Prepare happiness at Ben’s Bread

Hello Wednesday morning and welcome to day four of Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, where we spend time with Ben Rosario, the owner of Ben’s Bread.

Every weekday, the Thread and Visit Tuscaloosa will highlight the city’s most in-demand restaurants and the hands that prepare our best dishes in features published each morning.

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A few months after opening his brick-and-mortar bakery on Loop Road, Ben Rosario finds himself far from where he started and a good distance from where he wants to go, too.

The British Sri Lankan baker moved to Tuscaloosa from the UK with his wife Sarah seven years ago, and initially taught piano at the University of Alabama’s Community Music School.

In doing so, Rosario began taking steps to turn his growing love for breaking sourdough bread into something bigger and sold it at the Tuscaloosa Rivermarket for the first time in 2020.

“The first market I did, I made 18 loaves of bread and it almost killed me,” he said. “When I was finished, I would have liked to make over 60 loaves of bread, 100 bagels and 50 croissants, working from home, all ready for Saturday morning.”

As his popularity in the market grew, his business – simply called Ben’s Bread – grew too large to cook on a large scale in his own home, but Rosario lacked the capital to buy a building and get to work. Instead, he launched a successful online crowdfunding campaign and raised enough money to lease the former Kozy’s building at 3510 Loop Road.

Ben’s Bread Bakery officially opened there earlier this year, and Rosario said he is tripling his previous production, but wants to continue to increase the amount of baked goods he creates and sells without sacrificing quality.

He said he considered changing his brand name several times and began using the bakery build to accomplish this, but ultimately decided to stick with what worked.

“I would have imagined Wild Arcadian Bakery, which on paper I thought was great,” Rosario said. “But every time I tried to tell someone, I cringed a little bit. I felt pretentious and I couldn’t say it and own it. All my existing customers love Ben’s Bread and we crowdfunded it that way, so here we are.”

Rosario said his interest in baking was sparked almost a decade ago, while he was still living in the UK and watching the hugely popular series Great British Bake Off.

Rosario’s sourdough bread, bagels, bomboloni donuts and more, however, are much simpler than the show’s iconic Showstopper spectaculars.

“Bread, on the whole, is as simple as possible, with fewer ingredients. Bread is just flour, water and salt. You hear that all the time with bread, n ‘is this not ?” » said Rosario. “But I don’t put sugar, oil, or butter in anything except things like croissants and donuts. Otherwise it’s a really old-fashioned way of making bread, I guess the bread was made hundreds of years ago.

Baking is often presented as a science: adding the right ingredients in the right portions and cooking them exactly according to the recipe will yield consistent results.

But Rosario said that even after nearly a decade as a baker, his experience is still far less clinical than all that.

“There’s a bit of magic in it and every time I cook I think, ‘Is this going to work?’ Is this going to work?’” Rosario said.

None of its baked goods contain commercial yeast, it’s just pure sourdough and wild yeast, and variations in temperature and humidity and the ratio of ingredients all help give each batch of bread a unique taste.

“It’s like chaos theory and a small change anywhere can have a bigger impact further down the road and especially for something like a croissant, which takes all week to prepare, I can make a mistake on Monday and not finding out until Saturday,” Rosario said. ” But the excitement of pulling things out of the oven bed at four in the morning and seeing how it all turned out, the magic of that never goes away.

The bakery also now has an expanding coffeeshop, where Ben’s partner Nanda serves English breakfast teas, filter coffee and more, with plans to expand into the espresso when possible.

After seven years in Alabama, Rosario said he is still struck by the sense of community here. People’s pre-orders kept it afloat and virtually anxiety-free during the worst of the pandemic at the Rivermarket. The Kickstarter raised more than $30,000 to open the bakery, where support continues to pour in – even the cups available in the cafe are donated.

“A lot of that is due to people’s incredible level of engagement and trust in me to make them something they want to eat,” Rosario said. “There’s a huge amount of enthusiasm that I’m very grateful for, and when I get an email saying how much someone enjoyed something I made, I appreciate that kind of feedback because the Half the time I like it, but sometimes I spend a lot of time worrying that what I’m doing isn’t good.”

But it’s good, of course — especially Rosario’s 18-layer croissants, which he laminates by hand in a process that takes several days to prepare and bake.

Quiet days at the bakery, which opens Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings, can still fill Rosario with existential dread, but he said every week since opening has been a success.

Looking ahead, Rosario said he plans to also open Wednesday, expand both the food and drink menu and continue to improve the community side of Ben’s Bread, such as possibly adding a public garden and a children’s play structure to become a unique place. stop by for “organic, healthy, family-friendly stuff.”

“The community and customer support really keeps my enthusiasm going. The fact that people want to reserve their orders and pay in advance, they want to arrive early, line up at the door to get the croissants as soon as they come out for the first time – their comments are the best motivator, it just gives me energy,” he said. “It gives me so much motivation to do more things, interesting things, better things.”

Rosario said he was also motivated by gratitude: Without those years of community support, he never would have been able to turn his hobby into what it has become today.

“This would have been impossible to achieve without this support, which is why I feel completely indebted to everyone,” he said. “I feel very grateful all the time for all the help and support, because none of this would have been possible otherwise, none of this. I had no money to do this, so people did it, people made it possible and continue to support it and it’s been like that since the beginning, I couldn’t be more grateful.

Ben’s Bread opens at 9 a.m. at 3510 Loop Road every Thursday, Friday and Saturday to fulfill pre-orders and walk-in sales.

During Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, Rosario’s is your choice for its new Danish pastry — a savory option with sautéed mushrooms and Gruyere in the center, or a sweet offering with berries and custard.

“If you like simple, organic food, prepared with love and as fresh as possible, come try it,” Rosario said.

This profile is the fourth in a series as part of Visit Tuscaloosa’s Restaurant Week 2024, presented this year by UA Online.

Stay tuned to the Tuscaloosa Thread for more features every morning this week. We’ll be back Wednesday morning with Ben Rosario at Ben’s Bread about his new bakery on Loop Road.