Bakeries | East Rock | Economic Development | Food Business | Culinary Arts
Bill Frisch, founder of East Rock Breads, readies a batch of bagels for proofing. Photos Kapp Singer.
The air is warm and filled with the slight tang of sourdough on a Thursday afternoon at East Rock Breads. Bill Frisch stands in front of a large wooden table, swiftly shaping bagel after bagel, preparing for the Friday morning rush. He checks the weight of each before arranging them in neat rows on a tray to proof. The space is quiet—no music, just the hum of ovens, refrigerators, and fluorescent lights.
“People call me a weirdo for being in here when it’s silent,” Frisch said. “But I honestly love the sounds of the dough. There’s a lot of information you can get from dough based on the sound.”
Frisch opened East Rock Breads’ storefront at 942 State Street in early January. In the couple of months since, he’s seen great success, regularly selling out of bagels, baguettes, croissants, cinnamon rolls, and more.
On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings—the three days the bakery is currently open—customers can be seen toting brown paper bags stamped with the store’s logo all around East Rock.
Frisch initially launched East Rock Breads about a year and a half ago, baking small batches of bagels in his nearby apartment and selling them via Instagram. All the while, he was preparing the brick-and-mortar storefront, replacing dryers and washing machines—it was previously a laundromat—with industrial ovens and mixers.
He laid eyes on the space shortly after moving to New Haven from Chicago with his wife, Ida Cuttler, who is a student at Yale University’s David Geffen School of Drama. In Chicago, Frisch had worked at several different bakeries but always wanted to run his own. After arriving in New Haven, he took a free business class offered by the city’s Small Business Resource Center and began drawing up a plan for the bakery.
“It just seemed like the right place at the right time,” he said of starting his business in New Haven. “I had been thinking about starting a bakery for a while anyway in Chicago.”
It took Frisch over a year to obtain all the necessary permits and renovate the space. Since opening, Frisch has been able to expand the volume of bread he makes as well as the diversity of offerings. He could bake about 200 bagels per week out of his apartment. Now he’s making about four times as many, alongside 150 sourdough country loaves as well as other breads and pastries. On Thursday, he was testing a sourdough brioche recipe, sticking a probe inside the bread to test the temperature before cutting into it to closely examine the crumb.
Despite Frisch being the only employee at East Rock Breads, he tends to speak about the bakery in the first person plural: “We started out just with bagels"; “We like to use as many natural processes as possible.”; “We always try to do specials—one item that brings people in. Lately it's been cinnamon rolls.”
It’s a subtle but generous acknowledgement that—while he spends much of his time baking solo—the bakery is a team effort between him, his wife and their friends. At the peak of a recent Friday morning rush, Frisch was shaping baguettes in the back while Cuttler made pour-over coffee and rang up customers before running out for class. Frisch’s friends from his time working at the ice cream shop Elena’s On Orange also often lend a hand.
Frisch said that, at first, he was worried he might be stepping on the toes of other East Rock artisanal bakeries, like Atticus and Olmo.
“I was like, ‘Am I gonna start something here?’” Frisch said with a laugh. But he quickly realized that the other shops welcomed East Rock Breads.
“I feel like other bakeries around here can feel free to exchange ideas and stuff,” he said. “The thing I love about the baking business is the camaraderie.”
“There’s definitely room for some more bagel shops in New Haven,” Frisch added, noting how frequently he sells out.
In terms of his own bagel style, he tries to hew closely to the classic New York—boiled and then baked. But he likes to add his own flair by adding sourdough in addition to yeast. He also experiments with flavors you wouldn’t find at a typical bagel spot. Last week’s special was cherry and pistachio, and in the past he’s offered roasted beet, black garlic, preserved lemon and poppy seed, za’atar, and more.
Frisch buys much of his flour from Ground Up, a small milling operation in Holyoke, Mass. which sources grain from around the Northeast. Ground Up mills the flour the day before they send it, which means it could be less than three days between when the wheat is milled and when Frisch takes a loaf out of the oven.
Sourdough country loaves ready to be baked.
“Because it's stone ground, you get the benefits of it being easy to work with—sort of like a white flour—but it has a lot of that bran, so it's kind of nice to get the benefits of eating more whole grains.”
While bagels are his staple, Frisch said that, at the moment, his favorite thing to bake are baguettes.
“It’s simple ingredients, but your technique has to be just right,” he said. “It’s such a challenge to get that perfect score—everything lined up perfectly.”