Amy's Bread...The Book

Last Monday night, Kevin and I packed up the kids and headed into the city for Amy’s book release event.  She and co-author Toy Dupree were set up in Chelsea Market, signing the re-release of their book, Amy’s Bread.  It was a wonderful evening.  I got to catch up with my former colleagues and friends.  Amy had a huge spread of bread and sweets, representing the recipes in her books.  (She released ‘The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread last year)  I was very happy to partake in the coconut dream bars.  I missed them so.
Everything in the bakery had pretty much remained the same.  I was surprised to see the same retail staff as was there three years ago.  It is unheard of to have such low turnover in bakery retail staff.  It speaks volumes for Amy’s culture.  The retail manager, Luke, recently married and bought a corner store on Lake Placid.  He’s moving in six weeks.  I guess I’m not the only one who decided to change things up in a big way. 
Kendall and Ann were busy getting the Thanksgiving lug plan started; just kidding…they were great and I loved seeing them.  I call Kendall whenever I need a pick-me-up or whenever I have a question about weights and pricing.  She’s full of spunk and she’s always laughing.  She and Josie hit it off right away.  Josie, of course, went Mommy hopping through the bakery.  This kid loves Mommies and if there’s another Mommy in the room, she wants nothing to do with Kevin and I.  She hugged and cuddled with Ann and Jessica, the operations manager at the bakery, too.
I spent a while catching up with David, formerly my daytime counterpart.  He’s known as the ‘peacekeeper’ in the bakery.  He was my ‘go to’ guy whenever I had staffing woes.  I have a very big decision to make, which I will write about once it is made; David gave me great advice as he always did.  He’s been at Amy’s for 10ish years now, which means he has seen it all and he knows how to handle just about anything that comes his way.

The Book…
Truth be told, I never read the 1st edition of Amy’s Bread.  It was out of print when I was considering a job at Amy’s and though it was on her bookshelf in the office, I never sat down to read through it.  When I got home from the signing, I cracked open my new book.  I was anxious to read what Amy and Toy wrote and I was eager to see how everything turned out.  I was working at Amy’s during the recipe testing and the re-write process.  This book isn’t just new packaging, Amy and Toy retested and updated all the recipes and much of the text has been completely revised. 
Writers have a voice and every writer’s voice is different.  My style of story telling is totally different than say, Frank McCourt (and hopefully more uplifting).  Amy and I have a very similar voice.  In fact, if I were to write a book about bread, this would be it.  Her way of explaining the bread baking process is unlike any other I’ve read.  It is very down to earth and simplified though it maintains its scientific integrity.  When preparing to write this, I was thinking about what makes us different.  Why can Amy and I explain this process in a way that’s easy to understand and attainable for a non-professional baker?  What sets us apart from Jeffery Hammelman, Joe Ortiz, Ciril Hitz and Michael Suas?  It took a while for me to see the obvious.  We’re moms!  Amy is doing what moms do best…making something complicated, easy to understand.  I remember getting an email from her about a product being ‘yucky,’ and thinking, this is what I love about Amy.  She isn’t afraid to shy away from the technical jargon and put things on a real level.  I’m sure the hardcore, old school men in the business wouldn’t appreciate ‘yucky’ in the same way I do but I truly value her candor.  I didn’t realize how rare these qualities were until I left Amy’s and spent time at other bakeries…she is one of a kind.
Bottom line, if you enjoy reading my blog, buy this book!   It includes my absolute favorite bread from Amy’s, pumpkin pecan.  I think it is my favorite because it was only made in November and I looked forward to it all year.  I actually froze several loaves to eat them throughout the rest of the year.    It also has a recipe for whole-wheat challah which I helped test during the research process.  I’ve been writing this post while watching the snowfall outside and waiting for my mini-batch of whole-wheat challah to rise.  It just came out of the oven and I broke the cardinal rule of baking…I cut it open and at a hot slice.  Hot bread is never bad and this one is no exception.  It transported me right back to Chelsea Market.   I know I’m being a little sappy but I got teary eyed.  I miss the frenzy, the smells, the bakery team, the city life.  Maybe there’s still time…..

The Power of One

Amy Scherber once told me you're not truely a baker until you've baked through all the seasons.  It's so true.  In the summer I have to move at warp speed to shape and bake all the dough before it eats me alive.  The heat/humidity combo is what yeast likes best.  On the other hand, in the winter I have to boil huge pots of water, turn on ovens and burners, mix with super warm water just shy of temperatures that will kill my yeast and wait...wait...wait for the dough to rise.  Based on the 15 degree temperatures and last Sunday's ice storm, we are in the throes of winter.

Some bakeries have a 'proof box'.  Proofing is fancy baker-speak for rising.  They yeast is prooving itself by making the dough rise.  Retarding is refridgerating or slowing the yeast growth.  Really fancy bakeries with tons of money to spend have one unit that can proof and retard the dough.  It's a really cool concept.  You can put dough in at the end of the day, the box keeps it cool then slowly warms it throughout the night so it is ready to bake as soon as you need it to be.  At Amy's we didn't have a proofer and bread was retarded in the walk-in cooler.  We didn't need a proofer because the quantity of dough was such that when the last of the baguettes were shaped, the first were ready to bake.

I could really use a proofer at the Patisserie because I bake small batches of bread.  Last winter it took me eight hours to accomplish what I could in five hours over the summer.  As I mentioned, there were lots of pots of boiling water and several hot sheet pans used to get my bread to rise.  I actually have a proof box but it is supposedly missing it's heating element which renders it useless.  It's not totally useless because it is air tight.  It traps the steam coming off those hot pots.

Last week I decided I had some time to tinker.  Working the night shift at Amy's gave me the opportunity to fix things I never dreamed I'd be able to, like giant ovens and roll dividers.  Not many people make service calls at 2am.  I read a lot of manuals, turned several screws and took some risks but I could get things to work most of the time.  Anyway, I thought maybe I could figure out what was wrong with my proof box.  I started by plugging it in and crossing my fingers in hopes that it wouldn't start a power surge or an electrical fire.  I waited for a few minutes and low and behold...steam!  Warm steam was filling the box!  The thing worked.  I went through an entire winter last year using a cold box that could have been warm if I'd only tried plugging it in.

When Mark opened the bakery, the box really didn't work.  A mechanic was supposed to fix it but he removed the heating element and never was seen again.  The previous owner of the box harrassed the mechanic in an attempt to get the heating element back but no one ever saw him again.  Apparently he either never took the element or replaced it stealthfully because my box works.  Let this be a lesson to never accept that something is broken until you've at least tried to plug it in but don't tell my daughter.  We're hoping she's accepted that the ABC singing toy is really broken and not just turned off!

Miguel's Grandmother

“I hate new people…I fuckin’ hate new people.” Miguel screamed at the top of his lungs while I, a very new person, tried to load baguettes into the oven.  The oven has four stone decks, each one holds about 50 baguettes. The trick was to fill all the decks before the bread in the first deck is fully baked thus allowing for a quick smoke break.  The faster one loads an oven, the longer the smoke break.  At the time, I could load one deck and get about half way through the second deck before I had to start pulling baguettes out of the first deck.  I was incredibly slow but I insisted on doing this.  I was determined.

If Miguel wasn’t yelling about how much he hated new people, again, I was the only new person, he was telling me to move my ass.  Miguel stands at a tall five feet and he has a little round Mexican belly.  Of all the Latino men who worked at Amy’s Bread, he spoke the best English.  He is married to a tall thin American redhead and they have a couple kids so it would make sense that his language skills are a little more developed.  I wanted to spend as much time with Miguel as I could as he was the best baker at Amy’s Bread.  He started out washing dishes and one day they let him shape the bread.  Shaping led to baking which led to mixing and now they refer to Miguel as the “dough whisperer” because he can get the bread dough to do anything he needs it to.  I wanted to be that good.  But alas, I couldn’t even fill an oven with baguettes.

Once I’d gotten a little faster at loading baguettes, Miguel told me I needed more ‘esteem’.  I thought he was being sweet and telling me I needed to have more confidence in my baking abilities.  What he really meant, with his thick Latino accent, was that the baguettes needed more ‘eh steam’ in order to get a better crust. 

It didn’t take me much longer to get the baguette loading down and to get Miguel to stop screaming at me.  Well, he still screamed but it was more light-hearted in nature.  Most of the time he was reminiscing about his grandmother in Mexico, “My grandmother can shape baguettes faster than you and she’s in a wheel chair and she only has one hand!”

At the end of my tenure at Amy's Bread, I could load a full oven, leisurely smoke a cigarette and take a bathroom break before my bread was ready to come out.  I could also shape baguettes faster than Miguel, or at least at the same speed, though he would never admit it.  I only know this because we used to race to fill trays and racks.  With 1,500 baguettes to shape each night, we found creative ways to entertain ourselves.  Miguel and I used to race (and I used to beat him!).

I have since quit smoking and my new oven is much smaller than the beasts I once knew but how I miss Miguel and his grandmother.

Lug Plan

Lugs are the big, flat, plastic bins that most bakeries use to deliver bread.  They are great for cooling the loaves and once they are emptied they compact together making for a great space saving tool.  They come in a variety of shapes, sizes and most importantly... colors.  Amy's Bread has three retail locations and each location is assigned a different color lug.  When the delivery drivers arrive to pick up the bread, they instantly know which stack goes to which store.  So, Thanksgiving rolls around and there is a lug shortage because there is simply too much bread to load into the every day quantity of lugs kept on hand.  This is where the Lug Plan comes into play.

The Lug Plan is infamous among management at Amy's Bread.  The buzz surrounding it starts months before the big day.  Basically, the plan states how many of which color lugs go to which store location and how many of which color lugs come back from each location in order to go out a second time. The first year I experienced said plan, it was made using an excel spreadsheet and it was little more than words and numbers.  At that time, there were only red, blue and the big, ugly, light blue lugs that only came out of storage for the holidays because they didn't fit into the other lugs.

During my last Thanksgiving at Amy's Bread, green lugs were added to the mix. [If I remember correctly, this was an ordering mistake.  No one actually planned on having a 3rd color]  There were 23 red lugs, 37 blue lugs, 12 ugly, light blue lugs and 15 green lugs.  I know this because I had to count them every year in order to help assemble the Lug Plan. The addition of the green lugs took the lug plan to a whole new level.  It went from basic spreadsheet to power point presentation.  The improved plan included arrows, colors, highlights, moving images, destination time stamps, dancing ladies and rocket ships.  It took weeks to create and quite some time was spent training a prodege to take over the next year's plan planning.  When all was said and done, the Lug Plan sat on my desk and all anyone needed to know was how many of which color lugs go to which store location and how many of which color lugs come back from each location in order to go out a second time.

This year at the Patisserie, I am happy to have a very small stack of light blue lugs that were rescued from behind a grocery store.  They are much more content now that they are cradling my yummy, organic, crusty bread than a yucky loaf of squishy Wonder Bread.