Discover Top Posts Tagged with #marla bakery

Day 17. Back patio discovery at Marla Bakery. Jan. 31, 2016.

#patio #photo a day #marla bakery #san francisco #outer richmond #city view

TONIGHT: Nopa’s #SousChefs are gathering for #SousDay, a popup at Marla Bakery in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond. Menu and tickets on Nopalize.

#popup #san franciso #marla bakery #sous chef #sousday

So pleased to see (and taste) @Marlabakery at Boulettes Larder delicious, new Boulie Bar. Well done Amy Brown!

#Amy Brown #Marla Bakery #Bread #Eating

Building a Bakery From Scratch: Part 3 of 3

This is the third and final installment of a three-part interview series with former Nopa pastry chef Amy Brown.

N: You came to Nopa in 2007. Your french toast has left a mark to this day. What else are you proud of?

A: Is this the part where I pat myself on the back? I’m very proud of the Complete the Circle Lunches [a monthly event where Nopa's staff and its farmers and winemakers share a meal]. I didn’t start them, but I grabbed the reins. I was present at every one that took place and spearheaded all the kitchen shenanigans. Before I started the brunch program, I was the one who went to the market on Saturday, and I loved to have that contact with the farmers. They remind me of what is out there to work with, in terms of ingredients, in terms of community. It’s also a humbling experience to sit at a table and talk to a farmer who’s been farming organically for 25 years, which means that maybe for a decade he was farming for very small audiences, and finding it very difficult, but he keeps at it.

Photo: Alanna Hale

N: Those connections will serve you well when you have your own place.

A: Yes. Another thing that I really appreciate out of my time working with Laurence, Jeff and Ally is that you still don’t feel the age of Nopa. I worked at other places where you see a peak and then you see a plateau of energy and excitement. At Nopa, that has never been the case. Jeff, Laurence and Ally are constantly asking themselves, “what more can we do?” Every time I read something about Nopa, I’m like yeah, of course there doing that now too. Great! It’s wonderful that they set the bar that high and I aspire to pull something like that off in six years.

N: How did you decide the time was right for you to go out on your own?

A: Two things came into that. One thing was just having worked in the field for 14 years. As wonderful as Nopa was, I started to feel it in my body. The hours were hard and at the end of the day as a pastry chef, I could leave feeling really good about the work I had done, but I did not really have an exit strategy, a way to grow out of the business. For years and years I had no interest in opening my own place. I don’t trust myself with finances at all. But then I met Joe at Nopa and he’s really good with money. I had found someone with the same passion about the vision but with a lot of different strengths, so I started to believe we could do this.

Now seven months into it, I am working harder than I ever did, but I also feel that we’re creating something that hopefully can sustain us and when I’m 50, I won’t still be getting up at 3.30 in the morning. We’ll see.

Marla Bakery: 3619-21 Balboa Street, between 37th and 38th Avenue. www.marlabakery.com

Author Evy Ballegeer was born and raised in Belgium. She has been cooking her whole life but only decided to leave journalism and build a life around food after volunteering as the lunch lady at a local shelter and at MLK Middle School in Berkeley. She trained at Tante Marie's, interned and worked at Nopa and now gets paid to throw parties and bake cookies. She has a husband and two kids and wants to extend her family with a dog, three goats and at least five chickens. They will all live happily ever after on a Sonoma farm B&B one day. Follow Evy on Facebook and Instagram.

#Marla Bakery #Amy Brown #Pastry

Building a Bakery from Scratch, Part Two

This is the second installment of a three-part interview series with former Nopa pastry chef Amy Brown. Catch up with the first part of the interview here.

Nopalize: The name Marla is an acronym for all the people in your family who inspired you to cook and bake. Can you talk a little about how you started out in the kitchen?

Amy: I baked and cooked as far back as I can remember. I’ve always been in the kitchen. My mom and dad separated when I was one and were in different states by the time I was five. In my mind they have two very separate ways of approaching cooking. My mom grew up on a dairy farm. She cooked simple food, but always from scratch. I never saw things out of boxes or cans.

My father on the other hand would read a cookbook or watch a TV show and go on a quest to develop the best Middle Eastern meal he could. Now, this was Phoenix, Arizona in the ‘80s. I remember going on these wild goose chases for the one Middle Eastern store in all of the Phoenix metropolitan area to find this one particular type of pomegranate molasses or something like that. And then he got into Chinese cooking and he wanted to make a truly authentic hot and pungent soup. We had this recipe with 40 ingredients and we had to go looking for tiger lilies. (laughs) He also decided he couldn’t get good coffee beans in Arizona and so for a while he was roasting his own beans. That sense of discovery, of following something through and making it as authentic as possible, is something that I love about cooking.

When I was at the bakery in Turkey I saw again how you can follow a culture by its food. As cultures move and the diaspora grows, you loose the language in a generation and you loose the music, but food you can trace generations and generations. It’s literally a tangible thread. Whenever I don’t know what to do next, I have to hit myself in the head. There is so much out there.

N: They say most people either cook or bake. Are you a baker who cooks or a cook who bakes?

A: A lot of people make that distinction for me. I apparently do not fit the typical mold of a pastry chef. Maybe it’s because I didn’t come to it through school, but through baking and cooking on my own? I feel like I’m an intuitive baker for good and bad, and people tend to see that more as the way a cook cooks: tasting and changing and tasting and changing. For me it works well for pastry too. If it doesn’t taste good, fix it.

I was a horrible baker as a kid. I was very impatient. I tried to make sourdough bread in junior high. I used a crappy recipe but I tried to make it again and again. I never let it rise enough and always ended up with these bricks. My poor mom.

I went to college for Community and Environmental Studies and when I graduated I wanted to travel to Italy and bake bread. I was able to go to a friend’s family in Puglia and work in the bakery of a good friend.

N: Why bread? Italy is not exactly known for its bread, is it?

A: No, it isn’t. However, Puglia is the main area of wheat growing and the region is considered to have the best bread. They laugh at the Tuscan bread that has no salt. Italy does not have the same regional differences in bread like France, but they do have local sweets. We made this wonderful flatbread with local olive oil... Puglia is considered to have the best. We also used these tomatoes that are hard-skinned and you see people drying them on the outside of their houses. We would press these very intense tomatoes into the flatbread, with local garlic, olive oil and dried oregano.

Coming from the US, that was the first time I experienced what a difference these strong local ingredients could make. It was the best flatbread I’ve ever had.

N: Is this also the place where you learned to make your now-famous panettone?

Yes, although they never gave me the recipe. At the time, I was 22, I envisioned staying forever and the father said: “We’ll only give you the recipe if you promise to never come back to Italy and open a bakery”.

N: Sounds like a pretty formative experience.

A: For sure. When I went back to the US, I first started working as the bread baker at a café up North and then I got a job at Citizen Cake where I became the head of the bread department. I would make pane pugliese and there were certain memory triggers. I would look for a certain texture, listen for a certain sound. It was maybe frustrating for the people who worked with me, because I couldn’t really tell them when it was right but as soon as I saw or smelled it, I would say: this is it.

#Amy Brown #Pastry #Marla Bakery

Building a Bakery from Scratch

After five years as the pastry chef at Nopa, Amy Brown left last May to launch her own project, Marla Bakery. With her partner Joe Wolf, the former pickler at Wise Sons, she sells her baked goods at pop-ups all over town, from brunches at State Bird Provisions to the weekly Mission Community Market. Now that the duo has signed a lease on a place of their own, it’s high time for Nopalize to catch up with Amy, a.k.a the one who got us all addicted to Nopa’s spectacular french toast.

Nopalize: Congratulations on finding a place! Tell me all about it.

Amy: It’s in the former Crown Lock in the Outer Richmond, just across the street from the Balboa Theatre, about five blocks from our house. We pretty much have a shell of a building right now, which can be good or bad, depending on who you talk to. It allows us to put in the kitchen we want, so that’s definitely a good thing. We hope to open seven to nine months from now and will have room for 35 in the dining room and possibly another 10 outside.

N: Do you plan to become a full service restaurant?

A: We’ll do breakfast, brunch and lunch. We’d like to start with Sunday suppers and maybe branch out to two or three nights a week, but I don’t want to become a full service restaurant. We have a lot of friends in flux and we would love it if they could use the space as a pop-up, or a place where you can teach a class. Rather than having a dark restaurant five nights a week, I’d like to have other things going on. When people walk by a lit place, it peaks their interest.

N: Was it always the plan to do pop-ups before opening a place of your own?

A: Not at all. I went away for a couple of months when I left Nopa. I worked with some good friends up in Seattle, took classes on a farm, went to Turkey where I worked in a bakery in Istanbul and followed ideas that I was curious about. When I got back, I was going to write a business plan and go from there. But two weeks into it, I realized my brain just does not work that way. I felt overwhelmed and I soon realized that I work best from the kitchen out. We found a commercial kitchen space where I was going to spend a couple of months on recipe development. We hosted a tasting party and a couple of the people who were there wanted to sell our baked goods and that’s how we started doing wholesale and markets. I’m grateful for that business as we’re not just sitting around watching the money hemorrhage out of us.

N: How will Marla Bakery be different from other bakeries?

A: The honest answer? It’s different because it’s me. Marla bakery is incredibly close to Joe and I, that’s the main difference. Bread will play an important role. I’ve also always wanted to follow something to its roots. I like knowing how things are made. So if I serve a bagel and cream cheese for brunch, I’m not going to buy the cream cheese, I’m going to make it. I feel like you can taste the difference, maybe not in a better or worse way, but I just like tasting the hands of the people who made it all the way through. For one thing, it keeps people interested. It’s so much more fascinating to make something from the beginning than to pull it out of a jar.

N: Even if you need 25 hours a day to accomplish that.

A: Yes. I don’t choose the easiest, most efficient way to anything. Ever. That’s my drawback.

N: But it probably gives you more satisfaction in the end.

A: I think so. Right before I left Nopa, the Prime Minister of Turkey was in the city because his son had just graduated from Stanford. We got word from the Secret Service that they wanted to dine at Nopa. That meant all kinds of things: the menu had to be scoured for anything that was not Halal. There could be no wine or wine products like vinegar in the dishes and everyone was trying to figure out what we could and couldn’t serve. The private chef of the Prime Minister came to oversee everything. I told him I had plans to go to Turkey where I really wanted to learn how to make baklava, from scratch. Of course nobody in Turkey buys frozen phyllo dough. “I’ll show you,” he said. So there he was, in his dark blue suit, cornstarch flying everywhere because that’s how you keep the layers separate. I remember watching him. It was amazing.

And so when I went to Turkey, I had to get to the bottom of this. The baklava bakeries are just incredible. I was there close to the end of Ramadan. It was mid-July, the hottest part of the year with the longest days. Because you can only break fast an hour before sunrise and you don’t eat again until sunset, the bakers worked all day with no food or water. It was also their busiest time. After Ramadan ends, they have a festival of sweets: you visit all of your neighbors and family relations and you present sweets. So this baklava bakery was going full tilt. These guys who usually work 6 hours a day were now working 14 hours on an empty stomach in a basement with no ventilation. Nobody talked because there is so much corn starch in the air that it coats everything. It gets in your nostrils, your throat. They kept bringing me water, even though they themselves could not have any. I was amazed by that kind of hospitality.

Check back for part two of the interview with Amy — including how her past shaped her current life as a baker — tomorrow.

By Evy Ballegeer

#Marla Bakery #Amy Brown #Nopa #Pastry #Brunch