Warning: This Viking Bageri story contains gluten
People did a variety of things to cling onto their sanity during lockdown: finally opening that dusty Dostoevsky novel on the shelf (and putting it back after reading chapter one). Bingeing on Tiger King. Organising the sock drawer.
Magnus Ericsson baked baguettes. A lot of baguettes. “About 10,000 I reckon,” smiles the Swede. “I can do it in my sleep now. I did actually fall asleep once mixing dough because I was so tired.”
But a professional baker he is not. Ericsson is CEO of Sheikh Khalifa Medical City Ajman, a four-hospital facility that was the designated Covid hospital for the Northern Emirates, admitting serious ICU patients from Ras Al Khamiah, Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain.
“I was in the office every day, working a lot, it was stressful, and when I got home I needed to put my focus elsewhere,” he explains. “I wanted to do something tactile with my hands that would let my mind wander, so I baked bread. I wanted to try bake the best baguette in Dubai. There was no grand plan.” Did baking help his mental health? “Oh, definitely. I think it’s important to do things that are your own, and baking became part of who I am.”
At first Ericsson handed out his baguettes to neighbours in his Jumeirah compound, reluctantly accepting money from his grateful customers but then donating it to an orphanage in Ghana. “A few Emiratis came one week, then the next week 20 people came – it was like contraband!” the tall Swede says with a chuckle.
As word of Ericsson’s delicious baguettes spread, demand exploded. “I said to my wife, something strange is happening here,” he explains. Ericsson built a website and started charging AED 20 per baguette. He bought a second oven for his home but people didn’t want to wait for their fix so he leased space from a professional cake shop in Oud Metha. “This is the insane part,” he laughs, “for one year I was working five days a week at the hospital and going to the bakery at 3.30am every Friday and Saturday for two weekends every month. At one point, we had so many orders that the waiting list was seven weeks.”
Along with the punishing hours, Ericsson was consumed by perfecting his baguette recipe. An engineer by trade, his detail-obsessed brain demanded that he delve deeper into the physics and chemistry of bread-making. “I did 70 iterations of the same recipe until I found the best one,” he says, almost in disbelief. “I tried 15 types of flour; many types of yeast, changing the amounts from 3g to 3.2g; I used tap water, boiled water, fizzy water; I experimented with oven temperatures, proofing, using steam in the oven… I did everything to understand what made the best recipe. It was crazy, I went deep. The nerdiness is unheard of, I understand that, but I think that’s my way of handling life. I don’t dare play golf because I know I’d be obsessed for years.”
Remarkably, Ericsson refused to use a dough mixing machine, insisting instead on mixing everything by hand because, he says, it creates better gluten strands and more air bubbles that add flavour. His secret ingredient? A blob of honey. “I’m not a trained baker, I’ve learned through trial and error,” he says. “I was contacted by the Swiss Baking Institute in JBR who asked me to come and do a course in baking baguettes. I thought, erm, you’re the experts, isn’t that your job?”
Viking Bageri’s move to expand
As Viking Bageri continued to expand, Ericsson was approaching burnout. When Krush Brands, parent company of Freedom Pizza, came calling in April 2021, Ericsson signed a deal. “I was ready to call it quits, because I never had time off, I was missing out on seeing my kids grow up,” he says. “I was in bed by 7pm every night, I was dead boring.” The bakery now operates out of Dubai Marina and employs two bakers, who send Ericsson pictures of the sliced baguettes every day on WhatsApp so he can check the structure of the bread.
It has been tempting to supply Dubai restaurants but Ericsson, 43, declined. “I want my bread to reach the customer within three hours of it coming out of the oven,” he explains. “But a restaurant might take the bread in the morning and serve it later that night. They told me, ‘But they won’t know it’s your bread.’ I said, ‘True – but I will.’”
Maintaining his independence as much as possible is important for Ericsson, an attitude perhaps borne out of the loyalty shown to him by those early customers who waited patiently at his front door to collect their baguettes. “I think Dubaians are very eager to safeguard these homegrown brands,” says Ericsson. “Viking Bageri is something that sprung from Dubai and I felt that support from the community, especially in the beginning, it was really nice.”
Never taking his bakery business too seriously has been another factor in its success, Ericsson feels. “This is not what I live and die for,” he says. “If the bread business was my only shot and I had to make it a huge success I might have made mistakes or cut corners. I have another job that pays the rent and school fees but the bread is fun, it’s a passion and I enjoy it – well, I don’t enjoy getting up at 2.30am.”
Giving up the day job to pursue Viking Bageri is not an option either, partly because he enjoys working in hospitals. “Plus,” he says with a grin, “I’m not sure it would be wise to launch a full-time baking brand with the knowledge of baking just one baguette.”
Ericsson still bakes baguettes occasionally at home for research and product development (“I love making a monster sandwich”) and is often assisted by his enthusiastic nine-year-old daughter Astrid. “When she helps me, I have to tell myself: let her do her own thing, even if the baguette doesn’t look perfect – I can’t spoil her fun,” he smiles. “She’s very proud of me and tells her friends, ‘My daddy makes the best bread in Dubai!’”
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