A Few Great Bakeries

The Mexican Day of the Dead is on November 2, and bakeries in Mexico make special sweet breads and colorfully decorated sugar skulls that people place on altars to honor their deceased love ones. In Lafayette, Indiana, at Mama Ines Bakery, Rosa Montoya shows us a “mortito” or little dead man, and some of the skulls that she sells from mid-October through early November.

We usually build all of our stories by assembling all the sound bites and information that we find interesting and important. Sometimes we have to cut things we really liked just to meet our time limitations. These are comments and loving tributes from various folks in Syracuse about the tiny bakery on Pearl Street that makes excellent Italian bread.

Our crew visited Minerva Bakery just before Thanksgiving in 2014, and the place was crowded. All the customers in the store, all the bakers in the baking room, the icers in the decorating room, and the pie-master in the hallway, all were willing to talk and consider the many things that Minerva a very special small bakery that has survived.

When we asked if owner Marco Littig had a favorite thing at the bakery, he began to sing the praises of the molasses cookies. It’s a long clip where he tastes the cookie and tries to explain its flavor and goodness. Then sandwich chef Monty Colby talks briefly about the reputation of Bernice’s Bakery in the town of Missoula.

Owner-baker Naruske Monguchi and translator Benjamin Winterton consider how to translate and explain what “Mahoroba” means in English. Although it could be translated simply as “good place,” there’s more to the word than that. And then a few regular customers talk about their favorite treats, savory as well as sweet.

Here are 2 sequences that we cut from the program: a look at how Catherine Eliot lines up the rustica bread and loads it into the oven, and a bird’s-eye time-lapse segment that shows how workers in the front of the bakery set up the front counter in the morning.

At Orange Peel Bakery on Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday evenings, Juli Vanderhoop and her helpers invite everyone to a pizza night. You bring a topping and you share it. So while interviewing Juli about her bakery, she shared some of her thoughts on sharing, something that we all encourage children to do.

As a young girl, Rhonda Jones learned some French from her dad who sometimes drove a Trailways bus into Canada. As a high school student, she decided she wanted to study in France, and she explains how all of that lead to the name of her business.

Producer Rick Sebak asks chef George Jackson if he is a native, and Jackson talks about his status as a full-blooded Tlingit, an indigenous person in southeastern Alaska, and while he makes bagels, he talks of similarities between making the dough and treating salmon.

Since the late 1960s, the bakers at Sluys Poulksbo Bakery have been making thin, flat, crispy, dark brown cinnamon rolls called Krispies. Bakery founder Marion Sluys explains how they began making them, and Dan Sluys explains how to take them off their baking sheets and what can happen if you don’t bake them correctly.

Bakeries are full of wonderful things: smells, sweet possibilities, friendly bakers who sometimes wait on you. A lot of work has usually gone into the sometimes soft, crunchy, salty, icing-covered products for sale, and the purchases you make often result in satisfaction and happiness. We celebrate all this oven-baked artistry in this hour-long documentary.