Chang Joanne - Flour, Too

flour, too

INDISPENSABLE RECIPES for

THE CAFS MOST LOVED

SWEETS & SAVORIES

Joanne Chang

Photographs by Michael Harlan Turkell

Text copyright 2013 by Joanne Chang.

Photographs copyright 2013 by Michael Harlan Turkell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2740-8

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged this title under

ISBN 978-1-4521-0614-4

Designed by Alice Chau

Typesetting by Helen Lee

This book is typeset in Archer and Gotham.

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

Winter Greens,
Mushroom, and Parmesan Strata

To my mom and my dad:

with infinite gratitude for always believing in me

and instilling in me an obsessive love of food.

Not a day goes by that someone doesnt ask me, How can I open a place like Flour? I am fairly certain that they are not actually looking for step-by-step instruction on how to get into this crazy business. My guess is that instead they are just dreaming of how they can gain unlimited access to a never-ending supply of our egg sandwiches, sticky buns, gazpacho, and BLTs. When customers fall in love with our food, they fall for it hard. Each time, I smile and offer a few starting points but the truth is I often ask myself that same question. How did Flour, my little bakery-that-could, evolve into a beloved bakeshop and caf that feeds literally thousands every day with made-to-order sandwiches, homemade soups, pizzas, dinners, breakfast pastries, desserts, and specialty drinks? My original business plan, while ambitious, bears just a passing resemblance to what happens at Flour every single day.

As you might imagine, the day starts early at Flour. At 4:00 a.m. the opening baker comes in and fires up the ovens. And while its a ridiculously early hour, its also one of the most magical at the bakery. Youre alone in the kitchen about to bake off hundreds and hundreds of hand-shaped pastries and breads that within a few hours will be out on the counter and quickly consumed by delighted customers. The walk-in refrigerators are filled with towering racks of doughs that have been slowly proofing (i.e., developing flavor and texture) overnight. The first order of business is to get all of the trays of scones, brioches, and other breads out of the refrigerators and into the ovens so that theyre ready to display by 7:00 a.m., when we open. Its like a dance: sliding tray upon tray of pastries into the hot ovens, poking at a scone, pulling a corner brioche thats ready before the others, giving a tray a turn, moving a pan of glorious sticky buns out of the oven and onto a cooling rack. At any one time there are sixteen trays in the ovens in various stages of baking, with another sixteen or more waiting their turn to go in.

How did it get to be 6:00 a.m.? Way too soon, the next baker arrives ready to tackle the cake orders and set up the pastry case with triple-chocolate mousse cakes and Boston cream pies. This baker spends the next eight hours writing Happy Birthday, Congratulations, and even intricate math formulas (for our MIT customers) on cakes; cooking creamy steel-cut oatmeal; slicing kiwis for fruit tarts; and making sure that every cake and tart order for the day is complete, well packaged, and passes the mom test. In other words, would your mom (who maybe originally had dreams of your going to med school) be impressed and proud of the dessert you are making? If not, it doesnt leave the bakery.

Following on the case bakers heels is a bevy of front-of-the-house staff. The meditative quiet of the bakery is now a clanging hum as these staffers set up the pastry counter and get the sandwich station and coffee stations ready to go. Then the next baker arrivesour cookie baker. All of those perfectly baked double-chocolate cookies, macaroons, peanut butter cookies, homemade Oreos, and dozens more are his or her responsibility. We sell around a thousand cookies a day, which means that if youre the cookie baker, what you bake that day sees its way into more customers hands than any other product. Talk about pressure! But its a good kind of pressure when you see someones face light up after taking a bite out of a still-warm oatmeal raisin cookie.

At this point its hard to believe it is only 8:00 a.m. While most of the world is just getting ready for the day, our staff is already in full swing. Its time for the savory side of Flour with the arrival of Chef, along with his prep staff. The steady buzz of the bakery evolves into a mild roar with a bit more chaos and chatter: Good morning, Chef! Here are your quiche shells. Ill be out of the bottom deck oven in about ten minutes. How long do you need the stove for? Can you use up these overripe pears for anything? and on and on. The prep staff confers with Chef to get the production list for the day, and on go the blenders for soups and the slicer for roast beef and the stove for chutneys.

Chef focuses on the daily specialssoups, pizzas, and quichecreating a new menu each morning. The first hour of his day is often spent in the walk-in refrigerator, which, just a few hours before, was jam-packed with pastries and doughs. Typically by now the produce and meat deliveries have arrived, and he negotiates for storage space on the crowded shelves, deciding what cheeses will top his pizzas, which vegetables will go into his soups, what scrap produce and trimmings should end up in a stock today. He carefully coordinates his time and prep with the production baking team, whose members have now arrived to tackle the daily pastry production list. The stoves, ovens, countertops, walk-in refrigerator, and freezer all need to be shared among anywhere from a dozen to two dozen bakers and cooks, and trying to make it all work is a massive game of Tetris each day. The production bakers knead focaccia dough, cream butter for brown sugaroat muffins, roll out currant scones and croissants, bake off tart shells, and assemble lemon-raspberry layer cakes while Chef works on his dinner specials and oversees his prep team. The savory cooks roast the meats, slice the cheeses, mix up the spreads, cook down the sauces, and prepare garnishes for the sandwich menu under Chefs watchful eye.