About Klecko
To call Klecko the founder of the St. Paul Bread Club sells him short.
In the world of boring job titles, he is production manager of the Saint Agnes Baking Company in St. Paul. In the world of exuberant self-promotion, he is Lord of the Sourdoughs. And in the world of the St. Paul Bread Club, he is its reason for being.
Klecko founded the club in 2003 for a couple of reasons. The first goes way back. As he tells it, he was a teenager heading down a fun but inevitably fruitless path when Tom Zolick got hold of him. Mr. Zolick, a Polish man who lived up the street, was a master baker who saw in this juvenile the potential for redemption.
Besides, the kid was begging him, although for reasons that wouldn't pass muster at your conventional culinary school: "The baking industry was kind of a nocturnal thing, and everyone seemed like a bunch of pirates," Klecko said, then grinned. "So I was attracted to that." His instruction began.
"I remember Master Zolick once telling me, 'If you were really smart, you'd get really good at this and get a TV show and teach housewives how to bake,'" Klecko said. "This was in the mid-1970s, you know, and he'd seen the first generation of women who stopped doing their own family baking. And while it was important for women to step up into the world, there was a loss."
(An aside: Klecko, now forty-three, still calls his teacher Master Zolick, upholding the formality of their master-apprentice relationship. Personal friendships within the Bakers' Guild were frowned upon. "They wanted you to come to the table and think about bread, not about going out for beers after work," Klecko said. "But it was all done with honor and respect.") The idea for the bread club got a further nudge one Christmas Eve during his annual observance of an old Polish tradition of hanging loaves from a tree for the birds and the squirrels to enjoy. In Europe he would have been in some moonlit woodland; in St. Paul he was under the streetlights, adorning a tree in front of the Bean Factory, a neighborhood coffee shop.
The practice arose from the belief that bakers are supposed to give back to Christ by giving to the animals, but maybe humans could use some nurturing, too. "I started to see the power of baking." Master Zolick's vision of a TV show was reimagined as the St. Paul Bread Club.
Now, for the birth of "Klecko," we have to go back into the ethnic origins of St. Paul's bakeries. Once, local ovens were distinguished by whether they were run by Germans, Russians, Scandinavians, Irish, or Italians. When the large factory-sized bakeries came into being, the workers still divided themselves along ethnic lines.
So here came Daniel McGleno, freshly sprung from the baking curriculum at the Dunwoody Institute, into this world of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation bakers. "In my whole life I'd never thought about anything other than baking bread," he said. "I had to show people how serious I was."
But he also needed to fit in. He was Polish on his mother's side and Irish on his father's but had grown up eating Polish bread, so he edged over toward the eastern European bakers. The trouble was they couldn't have someone with a name like McGleno in their midst. So they christened him Klecko, which, loosely translated, means "to revere your master."
He was in. Today, he's the heartbeat of Saint Agnes, having remained through three changes of ownership, the current owners being Gary Sande and Larry Burns. He's developed his own potato-based sourdough starter that he calls a brick for its mass and heft. True to form, he gave it a name, "Annalisa," and true to her, he's kept her working away in huge vats for eighteen years.
If you've got a day or so to spare, Klecko will correct all the misconceptions you might have about sourdough. A good sourdough isn't defined by its sourness but by its density, which also enhances its moisture level. Too often what passes for sourdough today goes way beyond a subtle tang to having an almost acidic bite-as if you were eating baking soda.
Klecko's sourdoughs, even his step-it-up "nasty" varieties with their double dose of starter, are characterized by being both tender and dense, with an even crumb that literally tastes cool in your mouth.
Over the years, he's designed sourdough breads for dignitaries ranging from Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to the Archduke of Austria. This is the sourdough that provides the underpinning for the Saint Paul Hotel's black raisin bread, for the brat buns at the Xcel Energy Center, and for the breads that are served in dozens of local restaurants and entertainment centers, as well as being available at the farmers' markets in St. Paul and Minneapolis during the season.
He says that his own education continues with each bread club meeting. "In the early years of the business, you learn pretty fast to keep your mouth shut," he said, then laughed. "That's the real reason I founded the bread club, to have all these bakers to talk to."
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