By Katie Bennett
Walking anywhere near 812 N. Union St., you slowly inhale the scent of freshly baking bread.
As you enter Black Lab Breads, you find the culprits of an increasingly enticing smell. It’s coming from the many cases lining the bakery’s storefront, which are overflowing with loaves of bread, rolls, tomato pie, the week’s specialty pizza, cookies, bagels, and specialty breads for the season.
In addition to the scent, you notice that the entire shop has a homey, warm feeling. That warmth would be courtesy of the mammoth four-tiered stone hearth that sits puffing away in the recesses of the bakery, as it spits out a myriad of piping hot baked goods.
You revel in the smells around you, and take a bite of a roll, still warm from the hearth. Breaking through its golden crust, you reach the moist, light center.
Mouth watering yet?
812 N. Union St. has housed bakeries for the past century — most notably, DiFonzo’s Bakery, which first opened on December 26, 1936. Renowned for its rolls, DiFonzo’s had attracted people from all over the Delaware Valley.
When Mr. DiFonzo finally closed his doors in 2005, he sold it to Barry Ciarrocchi, now owner and head baker of Black Lab Breads. Before selling it, however, Mr. DiFonzo made sure Ciarrocchi would carry on the building’s baking legacy and continue to deliver a high-quality product to loyal customers.
“It’s great that they’re continuing the use of the building instead of letting it be knocked down for some housing complex or something,” said one customer, who did the layout for Ciarrocchi’s setup. “It preserves a small, kind of historic piece of Wilmington.”
Located in the heart of Wilmington’s Little Italy, Black Lab Breads is baking for people who have been DiFonzo’s customers for more than 60 years.
A former DiFonzo’s customer himself, Ciarrocchi remembers the special times when he had the rolls as a child.
“My dad used to come down and he’d make sandwiches on those rolls,” he said. “And at one point I started thinking ‘What does this guy have? How come you can’t get this anywhere else? I mean did he sell his soul to the devil?’”
He said that’s what piqued his interest and finally got him into baking — “this guy was doing something that no one else could even grasp.”
Although he’s rumored to be a chemist, Ciarrocchi actually has a master’s degree in mycology — the study of fungi — which comes in handy when one’s constantly working with yeast.
Even so, Ciarrocchi said much of the first year has been trial and error. But all this trial and error in no way reflects an attempt to reproduce Mr. DiFonzo’s famous rolls.
“That’s the big myth,” he said mid-grin. “I’ll be honest with you, me and Mr. DiFonzo, we’ve had a lot of laughs about that. Only because people think there was a secret recipe, and there just isn’t.”
“It’s just how you handle it that makes his bread different from mine,” Ciarrocchi explained.
DiFonzo himself agreed matter-of-factly. “Everybody does it different; and they’re doing a great job over there.”
And the two men couldn’t handle their bread more differently. DiFonzo always mixed and made his bread in one day in order to keep up with demand. He needed the bread making process — from rising to proofing to baking — to be quick, and so he used a steam box to move everything along.
Conversely, Ciarrocchi mixes his bread and then allows it to rise overnight, allowing the fermentation process to move at a slow pace.
“For me,” he said, “that fermentation is the whole game. It develops the flavor more and lets the natural yeast do its job.”
So far, his fermentation game seems to be doing quite well. During the 2006 Thanksgiving week alone Black Lab Breads saw a 20% increase from the 2005 week’s profits, selling approximately 1,000 rolls alone.
“Everything’s going well,” said Lucy, a part-time sales employee who worked for DiFonzo for 11 years before Ciarrocchi took over. “The bakery’s definitely being profitable, and it’s starting to draw some attention.”
One long-time loyal customer (of more than 73 years) commented that the bakery was top-notch. “It’s magnificent, and that’s why I keep coming back here. These rolls,” he said, pointing to a bag on the countertop, “they’re outta sight.”
Another elderly customer of DiFonzo’s and now Black Lab Breads said he was pleased with the bread. “It’s different; but it’s good. I’m a bread junkie,” he said with a slight smile. “I enjoy it with all of my meals and buy enough each time I come to last me at least a month or so.”
The best customer of all, however, Ciarrocchi said, has to be Pete Zingone.
“He comes in every Sunday; and just about every Sunday he has to tell me ‘I got go home and put this bread in my oven for 2 hours cause you don’t cook it enough,’” he said. “He’s a great guy; I love him to death.”
It’s this kind of close-knit family that one encounters with the Ciarrocchi’s, Lucy and her family, and most customers that really makes the bakery stand out, because many of the regulars come in just as much for “hi’s” and “how are you doing’s” as they do for bread.
In a world where the small-town businesses are being overrun by corporate America, Black Lab Breads is holding its own, preserving a refreshing bit of baking history.
