Making 28,000 Pastries a Week in a Small Brooklyn Bakery | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Every time I tell someone that I'm a pastry chef, they're like, oh my God, that's so cute. And I'm like, if you knew I had to pick up a 50-pound bag of flour multiple times a day, maybe you wouldn't be saying that. The Good Batch is a neighborhood bakery, but it's also a mini factory. We are sending stuff to all of our wholesale clients all around New York. We make about 13,000 to 14,000 cookies every week. For wholesale, it's about 28,000 items weekly. We can get all of these things done with planning, a great team, and really big mixers. I'm Brianna Fortes. I'm the pastry chef here at The Good Batch. Come on in. It is 8 a.m. We just opened, but we've had people here since 2 a.m. baking all of our stuff for the front of house, like our scones and our biscuits. As you can see, we are getting one of our three deliveries today. This is where we get most of our flour and sugar from, so big delivery. I have to go into the back to check our wholesale orders. Come with me. This is our main kitchen. We have a bunch of different machines that help us produce all of the different pastries and cookies that we need to make every single day. Over here, we have our wholesale orders just for today, and we have, for just cookies, a little over 2,600, and for everything in general, we have a bit over 3,000. So I take this paper, and I put it into our calculator on our computer, and then it populates how many full trays of cookies based on how many cookies can fit on that tray and how many partial trays we need as well. We just reached over 200 wholesale clients all over New York City. I'm currently writing the rest of the numbers for our bakers. This is how we tell our bakers how many cookies to make of each one. And as you can see, we have a lot to do. I'm gonna put that over by the ovens just so that they know the second they walk in, this is what we gotta do. I'm gonna go do a quick inventory just so I know how many things I need to order for tomorrow. This is our basement. This is where we hold all of our paper goods, any of our miscellaneous food items. We have a whole chocolate wall over there, and that metal door is our freezer, which is where I'm gonna go check if we have enough cakes for Anita, our cake decorator, to make cakes. Today, we only need to make about eight cakes. I think we need to focus more on cupcakes today. We're gonna have to make about 12 dozen cupcakes today. Welcome to our freezer. So in that very dark corner over there is where we have all of our cakes. One, we have another one in that. Cupcakes are on this rack, and we are severely deprived of them this week, so we are gonna have to focus on those. We're good. Let's get back into the warmth. All right, it's 8.30, and I need to head upstairs to start doing the lemon bar filling for our front of house. This lemon bar is actually one of the brainchilds of my boss, Anna, and Caroline Schiff, the pastry chef at Gage and Tolner. So we add the flour and the salt. Don't laugh. I'm too little. Baking is a science, and I can make the same recipe about eight times, and if I do the tiniest little difference, it comes out so different. I keep a scale just to double-check all of our mise has been accurate. 500 grams of flour is 500 grams of flour, no matter how dense you pack it. I'm gonna add the lemon juice and the zest. The filling for this lemon bar is more of a baked curd than it is a custard, just because there isn't any milk in it. If there was, then it'd be a custard. So now I'm gonna crack some whole eggs into here. We tried it with yolks, and it ended up being a little too thick. We wanted it to be more juicy. Oh, what's going on? You all right? Yeah, no, it's okay. It's just because the dough's so sticky, but... Oh, yeah. The dough is a little bit firmer than we normally have it, so it keeps sticking to this guy and going right up there when we really want it to just land gently on this electric glue tape we got going on. This is Anna. She is my boss and the owner of The Good Batch. You have to be really nimble as a business owner. I bought this machine in like 2012 because I was making too many cookies. It's originally actually a hamburger patty machine, but it had been repurposed for baking equipment. I'm gonna jump in. Let me, I'll switch with you. I'm heating up the cookie dough to melt the butter a little bit. The problem is that we have this new AC unit in the kitchen, so it's a lot cooler in here than it normally is, which is great for the human side of things in here, but our cookie dough is reacting differently to it, so we're gonna see if it works. So obviously things happen, but I do need to get this into the oven, so I'm gonna head back to this now. I am putting the eggs through a strainer. If you don't, you kind of get these like chunks of egg whites and egg yolks that kind of don't make the curd as homogenous as you want it. We do this just to make sure that everything tastes the same no matter what part of the bar you're getting. So now I'm adding the regular white sugar, and then there's also some 10X that we already sifted. 10X is confectioner's sugar. It's just processed 10 times, and confectioner's a really long word. Confectioner's sugar has a tendency to be really clumpy, so whenever you're adding it to a liquid, you really want to sift it really well so that you don't have those lumps in there. That's a mango, so there's a dragon fruit, a mango, a star fruit, a kiwi, a plum, and some grapes. It's because I like fruity desserts, but it's also because I'm part of the LGBTQ community, and I like to be able to say I'm fruity. This is the pecan cornmeal crust. This crust was baked last night. We normally do this so that we're not putting this curd into something that's warm. It ends up changing the texture of the bottom of this curd. All right, gorgeous, beautiful. Now we're gonna very gently waddle-walk over to the ovens and place this on the rack so that someone can bake it later when we have some room. Now that that's done, I'm gonna clean up, and then I'm gonna sheet some dough so that I can start working on the elotescon. I'm gonna grab this, coming through. This is our confetti dough. We use it for our B-Day ice cream sandwiches. So we have two of these cookies, some lemon buttercream, and then vanilla ice cream. This is our sheeter. It basically is a mechanical rolling pin that doesn't make you have to have an arm workout while doing this. I just flattened it a bit so that it's not going back and forth as much. We put it between two pieces of parchment because we don't want to keep adding more flour to this because it changes the texture of the cookie. I think we sell 1,200 to 1,400 ice cream sandwiches a week between our location here, our location in Manhattan, and then at Smorgasburg. If I were to roll out this dough by hand, it would probably take me about 10, 15 minutes, depending on how cold it is in here. With this machine, it takes me about three max, and that saves us a lot of time. This lever controls this rolling pin right here. The lower the number, the less space there is in between the two rolling pins. So we just keep on making it smaller and smaller. And then just... Next one. This is actually the same dough that we use for our confetti cookie. Anna has a very firm belief that any cookie can be turned into an ice cream sandwich cookie, as long as you make it the right thickness. And now we're just wiggling it. Stay. Now that these are done, I have to let them chill for a bit before we punch them out. But now I'm gonna get started on the dough for my elote scones. ♪♪ There are way too many recipes in this bakery that we are currently working on. This is the recipe for the elote scone. Elote is a Mexican street corn that originally has chili, lime, and mayo. So the key to an awesome scone is super cold butter and super cold cream. This butter is what helps our scones stay moist, and it also creates the steam in the scone that makes it so, like, airy and fluffy. Tiniest little sliver changes the whole thing. So we order about 16 boxes of butter a week 280 pounds of butter. So I am 100% Puerto Rican. There was a lot of Mexican restaurants where I grew up, and I really like bringing those flavors to other people. The elote scone is actually one of my creations. All right, now it's sour cream, corn puree, and then we add lemon zest, lime juice. This is the roasted corn. And to this, we add guajillo chili and also red pepper. We're gonna pour cotija cheese into this bowl. We're gonna take this over to the mixer so we can start mixing. In a certain degree, you do have to kind of be a little bit of a mechanic. When you're working in a kitchen, you also need to know how these machines work to begin with. Now we're gonna dump in all of this cheese. When it comes to scones and biscuits, you put all the dry ingredients in, and then you put the cold, cold butter. It makes it so that there's chunks of butter throughout the whole entire mix. Now we're gonna raise this up. Remember those old cars when you had to roll up the window? All right. We're gonna let this go for a little bit. Butter. I forget that I'm mic'd up all the time, and I'm just saying weird things. This is our roasted corn. We're gonna toss that in and start mixing it real low just so that this is fully mixed in before we add the wets into there. This is soft, but I can kind of crumble it down. It's ready to go. Oh, coming this way. I'm gonna put it here. Telling you, those muscles are hidden. Thank you. This is what we call our frame. This is technically what you use to make, like, layered cakes. Each batch makes about 96 scones. Everyone has their own method of doing scones. I like to get a border going, and you don't wanna really pack it down or pack it in. Air is kind of like a secret ingredient when it comes to scones, so you kind of wanna keep that in there. Otherwise, it's just a little too dense. We are gonna roll it out just the tiniest bit just to make sure there's no cracks or crevices. So we're gonna just wiggle this off. Because we are a neighborhood bakery, consistency is really important. When a regular comes in and something isn't the way that they're expecting it to be, we take it really seriously. All right, so this is half. Now, this little doohickey is called a bicycle. We use this to measure out the length of our scones. One, two, three, four. Perfect. And then we kind of just mark where we're going. And I'm gonna go in, and I'm going to cut each strip out. So each pack gets three squares that are cut in half diagonally. So we will grab these out and bake these every morning before we open. So these are all packaged up. Anna is going to help me finish these up, and I'm gonna go downstairs so that we can get started on cake decorating. All right, so we are currently in our basement in our cake decorating station. The lovely lady behind me is Anita. She single-handedly does all of the cakes and cupcakes, unless help is required, and then I jump in. What I do every week is something that we call a comfort cake, which is basically a very creative jumble of whatever flavors I'm feeling. We sell it by the slice as a cake special every week. This week, we are making a vanilla cake with a pistachio buttercream, raspberry ganache, some pomegranate seeds, and then we have this pomegranate. It's in between a gel and a jam, and I call it a jiggle. Did you ever see that movie Flubber? Yeah. That's what it reminds me of. All right, this is our vanilla cake. We are going to trim this little dome part off so that it lays flat. I usually make a guideline very lightly around the cake, and then I will start cutting in towards the middle. I am going to grab a tip out of our tip treasure chest. This will help me make a guideline and kind of like a border around the inside of the cake just so that the filling doesn't ooze out. Gorge. The only wall we like. This is our raspberry ganache. Just pour it in. And so these are pomegranate seeds, and we're just gonna sprinkle those in here along with cocoa nibs. I'm gonna do a crumb coat, which is basically a thin layer of frosting so that none of the cake crumbs get into the frosting on the outside. It is like a primer. When it comes to decorating the top or the sides, go as fast as you can. Do not hesitate. It can smell fear. I'm going to start frosting. This is that pomegranate jiggle that I was telling you about. Now we're gonna add these tiny little decorative details that kind of just pull everything together. So I'm just adding a little bit more cocoa nibs just to bring some dimension into the middle of the cake. This one's more on the simpler side, so I think we can call it a quit. I'm gonna set this into the fridge to chill before we slice it up to give to front of house. And then I'm gonna go upstairs to R&D on an ice cream sandwich that we've been working on. We are R&Ding an ice cream sandwich that's gonna have an olive oil cookie, a balsamic ganache, and a nectarine paste, along with some vanilla ice cream. I had originally tried it with some dark chocolate, but it was a little too powerful for the rest of the sandwich. So now I'm gonna try doing white chocolate and cocoa butter to bring down that sweetness, but still get the balsamic flavor through. This clipboard is where I have all of the notes of the current projects that I'm working on. As you can see, it is a little bit of a mess. So I'm always constantly writing just so that I remember what I did and how I can change it for the next time. This ice cream sandwich actually is because we got a collab offer from a olive oil. I automatically thought of olive oil and balsamic, and I was like, that'd be a really cool ice cream sandwich. So this is our chocolate. We're gonna grab one of these pots and we're gonna put some heavy cream into it with white chocolate since it burns so easily. If you were to boil it, it'd probably get like a different taste to it. We don't want that. So we're now putting the heavy cream into the chocolate. Now that this chocolate is all melted, we're gonna keep adding balsamic vinegar tablespoon by tablespoon until we are satisfied with the flavor. So that's almost there. I don't think I'm gonna add a full tablespoon. I might add a half. I think we're good. So these are the nectarines that we'll be using for the nectarine paste. With bringing fresh fruit into ice cream sandwiches, it's a bit tricky because there's so much water in fruit and you have to get that really minimized and cooked out so that it doesn't get this unpleasant texture when it's frozen. Yeah, it'll get icy. I've never done a nectarine ice cream sandwich, so this is a real challenge for Rihanna. I'm just gonna throw them in a pan and add some sugar and the tiniest bit of lemon juice and a bit of pectin. Pectin is a natural gelling agent. It comes from fruit, most of the time from apples and citrus. And we're gonna use that in here just so it gets that thicker, pasty texture. And we're gonna grab the smallest amount of three grams. Based off my trial and error, 0.9% pectin in comparison to fruit is the perfect amount for any small batch. Once the nectarines start getting heated up, they'll release their juice and we'll blend this up. And we're going to sprinkle this in. Found them! Olive oil cookies. One side is gonna be this balsamic ganache and then can you spread that on this one for me? Yeah. Thank you. This is already looking good. I can tell like there's no water kind of leaking out from it. So I think this is gonna freeze really well. Let's let that one set. Let's put that in the freezer and then we'll eat this. Little baby bites. The combination is really nice. I feel maybe I put too much balsamic on it. I think we're gonna have to keep that one a very thin layer. Okay. It's a bit strange. And strange is good. Strange makes good desserts, but we don't want it to overpower. And also that will help showcase the olive oil flavor of the cookie. That's very well done. We're gonna wrap this up, head upstairs and check in with our team just because it's around two o'clock now and they're probably leaving. How are we doing with cookie dough? We need the lava and we need to follow the pineapple. Okay. All right. I will put that on the list for tomorrow. I check in with everyone just so that I know what we've gotten done, what we haven't gotten done, what we need to push to the next day. And I'm the one who writes on the board to update everyone. Now I'm gonna grab the comfort cake from the fridge that we made earlier so I can cut it and put it up in front of house before I leave. Hey, Ryan. This is our comfort cake. All right. It is 3.30. I'm heading home. I am beat. I hope you learned a little about what it takes to be a pastry chef at The Good Batch. I hope you visit us soon. See you then. Peace. I'm leaving. That's a wrap.