Big men of bread men ready for bake-off 

 
 
Thumbs up: David Barker, Robert Schwerdt and Tim Modra will represent the NT in the 2010 Australian Artisan Baking Cup.

A trio of master bakers is hoping a quintessentially Territorian creation is enough to take top spot at this year’s Australian Artisan Baking Cup in Sydney.

Charles Darwin University bakery lecturers, Robert Schwerdt and David Barker, along with Outback Bakery’s Tim Modra, will demonstrate their innovative bread-making skills alongside nine other teams from across the country during the competition.

Robert said the competition was centered on a baking technique that was relatively new to Australia, artisan baking.

“In contrast to uniform prepackaged sandwich breads, the beauty of artisan bread comes in its rustic look, yeasty flavour, and hearty texture,” he said.

“While you'd never think of snacking on a slice of plain supermarket bread, rip off a hunk of full-flavoured artisan bread and you need no butter or jam to make it complete.”

The three Top End bakers will have from 6am until 2pm on competition day to complete their creation for the main category, which this year has been themed “Australian Icons”. The team will also submit entries into two new categories for this year’s competition, the Healthy Nutritional Bread category and Cold Sandwich category.

While the team could not reveal any secrets until competition day, they have given their assurances that they would do the Territory proud.

The 4th Australian Artisan Baking Cup will be held from June 21-23 in Sydney.