The La Motte Bakery
Flour alone cannot ensure the excellence of the bread. That requires an unfailing instinct, expertise and the love of a job well done; in other words, the flour needs a good baker. The traditions of the bakery as a regular meeting place go back millennia. Crucial to human nutrition, bread has been instrumental in civilisations and was the first processed food humankind prepared. Technology has since replaced ancestral customs and expertise, as the industrialisation of bread-making has become a vital component of creating the modern world. Despite this progression, the preparation of good bread still retains an element of artistry. It requires craftsmanship and experience to enhance and enrich the continually evolving art of bread-making. Though it has transformed, its essence has remained unchanged throughout the ages, and bread-making serves to link our modern selves with our roots and traditions.
The La Motte Bakery Honours time-old methods, using modern science and design, to loosely replicate a Farm Bakery of the 1850s. Besides the beautiful architecture that combines tradition with modernity in style and material, the bakery utilizes methodology, equipment and ingredients from this era. The daily committed effort of the teams baking, cooking, cleaning and serving, forms the heart of the La Motte Bakery to make for an authentic, artisan offering. The bakers at La Motte aim to restore bread as a most versatile gastronomic offering through applying traditional farming, milling and baking techniques that combines old tradition with health-focused science to offer the discerning guest beautiful, delicious, and healthy food to share with family and friends as part of a wholesome meal.
The Bakkery at La Motte was conceptualized by Markus Färbinger. Markus has taught, mentored, and supported thousands of students, apprentices, and enthusiasts over 40 years of baking professionally – from the bakery in an Austrian village, where he grew up, to one of the world's premier culinary institutions: The Culinary Institute of America. In 2002 Markus and Liezie Mulder-Färbinger, his partner in life and in business, cofounded île de païn bakery and café in South Africa. And unbeknownst to him, he was continuing the artisan wood-fired baking tradition of the Färbinger family, dating back to 1700. Currently Markus works as a consultant at the intersection of human, product, and business development within historical and authentic projects.