Patrick Ryan lets Irish Country Living in on the secret to kneading bread.

“Think about somebody you don’t like and just go for it,” he laughs.

Though it’s hard to imagine the affable 29-year-old corporate law graduate-turned-baker having too many adversaries to pummel into oblivion – via a spelt sourdough or a chilli and tomato focaccia – when we meet at The Firehouse Bakery in Delgany, Co Wicklow.

Launched in May, it’s the second venture in little over a year for Ryan, who, along with girlfriend Laura Moore, returned from the UK to open the Firehouse Bread School on Heir Island in west Cork as part of his “bread revolution”.

“We’ve kind of forgotten what bread really tastes like, or what it should taste like, but four basic ingredients are all you need,” says Patrick.

“For me, bread – real bread – has nothing to hide, and that’s what we’re about.”

Baker’s Dozen

But Patrick, who comes from Castletown, Co Laois, only found his calling in a kitchen in Greece during a working holiday from his corporate law studies.

“The day I got excited chopping parsley was kind of me done for,” he admits, though quips, “I’m not sure how glad my parents were” when he announced that, rather than complete his LLB, he was returning to GMIT to train as a chef.

Still, it paid off. Not only did he meet Laura at college, he also got a day’s trial with Kevin Thornton, which led to an 18-month stint in his Dublin restaurant.

“I was peeling a bag of pearl onions for most of the day,” he recalls, “but they look at how you work – if you’re clean, you’re tidy, you’re eager, you’re into it. I suppose, in kitchens you find common sense is quite a rarity in people, so if they find it, they’ll teach you everything else.”

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(Though he was thrown in at the deep end the first week when the pastry chef he was working with went downstairs to get sorbet. “And I’m still waiting for her to come back,” he laughs.)

But his next move lit the spark for the Firehouse Bakery. While backpacking for a year, he stopped in Fiji to visit the Tribewanted.com eco-tourism project, where he jokes that he “kept hiding out in the kitchen” to escape the hard graft.

However, his efforts at staying incognito failed when one of the project’s managers, Duncan Glendenning, tasted his bread and convinced Patrick to re-locate to Britain after his travels to help set up The Thoughtful Bread Company. Patrick spent four years there as head baker, featured on the BBC TV series The Big Bread Experiment and co-wrote Bread Revolution, which received winning reviews from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall among many others.

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So why leave it all to return to Ireland in May 2012?

“I suppose after four years you need to either make it home, or go home,” says Patrick. “And there’s just something different about doing it at home.”

Daily Bread

Though his plan to set up a bread school with Laura – on an island off west Cork of all places – in the depths of recession, might have left many scratching their heads.

But with space at Laura’s parents’ sailing school on Heir Island, plus support from Comhar na nOileán Teoranta and their own savings, the couple invested €8,000 to launch their first classes on 30 June last year.

“We said: ‘If we get 60 people all summer we’ll be happy, break even and go lie on a beach all winter’ because we didn’t think we’d see a sinner past September,” recalls Patrick. “But we ended up with classes right up to 14 December and we were back on 5 January.”

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Indeed, a cursory glance at their schedule sees bookings staying strong right into 2014. And it’s not hard to figure the appeal. Limited to just six students, a full-day course, including ferry transport, lunch, an artisan goodie bag and as much bread as you can carry, costs €110 per person.

“Had we priced it any higher, that would suddenly have started squeezing people out of it,” says Patrick.

“And, for me, it has to be hands-on. A lot of people find bread, especially yeasted bread, quite daunting. But bread is actually a lot more forgiving than people think.”

The success of the bread school has allowed Patrick and Laura to finance their latest venture in Co Wicklow as one of the flagship foodies, sharing the site of the former Delgany Inn (other tenants include The Romany Stone restaurant and The Delgany Grocer).

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They now employ eight full-time and two part-time staff at their bakery, coffee house and patisserie, which has an open-plan design based around a wood-fired oven – or “The Sistine Chapel” as Patrick jokingly calls it.

It seems a smart move, not only giving Firehouse its daily bread income-wise, but also promoting the Heir Island school to a wider market – though the recently-launched evening baking courses at Delgany have also been enthusiastically received. Though the concept of a day off is now a distant memory for Patrick.

“Monday to Friday you will find me covered in flour at the bakery in Delgany,” he says, adding that it’s often a 4.30am start.

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“If I’m lucky, I get to hit the road for west Cork late on a Friday afternoon to catch the last ferry and, at times, it has been 4am heading down the M8 to complete the four-hour journey in time for a bread course that kicks off from 10am on Saturday and Sunday.

“It’s a baker’s life. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Now that’s what we call earning a crust. CL