Of all foods, artisanal bread has to be the most mysterious, not to mention the bakers who make it. As a clan, bakers are positively druidic - dressed in white and up before dawn to harness the invisible forces of yeast and humidity. Like Gollum, every baker has a "precious" in the form of a culture, called a starter or mother dough: dense live matter that keeps reproducing and forms the base of every piece of bread that comes out of an artisanal bakery.

THE BAKER:TREVOR DALY

THE BAKERY: Daly Bread, Worcester

THE CULTURE: Mama

Hang a right off the N1 and work your way into the foothills of the Hex River Mountains near Worcester, and with a little luck you'll come across Trevor Daly and his colleagues Bones and Arnold. Look past the shipping containers and the caravan, and what looks a little like a disused mine starts to take shape as a working bakery.

Daly's path to flour power is unusual: he studied marketing, backpacked for years, opened and ran an independent cinema for seven years with his twin brother Derek, then tried his hand at baking. When they sold their cinema's screening equipment, they divvied up the cash. Derek was able to go on holiday in Scotland, while Trevor's share went into buying the equipment he needed. With the endorsement of Cape Town's king-making marketmen, Justin Rhodes and Cameron Munro of the Neighbourgoods market in Cape Town, the rest is history.

"That first year it was cowboy baking - just me, the battery going out, baking in the dark through the night, I even had a close call with a fire."

While brother Derek collects the bread and functions as the public face of Daly Bread, selling it at the markets, Trevor prefers the recluse lifestyle in a trailer on a mountain with Bones and Arnold.

One of the few things they disagree on is music, a problem that was solved with headphones. Daly listens to his Lyonnaise ambient trance, while Bones and Arnold have a penchant for 50 Cent and Zimbabwean gospel.

"Good music is essential when you do the one in the morning to seven in the morning bake, watching the sun rise across the mountains."

Daly didn't study at chef school or apprentice himself to some mystic bread Buddha. His expertise is largely research-based and self-taught, having read some books (especially Chad Robertson's The Bread Builders) and, where possible, having visited some of his baking heroes for tips, advice and experience.

The rest is down to his boer maak 'n plan can-do attitude and exceptional oven, a massive rotational machine that he bought second-hand from Pick n Pay. Daly's bread is handmade, baked straight on the bricks of this wood-fired oven where his dough of pure mountain water, khoisan salt, stoneground flour and wild yeast starter combine to produce exceptional bread.

"I think cultures get a little bit hyped up. Some bakers keep them going for hundreds of years. Our starter is called 'the mama', which is what the Italians call it as well," says Daly.

"The most hectic thing that happened to my culture was it ended up in the bushes. We had a new cleaning lady who threw it out. I found out and had to scrape it off some sun-baked rocks. Fortunately it's fine."

Daly's signature bread is probably his ciabatta (pronounced kia-bata in Worcester), as that put him on the map. He tells us ciabatta means slipper in Italian and fetches his floury veldskoens and fluffy sheep slippers to illustrate the point. Perfecting the croissant is his next baking project, but Daly's got plenty on the go.

He now also supplies the Johannesburg version of the Neighbourgoods market, and is about to open a bakery close to the original Cape Town Neighbourgoods market.

The Hex River Valley spiritual HQ of Daly Bread will remain.

www.neighbourgoodsmarket.co.za

TREVOR DALY'S CIABATTA

Ingredients:

1kg bread flour

10g sachet instant yeast

20g (4 tsp) salt

750ml water (ice cold)

Method:

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl and gradually mix in the water, stirring with a strong spoon, then with wet hands, folding the dough in on itself until firm and smooth.

Cover with plastic and refrigerate overnight. You can keep the dough for 3 days before baking. There will be enough for 3 ciabatta loaves of 650g each, or use it for pizza, focaccia or even a baguette. Put the dough on a flour-dusted cloth, stretch and fold it to give it the desired shape and bake at high heat, preferably on a few firebrick tiles. The bread is cooked when it sounds hollow when tapped underneath and the kitchen smells awesome.

THE BAKER: JASON LILLEY

THE BAKERY: Jason, Bree Street, Cape Town

THE CULTURE: Henry

"Henry almost died." Jason Lilley is not talking about a dough-boy who fell in a tub of olives - he's referring to his longest-serving employee and the unsung star of the show: Henry, his six-year-old starter or culture.

With experience specialising in pastry at the Cellars-Hohenhort, Arabella-Sheraton Grand Hotel, working on the QE2 and a stint at Pezula in Knysna, Lilley's been around the block. He started getting into bread on the Garden Route, when he did a baking course under US baker Jeffrey Hamelman. Hamelman gave Lilley Henry.

When the chance came to move to Cape Town and open up a hole-in-the-wall bakery connected to Jardine restaurant, Lilley jumped. "I had to get out of Knysna. It's a one-horse town and the horse is dead," he says. "If you don't know your business, everyone else does."

Introducing Henry to city-slicker life took its toll (he was a country bumpkin used to sea breezes) and the culture, an unimpressive lumpy white paste not unlike wallpaper glue, fell seriously ill. Only an IV of filtered water and nutritious rye flour brought him back.

Henry survived and prospered. Jardine eventually closed but Lilley stayed on, taking over the building last year, giving the business his name and expanding the bakery. Today, the place pumps. So what's the secret?

"We just do things with pride, integrity and consistency. The flour is good, local, stoneground, organically grown and temperamental. The water is filtered.

"We do not use enzymes or dough enhancers. We try to make the best loaf we can. It's just flour, water, yeast, salt, Henry and love."

www.jasonbakery.com

JASON LILLEY'S 66% SOURDOUGH RYE BREAD

Starter:

250g stoneground pure rye flour

12.5g sourdough culture

6ml (1 slightly heaped tsp) fine salt

200ml filtered water

Final Dough:

215g stoneground white bread flour

165g stoneground pure rye flour

6.5g fresh yeast

6ml (1 slightly heaped tsp) fine salt

270ml filtered water

Method:

To make the starter, place the flour, culture and salt in a bowl and slowly mix in the water by hand until a firm, smooth dough has formed. Cover with plastic and allow to prove for 8-12 hours. Your starter is ready for use when it has risen and has a slight indent in the middle.

For the dough, place the flours, yeast, salt and 456g of the starter in a bowl, reserving 12.5g of the starter to use for the next loaf. Combine, slowly adding the water. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until firm and smooth. When tugged at, it should resist you.

Place in a mixing bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave in a place no warmer than 37°C for about 1 hour or until doubled in size. Knead into a ball and place in a round, floured rye basket big enough to take 1.2kg of dough. Allow to prove again for about 1 hour or until doubled in size. Place a baking stone (an unglazed ceramic tile) in your oven and preheat to 240°C. Place a roasting tray in the bottom of the oven. Turn the dough out onto a floured baker's peel (like a flat pizza shovel). Throw 2 blocks of ice into the oven tray to create steam, to moisten the oven for the bread. Score the dough and swiftly transfer from the peel to the tile. Throw a cup of water carefully into the oven tray to create more steam, essential for the expansion of the bread. Bake for 15 minutes, then open the oven door slightly and bake for a further 30 minutes. This will let moisture escape so the crust can form. Allow the loaf to cool completely once removed from the oven, as all the flavours are still changing and maturing. Only bad bread is eaten hot straight from the oven.

THE BAKER: MARKUS FÄRBINGER

THE BAKERY: île de païn, Knysna

THE CULTURE: MF 1700

Passion is not a favourite word of this Austrian master baker. "It sounds like something you regret the next day," he says. Färbinger dislikes what the word has come to represent - namely "being out of your mind and out of control, an abused catch-phrase for selling anything from cars to bread or yourself." The owner of Knysna's fabled île de païn bakery prefers to focus instead on "full intention, focus, immersion".

This could come across as the high-handed semantics of an ascetic and one too many evenings spent thinking about dough, but watch the DVDs of île de païn and you'll notice that calm intention to which Färbinger refers. His bakers and apprentices work through the early mornings in silence, apparently contentedly so. The consistency of tasks repeated and repeated well pervades the restaurant with calm and efficiency, despite the crowds.

Slight and confident, Färbinger is deeply knowledgeable on all things food-related, not just bread. The family name has been associated with baking for hundreds of years - it's even in his starter. "We call it MF1700 (the MF standing for Markus Färbinger ). Our name has been mentioned in conjunction with baking in a document as early as 1700."

Färbinger's own trail of crumbs leads to both Europe and the US, where he spent years at the pinnacle learning and proving himself, cracked New York and made a name for himself on both sides of the pond.

A move from New York to the Garden Route appealed to Färbinger and his South African chef partner, Liezie Mulder, but it's hard to believe that opening the bustling bakery and bistro was a change of pace. The place is constantly packed, regardless of Knysna's seasonal peaks.

While it was unusual, his moving from The Big Apple to the quiet backwaters of The Big Oyster has paid off.

"A couple of really positive things about Knysna and the wood-fired oven is that we are not sidetracked by the goal of just producing more. Other people's dream is to produce a lot, get a big factory, sell to a big company, get R20-million and do something else. We're sheltered from that cycle and that path. The path is not about how high I can climb and how fast I can climb. It's about the climbing itself."

That Färbinger plays a guru role to SA's would-be artisanal bakers comes through in conversation. He starts sentences and prompts you to finish them.

"A pyramid scheme can only work - when?"

"The animal that eats the most wheat on the planet is - what?"

Färbinger has formulated well-thought-out counterpoints to most established truisms about food as well as economics, diet, etcetera. His delivery marries passion (his translation) with zen.

"We don't work here to make as much money as quickly as possible. We do this because it makes people feel good, it makes me feel good. It's good for everyone," he says.

"I'm not here to prove my worth. I'm here to give you service and give you what I do well and I hope we have an understanding. I'm not here to live up to a restaurant rating of two, three, four stars. That's society's mechanism... I suppose it's no wonder some people consider me arrogant. But I certainly don't mean to be arrogant.

"Chill out everybody," he says, "It's just bread - although very good bread."

www.iledepain.co.za