Log In


Reset Password
Lifestyle

Rising stars

Local bakers mix muscle and magic to create ‘Serious Delights’

They have the biceps of Paul Bunyan, the endurance of a professional cyclist and the delicacy of a Japanese calligrapher.

They’re bakers and thus perfectionists, toiling at Serious Delights Bakehouse to satisfy our need for fresh muffins, crusty bread and delightful sweets.

I arrive seven minutes late for their 6 a.m. start time, and the bakery, located inside Nature’s Oasis at 300 S. Camino del Rio, already is buzzing. Kaitlyn Evans is shaping Pugliese dough, gently folding under the edges before fitting them into pans. Emma Donharl is frosting a triple-layer chocolate cake, expertly piping little fillips along the outer edges.

Amber Turley is preparing vegan blackberry muffins by adding whole wheat flour, sugar, oil and soy milk into a 30-gallon mixer. Susie Abshier is wrapping cookies for the self-serve bakery case.

My arms hurt, my back aches and my head spins just watching these petite young women going about their daily tasks, which will last for the next 10 hours. And all I’m doing is standing.

You might be surprised to realize that they make everything just as you would in your own kitchen – no weird preservatives in the dough, no fancy decorations on the cookies, no exotic ingredients in the muffins.

The cream cheese frosting contains just cheese, powdered sugar and vanilla; the snickerdoodle cookie has butter, sugar, eggs, salt and baking soda; the whole wheat honey bread is made simply of water, flour, honey, oil, cultured wheat and wheat gluten, salt and yeast.

The ingredients and baking methods at Serious Delights are no different, really, than the ones you would use at home, if only your mixer held up to 500 pounds, your sifter was broader than a champion pumpkin and your oven had 20 circulating shelves.

Ah, but there is one inescapable difference – everything must be perfect.

Manager Kate Naumann leans suspiciously over a chocolate chip cookie, eyeing its flatter, broader shape and noticeable shortage of chips. She picks it up with an air of disappointment, crumbles it into her hand and leaves it on the long wooden counter for all to see. Such a cookie could never make it into Serious Delight’s bakery cases.

Unlike at home, where you can destroy the flawed evidence with a quick pop into the mouth or a large dump into the trash bin and none will be the wiser, mistakes in a professional bakery are a costly business. If you forget the yeast in bread, you can’t fix it. If you bake muffins without sugar, all those expensive organic ingredients go to waste.

“We need the precision because we’re making huge batches of 80 to 120 pounds at a time,” Naumann said. “That’s a lot to mess up.”

Think about that the next time you’re forced to disappear a disreputable batch of cookies or feed an over-baked cake to the birds. It’s a lot of pressure.

Donharl, freshly returned from a decorating class at the San Francisco Baking Institute, spreads frosting over a 6-inch lemon cake, using a scraper to achieve a smooth exterior. When the top and sides are to her liking – a process that takes at least four passes – she drops alternating dots of raspberry preserves and lemon curd along the border, then deftly wipes away any drips. The 19-year-old emits a sigh of relief. Evans, 26, shaping ciabatta rolls across the counter, praises her pastry skills.

Meanwhile, Turley prepares the dough for the rustic Pugliese loaves. She weighs precise amounts of whole wheat, rye and high-gluten bread flour into a container shaped like an enormous open-topped football. She dumps that into a giant steel tub, adds ice water and allows the dough hook to spin for four minutes. (The ice water slows down the rising process, which is completed after 18 hours in the refrigerator.)

While the dough rests, she carries over a 60-pound bag of flour to restock, then pulls basketball-sized pieces of sticky starter dough out of plastic bins. The effort is similar to reaching into a washing machine to free a stuck towel. She adds yeast, salt and the preferment – the dough saved from an earlier batch – into the Pugliese. The dough hook twists it into mammoth swirls, like whipped cream gone mad.

Turley, 22, comes from a houseful of cooks but always was more attracted to baking for the sheer challenge of it. You have to understand not just flavor and texture, but chemistry and fractions. Customers frequently have no idea what goes into the baked good they just purchased.

One woman ordered trays of pastries and cookies for visiting holiday guests, insisting they all be gluten-free. When she picked them up, she turned to Turley and asked, “What is gluten-free?” (I know you know, but just to refresh, gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye that can cause an adverse reaction in some people.)

Owners Robert and Kelly Ziegler are dedicated to producing their baked goods without artificial ingredients, using locally grown whole wheat flour and eggs and organic, unrefined cane sugar. They also cater to those of us with dietary issues by offering the vegan muffin and several gluten-free muffins and cookies. (The filled ginger cookie Turley slipped me is three-bite heaven.)

Serious Delights has made a name for itself at the Durango Farmers Market, providing early-morning shoppers with golden brown croissants, savory jalapeño-cheddar bread and baby fruit pies. It’s all part of the Zieglers’ goal to contribute to the community, their customers and their employees.

“I want to change the quality of the food we put into our mouths,” Robert Ziegler said. “It’s the structure of our whole lives, and I want to recognize that.”

Back in the kitchen, Donharl concentrates on the difficult basket-weave design for the carrot cake, created by alternating flat, vertical lines with short, wavy ones. She finishes the top with bright orange carrots made from colored buttercream. Her hand shakes. She stops, takes one deep breath and returns to the task.

Donharl has worked at Serious Delights just six months, but the experience is shaping her future. The training in San Francisco sealed it.

“It helped me decide where I want to go in life,” the slight teenager said. “I want to do this.”

One might wonder why. The sheer physical toll of baking cannot be understated, a fast-paced yet unending labor of lifting, measuring, rolling, baking and cleaning 10 hours a day. The five women were occupied every minute of the almost seven hours I was there, never once sitting down.

Evans, blonde, blue-eyed and with biceps a Hollywood star would envy, moved seamlessly all morning shaping loaves of sourdough, rolling perfectly round ciabatta buns and crafting seeded bagels. She placed them gingerly on a baking peel as big as a shower stall, yanked them into the hot oven in one swift motion and removed them the same way.

“I like shaping in the morning,” she said. “You control it to make really pretty bread.”

And indeed it was, her loaves of braided golden challah bread a wonder to behold. By noon, Evans’ baking was done, yielding 13 loaves of Irish soda bread, 14 demi baguettes, 16 Pugliese, 21 whole wheat, 21 Four Corners seed bread, 24 ciabatta buns for Ska Brewery and 108 smaller ciabatta rolls for the store case.

For me, a lifelong baker and lover of sweets, I discarded any notion of becoming Durango’s next gluten-free baker. I realize now that a writer’s sedentary life suits me just fine. But I did pick up a few tips: Under-bake cookies to make them chewy, add salt to make muffins brown, and frost a cake with a crumb coat before adding the finishing layer.

Meanwhile, I’m glad and grateful to have such talented professional bakers do it for me. Lemon danish, anyone?

phasterok@durangoherald.com



Reader Comments