staff and our customers. We know most people by name and make it a priority to work with local businesses,” explained Hannam. “We work directly with a local farm to get our milk. We work with local produce farmers, and we get a lot of our ingredients at the farmers’ markets. We are all passionate about quality and food and we support each other.”

The tight knit community and their support is also what has helped Hannam and his staff expand from breads, croissants and pastries to café offerings like quiche and Ham and Swiss Sandwiches with house made grainy mustard. They also started a Monday Pizza offering that they recently paired with a community social.

“We’ve got live music and we’ve got some local vendors,” said Hannam. “We had our first social in May and we had over 300 people show up.”

Artisan Bakery further supports the community with its Give a Loaf program. In addition to the bakery donating bread to those in need, customers can also help. For $2.50 CAD, they can purchase a loaf of bread that will be supplied to outreach programs to distribute to community kitchens. In the winter, Hamman estimates the bakery donates about 500 loaves a month.

A simple, seasonal philosophy

While community is the backbone of Artisan Bakery, the baked goods they produce keep customers coming back. Sourdough bread is available by pre-order to pick up Thursday to Sunday, with additional batches finding their way to the community outreach program and local markets. But according to Hannam, the croissant is “their driver.”

For both products, along with the Danishes, cookies, pastries and pizzas they bake, two things hold true: quality and simplicity.

“We pride ourselves on clean ingredients and doing things properly. We don’t take short cuts. A loaf of bread is flour, water and salt. It doesn't need to be anything more than that,” Hannam said. “Having the skill to create things from the simple ingredients is important to baking quality products.”

In addition to simple, quality ingredients, Hannam and his staff base their menu on seasonality according to what ingredients are available.

“We have our base products and then at least monthly we're changing up features as far as pastries or our feature loaf or sandwich. But then in the summer, things can change weekly. It’s whatever I come back from the farmers’ markets with basically,” explained Hannam.

Help from Centerline™ by Hobart

To ensure that the ingredients used at Artisan Bakery turn out as their recipes intend, Hannam and his staff need to have the right equipment — which starts with a dependable commercial dough mixer. Along with a Centerline by Hobart HMM20 20-quart mixer that’s been a staple in the kitchen, they also recently started using the new HMM30 30-quart mixer. This Centerline by Hobart mixer, like its 20-quart counterpart, offers the versatility to mix dough occasionally and is intended for limited batch use and under four hours of mixing daily. It can also be used for multiple applications, which is helpful at Artisan Bakery since they make a variety of baked goods. As a planetary mixer, it's built to handle everything from delicate meringue to heavier bread dough in the same bowl.

“How much we use the mixer changes day by day depending on what is in production. Cookies get made on certain days and cakes on others,” said Hannam. “We use it for meringue and even for mixing granola. It definitely gets a lot of use, but it’s only ever a few hours a day. That’s perfect for us because we’re not a super high-volume bakery.”

Consistency Built In: A digital timer for consistent dough

When asked what he likes best about the HMM30 mixer, Hannam said he appreciates the easy user interface and the built-in timer, along with the Last Time Remind feature. The digital timer can be set to minutes and seconds, while the Last Time Remind automatically recalls the last mixing time used, so it’s simple to gain consistency in recipes. That combination effectively turns the HMM30 into a programmable commercial mixer built for repeatable recipes, batch after batch.

“We use the timer and Last Time Remind mostly for our bread dough. We can set the mixer for whatever the recipe calls for,” he explained. “A lot of our bread recipes are the same, so if one batch was mixed for four minutes, the next is likely to also get mixed for four minutes. You don’t have to change the setting, which is nice.”

GearSafe Max™ Technology for easier operation

The GearSafe Max™ technology is another feature that Hamman likes and that makes it easy for staff to use. This technology protects the mixer from damage if a staff member accidently changes speeds during mixing and also incorporates overload protection.

“Between the controls and the other features, it is easy for staff to walk in and be able to use the mixer, which is good,” said Hamman. “And we’ve never had any problems with it. It always keeps up the way we need it to.”

Ready to bring that same consistency to your own kitchen? Explore the Centerline by Hobart 20-quart and 30-quart mixers to find the right commercial dough mixer for your bakery or café.

About the Author

Carolyn Bilger is the marketing director for Hobart – Food Preparation Products. She has been with Hobart since 2015 and sets the strategy for marketing and new product development for the full line of Hobart food preparation equipment. See all her blogs here.