By Maja Kunert
Published on
If New York is famous for bagels and sky-high prices, Austria, much like Germany, is renowned for its love of bread. Now the two worlds have collided thanks to a family-run bakery from Graz that’s baking its rye sourdough loaf in the heart of Soho. Presented in sleek minimalist style, it’s priced at $60 a loaf, that’s roughly €52.
The new bakery “Rye” on Lafayette Street is deliberately focusing on a single product: an organic rye loaf weighing around 1.5 kilogram, made with natural sourdough and no yeast.
But if you can’t or don’t want to have a whole loaf you can order smaller portions or topped slices of bread, for example with chocolate spread, caviar or butter. The bread is baked in a two-tonne oven which, according to the owners, was specially imported from Germany.
Behind the concept is the Auer family from Graz, which in Austria runs more than 40 branches of the store.
The choice of rye bread as a flagship product is no coincidence: Austria has long been regarded as a rye nation; nowhere else in Europe does this grain make up such a large share of bread production.
Founder Martin Auer explained his motivation in a dpa dispatch: they “can ‘hardly wait'” to share their enthusiasm for natural sourdough bread with New Yorkers. The advantages of the loaf, he says, are its intense flavour, how long it stays fresh and how easy it is to digest.
Bread is in any case regarded by the German Nutrition Society and the World Health Organization as an important part of a balanced diet, chiefly because of its high fibre content, which has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attack and bowel cancer.
According to the company, the recipe goes back decades: Auer senior is said to have learnt the method from a farmer on an alpine pasture and later brought it back to Graz.
For a few dollars more: Should a loaf of bread cost that much?
The long tradition comes at a price. Martin Auer himself appears unfazed by the criticism but says he can understand it. His argument: New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
He told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur: “This is one of the most expensive cities in the entire world, and one of the most expensive streets in this most expensive of cities. People should take a look at what a flat costs here.” On top of that, all the ingredients for the bread have to be imported.
The production process itself also drives up the price: natural sourdough, unlike fast-rising yeast bread, sometimes needs several days to mature, during which microorganisms slowly acidify and aerate the dough. That ties up staff, time and space in the bakery and makes sourdough bread inherently more expensive than industrially manufactured goods.
Even so, “Rye” is an outlier by New York standards as well: a standard loaf of bread in the city usually costs only a few dollars, and traditionally baked sourdough bread is available in many places for between $10 and $20.
What the bread costs per kilo
If you work out the loaf price per kilogram, the “Rye” bread comes in at about $40, or around €34 euros per kilogram. For comparison: in Germany, customers pay on average just over €5 per kilogram of bread at the bakery, and just over €3 in the supermarket.
Even Berlin’s organic bakery chain “Zeit für Brot”, known for its stylish shop design and loyal fan base, prices its best-selling house loaf at around €9-10 per kilogram. That is clearly above the national average, but still only a quarter of what is being charged in Soho.
Mixed reactions
The price of the bread has become a talking point online. Critics see a staple food that is being turned into a luxury item for the well-off. One baker wrote in a comment that the price was “completely detached from reality”, especially at a time when there is so much debate about the sustainability and accessibility of food. Other users have called the amount outrageous, even by New York standards.
But there is also support. Some commentators are simply pleased to see a loaf without a long list of ingredients and made with unbleached flour, and point out that good artisanal baked goods in New York often cost €20-30 anyway. Others refer to the location in Soho, an area largely inhabited by wealthy residents, and consider the price understandable in that context.
Between outrage and enthusiasm, at least one thing is certain: the loaf from Graz hardly leaves anyone indifferent.