Red Door Bakery: Paint the town red

You can’t miss the bakeries in Adelaide with the big door bakery. And you wouldn’t want to either, considering what’s inside.

With a store in the suburban areas of Croydon and Goodward, as well as a store in Greenfell Street in Adelaide’s CBD, Red Door Bakery is bringing real food with real flavour made by hand, with soul, to the city and the burbs.

Starting out seven years ago, founders Gareth and Emma Grierson wanted to bring quality bread, pastry and coffee to Adelaide, and offer to the community what they thought was missing.

“We started making sourdough breads, using fresh butter in all of our pastry and made everything in house from custards to ganaches – nothing comes out of a packet with us,” Gareth says.

Before opening Red Door Bakery’s first store, the Croydon store, Gareth worked as a chef for 20 years, so his love of simple and fresh food was deeply ingrained. Growing up cooking in Sydney and Melbourne, he says he’s brought a restaurant philosophy into a bakery.

“I don’t think food needs to be too complicated – a pie, a sausage roll, anything, we just try to find the best ingredients we can,” he says.

“We use Berkshire pork in all of the sausage rolls and European butter for all of the pastries.

“We try to buy the best ingredients and use seasonal fruit – we don’t use anything tinned on the top of the danishes for example, so its all fresh.

“I think it’s a good way to do business as well because it’s not expensive and it’s a good philosophy to follow. If you eat things when they’re in season they’re going to taste the best. My advice is keep it as simple as you can.”

Gareth says this food philosophy is on the rise, with people becoming more aware of what they’re eating.

“I think bakeries from 10 to 20 years ago made a lot of products for convenience and there’s obviously still people that fill the market and that’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with it, but there is that growing desire for more handmade products and real food,” he says.

 

At Red Door they do a simple bread range including white, sourdough, wholemeal, rye, and caraway loaves. They don’t carry thousands of products, preferring to stick to four or five core products in each range. With their pies, they do a traditional beef pie and a chicken pie, as well as rotating flavours with what’s seasonally available with flavours such as a red wine, pancetta and mushroom beef pie, and chicken, tarragon and potato pie. One of their popular items is the Moroccan eggplant sausage roll, made with a Red Door eggplant chutney mixed through the sausage roll mix. They also do a simple yet flavoursome pork and sage sausage roll.

Their range of sweets are all made by hand with Corman’s butter, with stable lines being croissants, danishes and a basic tart range. On the weekends, Red Door ramps up its range with eclairs and its specialty – lamingtons with raspberry marshmallow in the middle instead of cream, as well as raspberry jam.

“I think the lamingtons are a great product, putting a twist on an Aussie classic is a good thing,” Gareth says.

“Also the tart range sells extremely well.

“We also do a chocolate caramel brick, which is like a chocolate brownie with a tunnel of salted caramel down the middle and then its dipped in ganache with a little vanilla salt on top.

“That’s probably the biggest seller in the sweets range of things.”

As well as the three bakeries, Gareth and Emma also own a woodfired pizza shop called the Croydon Social, as well as a production facility. Nearly a year ago the shop next to Red Door Bakery in Croydon came up for sale and Emma and Gareth bought it, ambitiously wanting to do something on top of their three bakeries.

“At the Croydon Social we do woodfired pizzas as well as tapas,” Gareth says.

“We do a long-ferment dough for our pizza bases, fermented for two days so you don’t get all of that bloating.

“Sort of the same principle as sourdough bread.

“It’s a yeasted product but slow fermented in a traditional Italian method so it makes a really light, crisp pizza base, which is great.”

While managing four stores, as well as four kids, is no small feat, Gareth still manages to bake two nights a week.

Emma, whose background is in front-of-house hospitality, does a lot of the back-of-house tasks such as tax and payroll.

“I really love the cooking side of it. The people management side is quite hard but they go arm in arm so you have to embrace it,” he says.

 

“The other thing I really love about having our own business is the flexibility. We’ve got four kids ranging from the ages 14 down to eight, so there’s always somebody to drop them off and pick them up from school, and you can go on the odd excursion.”

Gareth is also involved in a cooking program at the local primary school three of the kids attend, doing a few lessons each term and helping out.

“We were probably a bit naive in the start though, thinking if we start early we’ll be home by lunch time,” Gareth says.

“I think if we knew what we know now seven years in we would have done a lot of things differently, but that’s all a part of business, it’s a learning curve.

“We’ve got probably 40 employees now over four different sites, and if we knew the bakery would be as successful as it is we’d probably have the site three times bigger and have all the people working in the one site, with a kitchen and office and big retail facility in one spot, but everything’s great in hindsight.”

Red Door Bakery expanded organically because the Croydon store is 70sq m, of which 50sq m is occupied with the kitchen, so there was always a line out the door because you could only walk a few steps before reaching the counter.

They couldn’t keep up with production in the original store and were selling out quite regularly early in the day. So, they leased a production facility across the road and as time went on, they opened additional stores in Goodwood and in the city.

When Gareth and Emma were thinking of setting up a business initially, they looked at a business (one they didn’t lease) and it had a red door. Gareth said to Emma if they called it the Red Door Bakery, one, it would be easy branding and two, if they opened up a second bakery it’s an easy thing to do to paint a door red. And the rest is history.


Click here to upload your own recipe

RELATED POST

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website.

INSTAGRAM