NEW LIFE:Two years ago Eoin MacEntee set out his stall and took leave of his engineering career for a taste of food production
CRAFT BREADS, cakes, chutneys and sauces are now the lot of Eoin MacEntee who turned his back on a successful, Dublin-based career in building services engineering consultancy two years ago to go into food production.
Instead of dealing with multinational clients like Microsoft he now sells his produce at farmers’ markets in Co Clare after returning to live in the town of his childhood, Kilkee.
Ironically, it was the success of the economic boom that helped him make the decision to leave. He had been considering taking out a mortgage on a house in Dublin before deciding he would take some time out and return to his old job if it did not work.
“I thought if I commit to this mortgage I have another 30 years at least where I have to make the payments.
“It got to the stage where I said if I do not do it now I will never do it. It was a big shock to everyone that I actually did it, and a shock to me.”
After giving his notice in July 2007 at the age of 38, he was reassured when his employers told him to contact them if he wanted to return to work.
“That was all before the downturn,” he says. He was, however, surprised and tempted by an offer to return to his former employment last October. “I had committed to working on this up until Christmas and then review it.
“It is hard to know whether I would have survived because I would have been back in late.”
After relaxing for the summer of 2007 he studied for a Diploma in Specialty Food Production in UCD, a certificate in wine tasting and signed up for a three-month course in Ballymaloe.
“It did get to the stage where I had to fly from Cork up to Dublin just to do the wine course, and back again. My year of less stress was, at times, fairly hectic.”
After finishing the courses last year he brought his previous engineering skills to bear by designing a new kitchen for himself and setting up a website, www.westclareartisan.com. But instead of a commercial baker’s oven he had to settle for a Hotpoint range cooker.
“I could have bought a commercial one for twice the price but with 10 times the capacity.
“Because I am producing from the house I am very restricted in what I do. I am not allowed a lot of the commercial equipment. It actually got scaled back to a glorified domestic kitchen in the end, unfortunately.”
He also spent €1,700 on having a good stall made, believing it projects a good image. “Also I needed a strong one with the wind around here,” he says.
His new life has its own pressures, the main one being that he has to combine the unsociable hours of a baker with the morning hours of an on-street trader.
“I might get to bed at 5.30am and I am up again at 7am. People like to talk to the person who baked the bread. They appreciate that I bake it and here I am now in the market.”
As chairman of the new Kilkee Farmers’ Market he has found that the title is more than honorary. “I ended up doing a lot more than I thought. It’s a good bit of work. You put up signs every Sunday morning and take them down in the afternoon.
“I would think the market will become an annual thing every summer. We are getting a lot of positive feedback.”
He sets up his stall at two other markets every week, in Kilrush and Ennis, selling porter cakes, muffins, Italian breads, soda breads, including a cheese and chive one, and a favourite of his from when he lived in London. “It’s what I would call a London Bloomer. It’s a white, yeast loaf, quite similar to a sour dough but sweeter in flavour.”
He also sells chilli sauces, chutneys and relishes, and bakes wedding cakes to order and for Christmas is promising a fruit cake from a recipe of his great aunt’s that he unearthed. “It was the prize cake in the family,” he says.
While he is the only one of a family of six to turn to professional food production he is drawing on a strong cooking ethos. As a child he loved going through recipe books and says he still enjoys planning a meal almost more than eating it.
His great grandfather had a bakery in Limerick, Ryan’s in Irishtown, and even while he worked as an engineer he did courses at the National Bakery College at Dublin Institute of Technology and in Ballymaloe.
“I have always had this thing that one day I will do something with food,” he says.
He got satisfaction from having achieved the goal before his 40th birthday. “There were friends who thought it was some mid-life crisis but it was not.”
Gaining entry to the new business was expensive. When he tots up the cost of doing the courses, buying and fitting out the equipment and paying for items “you do not factor in”, he says the start-up cost has run to thousands of euro.
After a year in business he says he is now making a living from it, although “in the year overall probably, technically I did not”. “It is not going to make me a rich man,” he adds.
But he finds this is more than made up by the appreciation he receives from his customers.
“One guy made a point of coming back to me before two o’clock to say how good the bread was. You never get that appreciation from a multinational corporation.”
The stress factor is also much less. He enjoyed the creative aspect of being a building services engineer, designing lighting, IT and security systems for clients but often he worked 70 hours a week.
“You were responsible for the accounts on the project as well. You would have an argument with the contractor over a couple of grand on a multi-million euro contract.”
He remembers being on holiday on a Hawaiian beach worrying about a project that looked like it might unravel.
Now that he is back looking out on Kilkee beach, he does not miss his former existence.
“There are days I listen to the traffic reports for Dublin and I think, ‘Thank God I am out of that’.”