Discover Dubai's Viking baguette meeting everyone's bread kneads

euronews (in English)

Meet Magnus Ericsson, co-founder of Viking Bageri and engineer turned master baker now selling some of the best baguettes in Dubai.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:11 My life as an engineer has been quite international.

00:13 I've worked in Europe and I worked in Africa.

00:16 Then I was offered the position as CEO for

00:18 a hospital group here in the UAE and we

00:20 moved to Dubai five and a half years ago.

00:22 Life in Dubai with our family was great and then COVID happened.

00:27 Because I work in a hospital,

00:29 you become scared.

00:30 You want to make sure that your family is okay.

00:32 So you kind of isolate,

00:34 but also you need to have something which

00:37 can help you get your focus away from that.

00:41 My dad always used to bake when I grew up,

00:44 but the thing that he never made was crispy French baguettes.

00:47 So I said to myself,

00:48 I'll try to make my own baguette.

00:50 It was the best feeling

00:52 because it's something that you've done with your hands.

00:55 It's very tactile.

00:56 I can feel the dough going from one stage

00:59 into where that dough is actually working together with me.

01:04 After a few hours, you have this beautiful baguette.

01:06 You take it out from the oven, you can smell it,

01:08 you can listen to it, you can taste it.

01:11 That actually struck a tone in me that it's

01:13 very rewarding to just be able to bake your own bread.

01:16 Even though the universe as a whole had a pretty rough time,

01:20 this place was my place where I could just feel good.

01:24 We started gifting the bread to our neighbors.

01:27 And then my German neighbor came and said,

01:29 "Magnus, this baguette is actually the best I've had in Dubai."

01:32 And that's when I said to myself that now I need to perfect it.

01:36 I need to bake the best baguette in Dubai.

01:39 Then the engineering started.

01:41 I changed the amount of salt, the type of flour,

01:44 the temperature of the water,

01:45 every single thing that I could change,

01:48 I changed to see what would happen.

01:50 And I baked bread every single night,

01:52 probably 12, 15 baguettes per day.

01:55 The neighbors that I gave it away to

01:57 started giving to their neighbors and their friends.

01:59 And all of a sudden, we have people all over Dubai

02:01 ordering the bread.

02:03 People were calling and chatting with him on Instagram

02:07 all the time, and I realized that, wow,

02:09 there's a huge demand for his bread.

02:11 I had to do something about this.

02:13 So that's how we started Viking Baguette.

02:15 People were ordering the bread almost two months in advance.

02:19 So that's when we said, maybe we should do this

02:21 from a bakery.

02:23 To be able to share my passion with my team

02:26 and see them actually growing the same kind of passion

02:29 that I have, it's extremely rewarding.

02:31 I only wanted to bake the best baguette in Dubai

02:33 and success followed.

02:35 So I truly believe that if you're passionate about something,

02:38 you can turn it into something successful in Dubai.

02:42 We look forward to seeing Viking Baguette growing

02:44 and hopefully expand it to the rest of the UAE,

02:47 the region, and then who knows, the world.

02:51 [MUSIC PLAYING]

02:54 [MUSIC PLAYING]

02:58 (upbeat music)

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