Tom Douglas

A Tour of Our New Bakery/ by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor

Yesterday morning, I went over to Serious Pie Westlake to meet up with my young friend, Haley.  Haley is mulling over the idea of a future culinary career, and I had promised to give her a tour of our swanky new pastry and bread bakery.  Since her high school is on vacation this week, the time was right.

First I checked in with one of my favorite people, Chris Field, Westlake Pie Sous Chef (photo top left).  He was busy at the Biscuit Bar.  (Of course I had to have a ham biscuit first in the interests of “quality control.”)  Then I introduced Haley to our Pastry Chef, Stacy (photo top right), who was hard at work cutting rectangles of dough for cannoli!

Carol (photo above left) was rolling out coconut pie dough for pastry shells on our amazing dough sheeter.  (Oh yes, I remember the days when I rolled out all those shells myself with a rolling pin.  Of course, back then I wasn’t making nearly so many.  Remember that we now have 7, soon to be 10 joints that require pastries and breads everyday plus the Dahlia Bakery and Catering!)  I’ve never seen such a big container of pie weights! (Photo above right, with the parchment papers stacked on top ready to re-use.) The weights are dried beans- lentils in this case- that the bakers use over and over to weigh down their pastry shells so the bottoms don’t puff up while being blind baked.

Pastry Sous Chef, Katharine, was at work measuring and cutting dough for fig bars (photo above left, though you can’t see Katharine except for her hands).  The concentration and detail that goes into each of our pastries is a good reminder to me of why it’s not an easy task to write the Dahlia Bakery Cookbook! These are professional recipes, and we go to a lot of time and trouble to make each and every one of our products as perfectly as possible, but at the same time, we don’t want to make the recipes for the book too intimidating for the home cook.  It is a balancing act!

But my favorite moment was watching Haley help the very kind and welcoming bread bakers roll a few hamburger buns!  I love her youthful energy and enthusiasm!!

February 24th, 2011