If you're like me, you probably think of small artisan bread bakeries as a fairly new phenomenon, but one old world bakery in the heart of Schenectady has been producing the same handmade bread since 1913, when a hard-working Italian immigrant couple named Salvatore and Carmella Perreca, launched their bakeshop. Perreca's Bakery has carried on uninterrupted in the family ever since.

Today third-generation brother and sister Tony and Maria Perreca Papa share the bakery's ownership and its work, too. Their mother Lilia Perreca Papa, an octogenarian, born and raised above the bakery, still comes in to work at the counter. While keeping its essence intact and strong, Perreca's is expanding. The grand opening of a new bakery/café next door is planned for October 1.

Perreca's makes hard-crusted, Neapolitan-style breads in a coal-burning brick oven that dates back 87 years, when the family moved to the present location on Jay Street. Maria Papa told me that the fire has been going continuously since 1920. In one concession to the modern age, Perreca's uses a commercial mixer to make their dough, albeit one acquired second-hand by her grandfather when he moved the bakery.

As in the old country – and France or Italy to this day, regular customers stop by the bakery daily to pick up a fresh loaf. Many have always eaten Perreca family bread. A younger crowd, whose parents were loyal patrons, maintain tradition. They often come in on Fridays or Saturdays with their own children. The bakery is also a favorite of students and faculty from nearby Union College.

The bakery uses the same dough to make all its breads, whatever their shape or size. The recipe calls for just four ingredients: enriched white bread flour, salt, yeast, and water. This dough also goes into Perreca's popular bakery pizza, a dish better described as traditional tomato pie as it's not the pizza that Americans are familiar with. Theirs, also topped with grated cheese, is served at room temperature.

Maria knows of no other bakeries in the region that heat their ovens with coal. And she doesn't believe that coal-fired bread ovens were typical locally in the early twentieth century. In their oven they use anthracite coal, which produces more energy proportionately to its weight and burns cleaner than other coals. Maria notes that it burns about 500 degrees F hotter than wood. The bakery consumes 1.5 tons of coal a week.

While Tony Papa went to work baking bread at the bakery after high school in 1980, Maria pursued her studies through graduate school, moved to New York City, and became a publishing company executive. She returned home to join the business in 1996. She bakes the pastries – traditional Neapolitan-types such as almond biscotti and tarelle (a lesser known salt and pepper stick), and makes the soups. The bakery has stayed small, with less than a dozen employees.

A year ago the "cupcake craze" finally arrived at Perreca's. Maria explained the delay: "Our bread is so good that we couldn't make a mediocre cupcake." With customers singing the praises of their cupcakes on Facebook, their cupcake business has exploded. The almost nine-decade-old business has been able to stay true to its roots while adapting to changing times.

Doug Rountree's new bakery adamantly respects tradition. Doug proudly crafts Murray Hollow wood-fired sourdough bread in an 18-hour process as it would have been made 200 years ago.

"Things can't get too old for me." Doug, who prefers scrap pine from sawmills, splits his firewood by hand, though he mixes his dough in a mixer.

Murray Hollow Bakers was born in 2005 when this long-time chef built a wood-fired brick oven at his home in Salem near the Vermont border. Four years later Doug and Nancy make their living off of the new bread enterprise.

Doug contentedly stays home to bake while Nancy sells and promotes the bread. She takes Murray Hollow bread at three farmers markets (Salem, NY, and Dorset and Manchester, VT) and it’s regularly available near the cash register at the Village Store Coop in Cambridge and the Green Pea Market in Greenwich, and weekly at Yushak's and Gardenworks.

Murray Hollow's signature breads are made of non-brominated unbleached white flour, salt, water, and sourdough starter. Its other breads include bran and organic sesame varieties, and an oat loaf made with organic oat seed over two days. Doug would love to find a local "home-produced" bread flour in the future.

Doug's interest in bread and love of good cooking date back to his childhood, when he helped his Irish granny, a Missouri farm wife whom he called "Omi." He fondly recalls the impressive lunches she made for the harvest laborers on the farm.

In the navy for two years during the Vietnam War, Doug baked and cooked on an aircraft carrier, feeding a crew of 2,000. He later traveled in Europe and used his GI bill educational benefits to get a culinary degree in Oregon in 1972. As a chef he worked for a first class western hotel chain until he picked up and moved to Manchester, Vermont in the late 1980s. There he worked for small inns.

After a 25-year run as a chef, he burnt out and became a pastry chef. But small establishments in rural southwestern Vermont only had part-time work, so he pieced together jobs. At one job, Doug had the task of setting the fire at the brick oven of Rock Hill Bake House founder Michael London in rural Greenwich. Doug came in on the days that the "fire bread" baker there, a Frenchman named Bernard, wasn't baking.

The experience as London's "flunky," as Doug referred to the position, put him on his current path. The oven astounded him, and he had never seen anyone make bread without commercial yeast. "I was blown away," he says.

The opportunity to build his bake house came after Doug's parents passed away in 2004. He expresses gratitude to them for the inheritance he received from the sale of their modest home.

Doug's oven sits in a European-style stucco building ninety feet from the couple's early nineteenth-century home in the woods. A local mason dissuaded Doug from proceeding with his own sketches, so he purchased an Alan Scott blueprint. (Scott was the master bread oven builder who co-authored The Bread Builders.) The firebricks inside his oven are new but for the outside, he laid bricks salvaged from a furniture factory in Hudson.

Doug began his own sourdough starter in his mother's old crock. "It took about 12 days to get my culture started," he said. Once established, sourdough can last from generation to generation, if fed and cared for. Doug almost lost his though.

Before his one-year anniversary running the bakery (his first experience with self-employment), Doug landed in intensive care. He ended up with a pacemaker, missing two months of baking. During his hospital stay he coached his wife on feeding the starter. His heart trouble made him reckon with the realization that, by baking six days a week, he had driven himself too hard.

Doug cut back to the more reasonable schedule of baking four times a week. His oven allows up to seven or eight bakes with a single firing so he still can make a lot of bread! And he does, finding great pleasure in his calling -- providing his customers with authentic bread to savor.