For years, Caroline Schiff avoided bread. She had cooked and baked her entire life, and worked as a line chef, a cheesemonger, and a pastry chef at a gourmet market and several restaurants—and yet she rarely made bread. “A lot of times in restaurants and in the food world you’re either a pastry chef or baker,” Schiff says. “You stay in your lane.”
But in 2018, she signed on as the pastry chef for the revival of Gage & Tollner, the old-school downtown-Brooklyn mainstay that prepared veal chops and oysters for New Yorkers from 1879 until 2004. In 2019, as the small team behind the return mapped out the menu, they agreed the restaurant should serve homemade bread. So Schiff began experimenting with sourdough.
