Early morning at the bakery: how the bake starts
A craft story about what happens every morning at Pan Pan.
Before the city wakes up, work is already underway at the Pan Pan bakery. We won’t name an exact hour — that depends on the day, the batches of dough, and many small details only a baker’s hands can feel. What stays constant is the order of things: dough waits for no one, and the craft asks for patience before speed.
It all starts with the flour — Foricher from France, Label Rouge certified. That’s not an arbitrary choice. The Pan Pan team trained in Paris with a Foricher master baker, specifically to learn how this flour behaves at different stages of fermentation, at different temperatures, in different hands.
Sourdough is the heart of the process. This isn’t about adding yeast quickly and waiting — it’s a living culture that gets fed, watched, and used at the exact moment it’s ready. The baker isn’t just watching the clock, but the dough itself — its texture, its smell, the way it stretches.
Then comes the shaping — hands dividing the dough, folding it, giving it the form of a baguette, a sourdough loaf, or a laminated croissant where every layer of butter has to stay distinct before it goes into the oven. This is a part where rushing could do real harm — folding a croissant asks for a steady hand and patience, not speed.
Early in the morning, everyone on the team knows their task: some follow the fermentation, others prepare the oven, others fill the shelves. That division doesn’t mean rushing — it means no one has to hurry to the next step.
The oven is the last step, but not really the end. Heat turns the crust golden while the inside stays soft and elastic. The smell of fresh bread coming out of the oven is the signal to the whole team that the morning has officially begun — and that the shelves in the shops will soon be full.
What stays the same every morning is the sense that the craft isn’t rushed. Every baguette, every croissant, every sourdough loaf carries the mark of hands that have known this work for a long time. Skopje might still be asleep while all this happens, but that’s exactly why, when the city wakes up, the fresh bread is already waiting.
That’s the story behind every piece you take off the shelf — not a recipe with exact minutes, but a craft repeated every morning, with the same care.