Lachlan Cutting has spent months setting up the new bakery, even tiling the walls with his brother. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Fans of the iconic cardamom buller rejoice: cult-favourite Under Bakery is opening a second location.
The small-batch, hand-made bakery focuses on single-origin ingredients – Woodstock Farm flour, Big Little Dairy Milk, etc – and is widely regarded as one of the best bakeries in town (despite their tiny footprint). And Mawson residents can breathe a sigh of relief because the original shopfront will remain; in fact, as owner Lachlan Cutting told Region, it might even get better.
“It’s never been my ideal to have people queuing, so hopefully this will make things a little less hectic and chaotic on weekends out at Mawson,” he said.
I went into my conversation with Lachlan expecting to hear about increased production capacity, new menu items, and more sales, but the humble baker was more interested in discussing how this new space would improve life for his staff. And he’s not too worried about making the new shop a carbon copy.
“Our aim with this space is to keep the great product we’re known for, but make it safer and more enjoyable for people to work in. We want it to be the best environment possible,” he explained.
“Even within the bakery, we can tell who made each loaf by the way they score the bread, so there’ll likely be some small variations between Mawson and Dairy Road. But difference is okay: if both are great, then it doesn’t matter that there are differences. In fact, that’s great because it means humans made this, there’s an element of human touch.”
New equipment will reduce the physical strain on the baking team. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Baking is a notoriously physically demanding job, and the limited space at Mawson has resulted in a lot of what Lachlan wryly describes as “triple handling”. The new, open layout will allow a single trolley packed with pastries to take a journey through the bakery from the mixing room, through to the cool room, proving cabinet, oven, and then to front of house for sale, without a staff member needing to unload and reload the trays at each step of the process.
That’s not to say that there won’t be increased production, new menu items and more sales – there’s plenty of exciting ideas on the horizon – but the plan for now is to take it slow and grow at a sustainable rate. So when the new site opens in late November/early December, customers can expect their favourite core range to be on the shelves with new specials added to the rotation as the team adjusts to the extra legroom.
“We’re going to have a big retail shelf on one wall there, which will hopefully be full of preserves that we can also use on plated dishes here. Still very much with a scandi influence: think bread with pickles, maybe some meats, salad, vego options … simple ‘things on bread’ kind of dishes,” Lachlan said.
The light rye at Under Bakery has a cult following of its own. Photo: Lucy Ridge.
Much like Mawson, they’ll be serving batch brew coffee (in collaboration with their new Dairy Road neighbours Barrio), but they’ll also have capacity for iced drinks, sodas and more. There will be space to sit indoors in the high-ceilinged space. In warmer weather, there are lovely gardens around Dairy Road to enjoy, or a takeaway for a wander through the Jerrabomberra wetlands.
It’s exciting to imagine all the possibilities of a space like this in the capable and creative hands of Lachlan and his team.
Under Bakery is located at Mawson Shops, and their new location is at Dairy Road. They are open from Wednesday to Sunday. Follow them on Instagram for updates.
