Day In the Life: Pastry Chef

      The Co-op buildings through the years, 
            Crossroads Store on top, current Main store
on the bottom

Many of you know that since I moved to Bozeman I began working at the Bozeman Community Food Cooperative. Bozeman has one of the most renowned co-ops in the country and has seen a tremendous amount of growth and success since it first opened its doors in 1979 as a mom & pop-type cooperative called the Crossroads Food Center. Over the years they have changed locations and now have a main store in the heart of Bozeman, a Co-op Downtown branch, an Administrative building, and the Central Kitchen where all of the delicious Co-op food is prepared. The Central Kitchen (or CK) is where I began work in December as a Bread Baker and have since transitioned into working in both the Pastry & Bread Departments. Pastry allows for fun and creative projects while Bread is more of a science. Today at work I snapped some pics of the "magic" behind all of the goodies that you see in the stores, from soft & savory Artisan breads to
decadent desserts, we bake it all with style at the Co-op.

Today I was working a Pastry shift which started at 5:30 a.m. which was actually a nice change from working at 3:30 a.m. in the Bread room yesterday morning! I usually just have time to toast a slice of bread to eat on the walk over and with the help of the kitchens' fluorescent lighting and some hot tea I generally perk up by the time I hit the bench. The "bench" is where we make all of our goodies. We have two "Bench" shifts that work together to complete the list for the day which is comprised of Breakfast items (muffins, scones, croissants) that are delivered at 6:30, items that need to be frosted or finished off and sent on the 9 a.m. truck (cookies, cakes, parfaits, sweet breads), and then items that we need to prep for the next shift.

Scooping Oatmeal Raisin cookie dough

Today we made so many delicious treats, like Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, Glazed Lemon Bread, Cowgirl Cookies, Cream Cheese Frosted Sugar Cookies, Chocolate Zucchini Walnut Bread, Chocolate Cake, Banana Bars, Tart Shells, Cherry Hand Pies, Parfaits, German Chocolate Cake and more- wow! The pictures below feature the following: balls of our scrumptious oatmeal raisin cookie dough, an array of yummies including Glazed Lemon Bread, Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, and Cowgirl Cookies which are made with chocolate chips, oats, coconut & maple syrup, and lastly our decadent Chocolate Pudding Parfaits that we make with fresh-made, sweet whipped cream and layer with our chocolate cake and chocolate pudding- yum!

I wanted to showcase the variety of mixers that we have at the Co-op that are far from the trusty old-school handheld mixers that most of us grew up with. We have 4 different mixers currently in use between the Bakery Department as a whole so I am consistently working with these machines. The first picture is my absolute favorite mixer: my hand. I really like being able to feel the consistency of the batter and see it coming together. The machines have so many attachments and are loud and noisy, so for recipes that use oil instead of butter or shortening, I always go for the old-fashioned hand mixer to get the job done. Below are pictured the four standard mixers. Most of you will be familiar with the first one pictured, the classic silver Kitchen Aid, and from there we move into our 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest industrial kitchen mixers. We do large patches of cookies and sweet breads in #2, #3 is mostly used for small batches of bread and to mix and our bigas and starters (details of these to come in "Day In the Life: Bread Baker") and also our extra-large batches of cookie & pie dough, and #4 is reserved for large batches of bread like baguettes or ciabatta.

For our blog post finale, I decided to walk over to the store and take some pics of our pretty pastries on the shelf. I always feel like a mom watching her kid play at a soccer match when I go and see the desserts I baked wrapped in shiny plastic being picked up by a customer. It is important for the bakers to go and check out the finished product, it allows you to see how things handle the trip over from the CK and compare pastries and bread from week to week. I can go in and see how someone made their Tarts a little differently than I did and next time I make Tarts I might tweak my style a little bit if I see something I like. I am finally to the point where I have tried just about every item (non-chocolate of course) and have hit my pastry quota for the year. Now that things are warming up I can move on to sorbet and frozen yogurt- yum!!!

~Mary Lane~
Bozeman, MT 4.8.13