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OAK BAY NEWS -Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Victoria baker keeps tradition alive on Craigflower Road Baking runs in Byron Fry’s blood, with the trade going back five generations on his father’s side and at least two in his mother’s family. It took a little while, however, for him to realize owning and operating a bakery was what he wanted to do with his life. Fry will awake on the morning of his 25th birthday next week and prepare for the usual 3 a.m. Friday start time at Fry’s Red Wheat Bread bakery on Craigflower Road in Vic West. The young proprietor, whose father is not a baker, remembers being rather disinterested in grandfather Lou Lefeber’s work as a teenager during Don Descoteau his visits to Lefeber’s Biz Beat Lakehill Bakery in Saanich, where his mother also helped out. Living in a household where consuming natural foods was commonplace, Fry became interested in food security. “I started taking control of my own food and one way to do that was to start making my own bread, which I started doing at home,” he said. About four years ago when he was studying photography, Fry had the opportunity to shoot some bakers, including Cliff Leir at Fol Epi bakery in Dockside Green.
and its electrical system, which necessitated a more efficient, oldstyle approach to the company’s use of power, Fry and his associates built an oven brick by brick and created a space where customers could see the baking being done up close. Baking favourites such as pain rustique, flax rye and whole wheat country breads – publishing a dayby-day baking schedule and menu for customers – Fry’s aims to sell out its products on a daily basis. With specific breads baked through the day, depending on the temperature of the wood-chip fuelled oven, no ingredients are frozen, negating the need for a freezer. The up-close-and-personal approach of having much of the baking procedure on view for customers, not to mention the unique flavours of their specialty breads, has made the bakery Don Denton/News staff a popular stop in the Vic West Baker Byron Fry scores the tops of loaves of flax and sesame rye loaves before neighbourhood. popping them in the brick oven at Fry’s Red Wheat Bread. “We didn’t realize how great a location it was until we started The up-close exposure, so to speak, to After selling his wares at farmer’s working here and realizing how many the art of baking got him rethinking his markets for a couple of years, he people walk by,” Fry says. “We get a lot career options. decided it would be cool to build a of people coming in and saying ‘we live He dove into the business head-on, wood-fired oven. The next logical step so much closer to (another bakery) but working the early morning shift at the was to scout around for a retail location. it just doesn’t taste the same. We put a Italian Bakery on Quadra Street – “a He found one at the foot of lot of time and energy into it and I think really cool bakery with lots of cool old Craigflower Road, directly across from it shows in the product.” equipment,” he says – visiting bakeries where his great great grandfather, – Fry’s Red Wheat Bread, 416 in the U.S. and bouncing around a few Charles Fry, opened a bakery in 1920. Craigflower Rd. 250-590-5727 bakeries on the Lower Mainland. Motivated by the age of the building editor@vicnews.com
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