The Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook
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Introduction t five o’clock every morning, while most people in A New York City are still dreaming, industrial mixers are spinning inside Hot Bread Kitchen in East Harlem. Lutfunnessa, one of our bakers, boils a pot of water and measures local whole wheat flour for a batch of chapati. While she rolls the dough into perfect rounds, Nancy drains dried corn kernels she has soaked overnight. As head of tortilla production, she will make thousands of delicious, toothsome tortillas in three varieties, each from a different heritage corn. At 6 a.m., Ela comes in to start mixing yeasted doughs for the day, starting with nan-e qandi, a cakey Persian bread. Twenty other doughs will follow, which will be shaped and baked into more than seventy different breads. Throughout the day the mixers combine whole-grain levains, pungent spices, local flours, and New York City water to bake traditional versions of a global array of breads—sourdoughs, a German rye, flatbreads galore, and sweet Mexicanconchas . There is no off switch; every hour of every day, something is rising at Hot Bread Kitchen. At first glance, Hot Bread Kitchen looks like other bakeries. But, behind the braided challahs and loaves of multigrain, a powerful mission pre vails. Hot Bread Kitchen is a social enterprise that provides a life-changing education and opens doors for low-income minority women. The social part of the equation means that bakery trainees learn the skills they need to get management-track positions in the food industry or to start their own food businesses. The enterprise part means that we use the money earned from each loaf of bread to pay for training. Our business pays for our mission. The secret sauce at Hot Bread Kitchen is that the very women we train inspire the artisan breads we bake every day. Our product line is diverse and authentic because we use recipes that have been passed down by genera- tions of women. 9 The flash of inspiration for Hot Bread Kitchen came from a fortuitous mis- that someone else would make it happen. When no one did, I decided to pull understanding. In 2000, I applied for a job at a micro-finance organization together the pieces to launch Hot Bread Kitchen. called Women’s World Banking. I didn’t get the job, and some time after- First things first, I needed to learn how to bake professionally. I took ward a family friend asked about my interview at Women’s World Baking. bread-baking classes at the New School and did a stage (apprenticeship) in The missing letter sparked something in me. Never mind banking. Women’s the bakery at Daniel Boulud’s eponymous Michelin three-star restaurant world baking conjured up an image of an international female baking col- under the head baker, Mark Fiorentino. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, Eli lective—a concept that resonated with me because it married my passion for Rodriguez, had worked at Daniel, and he introduced me to Mark, who gently food with my commitment to social justice. corrected my pathetic baguette-rolling skills and taught me most of what I Every culture has a staple bread, and in most countries women keep alive know about baking. And despite my crazy days of working early mornings that baking tradition. You would expect that in the United States, especially in a bakery and then running a high school, the experience confirmed that I here in New York, a city rich in immigrant populations, women would parlay loved baking and fueled my desire to pursue the immigrant women’s baking those skills into baking jobs. But visit any professional bakery in North collective. America and you will see how few women there are—less than ten percent of With the requisite amount of baking knowledge under my belt, we baked all bread bakers. the first official Hot Bread Kitchen bread in 2007 in my own, very hot home My dream was that Hot Bread Kitchen could right that imbalance, and, of kitchen in a walk-up apartment on Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn. It was actu- course, bake great bread with an emphasis on regional specialties you can’t ally a tortilla from nixtamalized corn—the traditional, healthful way to make find everywhere. And in helping women professionalize their homegrown whole-grain tortillas—made by my first employee and friend, Elidia Ramos, skills and passion for food, Hot Bread Kitchen would create a pipeline of new with a recipe straight from her native Puebla, Mexico. I began selling corn bakers to change the face of the baking industry. tortillas (page 92) and multigrain loaves (page 150) in the summer of 2007 at But at age twenty-one, with no money, no baking experience, a freshly a farmers’ market in Harlem. People liked our breads, and I was happy to chat minted BA, and a lot of idealism under my belt, I was in no position to launch with everyone about my vision for the bakery. That summer, I was a baker, a social enterprise bakery. As you do with dough, I let the idea rest—proof, as retailer, buyer, janitor, and chief grant writer (though my mom assisted with we say in the industry—and began my career in a completely different area. that last one). We started to grow, and Elidia soon brought her niece, sister, I grew up in Toronto in a family fascinated by food. My great-grandfather, and eventually her daughter to our late-night baking shifts (we even used the who had immigrated to Canada from Russia, ran a Jewish bakery there for ovens at Daniel a couple of times to bake our breads). Our bread community years, Perlmutter’s Bakery. They made beautiful ryes. My mother also likes was expanding. to take a bit of credit for Hot Bread Kitchen because she and I baked challah Eager to grow beyond my apartment’s kitchen counters, I rented over- together on Friday afternoons for Shabbat dinner. I have vivid memories of night shifts of commercial kitchen space in Queens. Our distribution mixing dough with her, feeling it on my hands as I helped roll it out, the smell channels grew to include specialty shops—Saxelby Cheese in Essex Street of the loaf as it rose and then emerged, browned and sweet from the oven. Market was our first wholesale client for lavash. In 2008, I hired my first non- Bread is in my blood. baking staff person, Katrina Schwartz—a talented jack-of-all-trades—and we After college—and after that fateful failed job interview—I pursued a worked really hard to get things off the ground. In June 2009, we took office career in public policy and international affairs. I was the Youth Ambassa- space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, still baking bread overnight in Queens. dor for the Canadian Landmine Foundation, trying to help free war-ravaged Hot Bread Kitchen grew quickly, and in December 2010 we moved to areas of landmines. At the same time, I became interested in immigration our current and permanent home in East Harlem (also known as El Barrio). policy. I went to work for the United Nations Development Pr ogram in Costa Our full-scale commercial bakery is located in La Marqueta, an old indoor Rica. After completing a master’s in public administration at Columbia Uni- market space under the elevated trains built by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia versity, I worked at NGOs and for the United Nations focusing on human in 1936. The market’s original purpose was to “clean up” the neighborhood rights, education, and immigration issues. Then I worked as part of the lead- by bringing street vendors under one roof. While it was originally some- ership team at a high school in Brooklyn. Along the way I kept returning to thing of an anti-immigrant “get-them-off-the-streets” policy decision, the the idea of women’s world baking. I told many people about it, secretly hoping market thrived for decades. In its heyday, the market stretched along Park 10 THE HOT BREAD KITCHEN COOKBOOK introduction 11 Avenue from 111th to 116th Streets, and it’s said that ten thousand people food entrepreneurs who are ready to formalize their businesses, and help a day stopped there. Unfortunately for La Marqueta, when grocery stores bring their products to market by providing certified commercial kitchen started carry ing plantains and other tropical fruits, and the demographics space and business resources. Many people obsessed with good food share and eating habits changed in El Barrio, shoppers visited less frequently. All the Hot Bread Kitchen space! of the market buildings closed except the one that we are housed in—Build- We’ve gone from a far-fetched idea to a thriving bakery and train- ing 4. ing program in a few years. That workforce of two—Elidia and me in my When I first visited the dramatic space in 2009, I fell in love. There were apartment—has burgeoned to sixty-one. And as our trainee staff grows, so a handful of vendors like Mama Grace, who sells West African provisions, does what we make. Our breads are sold in New York City’s farmers’ markets has been there for decades, and has a steady following; while other stalls and GrowNYC Greenmarkets and at retail stores from Dean & DeLuca to were occupied by vendors engaged in various forms of illicit commerce— Whole Foods—we even ship internationally. We also supply bread to more but the ghost of vibrant enterprise was there. The forward-looking City of than eighty restaurants across the city.