It’s ten o’clock at night and, while most of the city is getting ready for bed, the late-night bakers at Troubadour Bakery, inside Bay View’s Colectivo Café, are wide awake and hard at work.

Casey, the lead baker, is nimbly pulling together three separate strands of foot length dough to create the perfect loaf of challah bread. At the other end of a long wooden table flecked with flour, two bakers are feeding raw, baseball-sized balls of dough into a whirling machine that transforms them into tiny little cylinders. In between feeding the dough balls into the contraption a baker deftly flicks a wrist throwing a puff of flour across the dough like some magician’s trick.

And isn’t making bread kind of magic when you think about it? Some flour, a little yeast, along with some good Lake Michigan water, a pinch of salt and—Abracadabra! —you’ve got loaves of tangy sourdough, baguettes that would make a Frenchman cry or a ciabatta that you can really chew on.

The artisans at Troubadour have been putting this magic show on every day, 365 days a year, since 2012 at this location. According to Bakery Director Richard Specter, that was part of the reason behind Colectivo’s open kitchen design.

“We thought it was a good opportunity at the time to attach the bakery to the café similar to what we have in Riverwest where the roastery is. It’s important to the company for people to see the craft. It’s really good work. I mean, it is a craft and most people are not familiar with how things are made. They really are not, and these are skilled people working here that bring value to the community and it’s a good opportunity to show off what they do. “

Every day this bakery can bake about 400 individual breads that are shipped all over Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago and that’s not even including the other shifts that are focused on the muffins, pastries and cookies. In the summer months those numbers can rise just like a loaf of multigrain in a 350-degree oven. “When it gets warmer, we’ve got our patios open so we’re making a lot of sandwiches for our cafes and bread is an important part of the sandwich,” Richard deadpans in the Colectivo conference room overlooking the kitchen below.

All of the breads Troubador bakes are European style breads which is really just a fancy way to say they’re slow fermented. As Richard explains, “Our breads could be mixed at seven or eight at night and they get baked off the next day at five or six in the afternoon. A lot of the breads get mixed depending upon the dough and then they get shaped and then they get retarded. And the retarding is you’re just retarding the fermentation so you’re slowing down the fermentation and that adds the flavor along with some needed acidity.”

Besides being delicious right out of the oven (and if you ever want to feel like you’re spending time in the coziest place in Milwaukee try hanging out inside a warm bakery on a cold winter night) Richard has some valuable tips on keeping their breads fresh.

“If you’re going to keep your loaf of bread for any length of time, say more than four or five days, I would freeze it, not refrigerate it. You’re going to have better success at freshening it up. Refrigeration seems to dry it out. Let it thaw out and if you toast it, it will be delicious. A baguette though, is really a one-day bread. If you want to keep it for the next day, I would put it in a plastic bag when you get home and then crisp it up in the oven.”

But really…who has leftovers when the bread is this good?