Karen Mitchell - The Model Bakery Cookbook: 75 Favorite Recipes from the Beloved Napa Valley Bakery

Text copyright 2013 by The Model Bakery LLC.

Photographs copyright 2013 by Frankie Frankeny.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2991-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available under ISBN 978-1-4521-1383-8.

Designed by Alice Chau
Typesetting by Helen Lee

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

The year was 1984, and I was a young, naive, and determined self-taught chef. I was operating a small but thriving catering business, hidden in a back alley behind Main Street in the center of the small town of St. Helena, in the heart of Californias best-known wine region. My landlord, who was both a good friend and my attorney, also owned the building that housed the town bakery. I had long dreamed of owning the St. Helena Bakery, which was operated by a European family. The location, the building, the interior space, and the ovens were perfectly suited to my idealistic aspirations.

When the building became available, my husband, John, and I immediately decided to rent it. I was elated, even though months of hard work lay ahead. I never doubted that we could renovate the facility, develop a new product line, and make a successful venture out of this wonderful old building. The premises had been vacated, and nearly all the equipment had been removed. The only things remaining were two brick ovens built into the walls during the 1920s. Most of the old brick hearth ovens in bakeries in California (and elsewhere in the United States) had already disappeared, replaced with electric convection ovens. I had always coveted those beautiful brick hearth ovens, which were partly baking tools and partly antiques.

The bakery products available in the Napa Valley in the early 1980s were San Francisco sourdough breads, often made from mixes. There were almost no artisan breads. Having traveled throughout Europe, I had fallen in love with European baking and was determined to bring European artisan baking techniques to the Napa Valleyusing those wonderful brick ovens. I longed to create naturally fermented sourdoughs and wonderful European-style croissants and pastries. At the time, I had no idea how big the project would become. I never stopped to realize that I now had the only bakery in the entire upper Napa Valley, nor did I dream that the bakery might grow into what it is today.

The hundred-year-old brick building was charming in an old-world way, with tiled windows, high ceilings, and even skylights. Our plan was to keep the historical details intact and create an environment that had the feeling of a 1930s caf. At the same time, we had to make the bakery functional and wanted to maintain an open feeling by keeping the two areas, retail and production, visible from the entry all the way to the back door.

Starting a bakery from the bottom up is an expensive and demanding endeavor. Bakery equipment is unique and twice as costly as basic restaurant machinery. I was fortunate that my husband is a building contractor with an MBA, because without his direction, I never could have taken on the renovation. John and his crew constructed the worktables, installed refrigeration and plumbing, updated the electrical system, built the bread displays and cabinetry, and did all the painting. Everything seemed to fall into place, except for one major hurdlewe had no idea how to fire and operate the bakerys old brick ovens, and we had to learn by trial and error.

Each oven was formidableapproximately 18 ft/5.5 m wide, 14 ft/4.3 m deep, and 16 in/40.5 cm high. The bricks on the floor were set in a bed of sand, and the oven ceiling was mortared into an arch. The ovens were heated by huge natural-gas guns attached to the walls on a swivel of galvanized pipe. Like the ovens, the gas guns with blower fans were probably manufactured in the 1920s. To light an oven, the gas guns were inserted into the mouth of the oven through a steel door. As the gas valve was opened and the blowers forced air in, the mixture was ignited by a propane torch. At full force, the guns resembled giant flamethrowers and made a deep growling noise that shook the windows all the way to the front of the building. The heat was aimed alternately at the center and then to the left and right sides of each oven to heat the brick surfaces evenly.

It was an enormous challenge to figure out the correct firing techniques and the oven temperatures. Our first tries were almost comical, and we had occasional mishaps, such as the time when a flash of flame caught Johns sweater on fire.

We learned that the specially designed heat sinka 3-ft-/1-m-deep layer of solid dry sandin the attic directly above the ovens could hold most of the oven heat from day to day. It was so effective that an oven fully heated to a baking temperature of around 600F/315C would take three weeks to cool down to 90F/32C. Bringing the ovens up to baking temperature took one to two hours. If we baked right away, everything burned on the bottom. As we continued to experiment, we discovered that we could do our baking in stages without having to refire the oven.

First, the sourdough breads would go in, and the steam heat, at full strength, would allow the loaves to rise. The steam, produced from a boiler connected directly to the original pipes in the oven walls, would come billowing out of the mouth of the oven, almost like a fire-breathing dragon. After perhaps five minutes, the steam would be shut off, and the ovens would revert to dry heat, which crisped the crusts of the bread. The aromas were incredible. After the first bake, as the ovens cooled slightly, we could continue with French loaves and finally with our more delicate, thin-crusted loaves. Later in the shift, we would refire the ovens and bake our morning pastries, muffins, and scones. In a modern bakery, the power would be left on all night to heat the electric ovens. Our method was more economicalnatural gas being much cheaper than electricityand the products were exceptional.