The Henion Bakery
by Katie Bryson

It's 4:30 in the morning. Dave Henion, the baker, is washing coffee pots; a red bandana hangs in neat folds from the back pocket of his jeans. An index card, taped to the front window, tells late-night passers-by that the Bakery opens at seven. Regulars know that the front door is never locked if someone is inside.

Dave, and Cory, his assistant baker, are wide awake. The back door stands open to the night sky; a cool breeze wafts through, into the kitchen. The ovens are beginning to fill. Their six levels can hold eleven sheet pans; round breads and rolls slide in and out on wooden paddles with a sweep of Cory’s arm. On an ordinary Saturday, the ovens would be full of bread, muffins, rolls, scones, croissants, brioche, and coffee cakes. Today’s not ordinary, though: It's Holy Saturday. Easter's special orders must be ready this morning. The exchange of one tray for the next must be seamless, if everything is to have its turn before the store opens.

First in are the Polish specialty breads, formed the day before and refrigerated overnight to keep them from expanding. Cory lifts round babka into an upper level of the seven-foot Blodgett oven; the babkas ' raisins and candied fruits glisten with egg wash. A foot away, Dave ladles molasses onto butter chunks, piled in the belly of a shoulder-high dough mixer.

There are two, wood-top counters in the kitchen; one faces the window that overlooks the Bakery’s front room; a door opens onto the front room and its three, glass cases. Fresh breads and cookies are carried, from kitchen to cases, throughout the day. Both counters are so close to the towering Blodgett that, with one wide step, either baker can reach it with his tray. The two men are so close to one another that it’s a miracle they don’t collide mid step.

“Doing what we do here,” Dave says, “is sort of a well-rehearsed dance routine.” He flips on the mixer; the butter and molasses fold together to form the wet base of a four-seed bread dough. “People have photographed me when I work, but I think they mostly end up with blurs.” Cory drops ginger scones onto a baking tray without missing a beat.

***************

When the mixer stops, Dave tilts the bowl and slides the dough, pocked with sesame and sunflower seeds, into a proofing box. The proofing box is warmed with steam to accelerate the dough’s rising. The room is so quiet, that the plop of the dough is audible. There's a hiss as Cory sprays pans with vegetable oil. As he does this, Dave lifts a flat of thirty-eggs from a nearby cart.

Dave's right hand lifts eggs from the carton and feeds them to his left. He taps each shell against the rim of a stainless steel basin, balances the egg against his palm, then pulls each yoke from its white with his fingertips.

Glancing up at Cory, he says, “They lost yesterday.”

Dave's Red Sox cap rides high over his graying, ginger hair; he knocks it back into place with one hand, before taking a quick slug of coffee. “They had an outfielder pitch the Ninth inning.” With a laugh, he reaches for more eggs.

“They did?” Cory looks up from the loaves he’s shaping.

“Yeah--- David--- David somebody or other--- He only gave up like four runs or something like that. They had a rough outing, 'cause they lost to Baltimore in thirteen the night before. The game wasn’t over 'til midnight, then they had to fly home to play a three o’clock game in Fenway.”

Dave pours milk into his eggs and begins to whip them lightly. The yolks break and spin away, dying the milk a pale yellow. “I guess it’s the third year in a row they lost their opening home game.”

The Henion Bakery has been open for over a decade. Dave and Barbara’s youngest daughter was two, when they opened the place. Their first granddaughter was born not too long ago. All their eight children have worked behind the counter at some point in their lives. Some of store’s employees have stuck around so long that customers ask if they’re Henion kids, too.

“Any of our kids could have a job if they needed it,” Barbara says, squeezing blue frosting onto a special-order birthday cake on a sunny afternoon. “They all know how to run the cash register, know a little bit about customer service. Some know about finishing things or making things or putting butter in the dough.” She laughs, a straightforward sound like small bells. “None of them want to end up with the family business.”

Barbara Henion isn't a round and rosy, baker’s wife. She's tiny: just over five feet, with the delicate bone structure of a bird. Her dark hair hangs straight to her jaw, framing high cheekbones, angular glasses. She's a baker, too.

The Henions are both graduates of the prestigious Cooking Institute of America (known as the C.I.A.) in Hyde Park, New York. Dave graduated in 1976, when the C.I.A. only offered a single program--the culinary equivalent of a Bachelor's Degree without a major. By the time Barbara put herself through in the late Eighties --- thirty-three years old, single, with children in tow -- she was able to take a specialized baking course. Barbara says she’d always been interested in baking, always liked to make things with her hands. What mattered most was that baking was a career she could pursue along with her children.

The Henions' workdays are governed by the needs of their kids. Dave is the one who comes in early to bake the day’s yeast breads; Barbara oversees the morning making of lunches and the brushing of teeth. By the time school lets out, Dave is waiting for the kids, while Barbara is behind the counter--- or in Bakery's kitchen, coating citrus chiffon layer cakes with french buttercream. The Henions have never been open on Sunday. Sundays are family days.

**************

Holy Saturday is one of the busiest mornings of the year for the Bakery. Thanksgiving and Christmas aren't so slow, either.

Dave chucks his cap back from his forehead, and whisks handfuls of tiny, wild blueberries into some muffin batter. “Christmas and Thanksgiving…" he says," People are willing to suspend their diets." The mixer thuds; Cory slaps down some trays on his counter. “The thing that’s hurting business now is the Atkin’s Diet. People decide that starch is …" Dave drops a muffin tin, hard, onto his counter…. "the Enemy.”

Dollops of marbled, purple batter drop, neatly, into muffin cups. " They reduce their starch consumption. Unfortunately, we sell nothing but starch in one form or another, so...” Dave wheels around to face the Blodgett and opens a middle door. “I read an article in the New York Times , said forty per cent of Americans are on reduced-starch diets.”

He swings up the door; the muffins begin their baking.

********************

Before the Henions opened their Bakery, Barbara worked for a year as the pastry chef at the local Bread and Circus . Bread and Circus is a chain owned by Whole Foods Market, one of the country’s many, theoretically, health-conscious or “organic” super markets. Health conscious they may be--but all such places are controlled by corporations. Bread and Circus is packed with shoppers. How could a small, family bakery like Henion have survived such competition?

Barbara simply shakes her head at the idea that the industrial kitchens of Bread and Circus or Super Stop 'N Shop could be a danger to her. She spins a second row of white chocolate curlicues around the perimeter of a cheesecake and says “Our food’s homemade .The difference is the quality of our ingredients--- and the variety of them. We use real butter and real eggs and real fruit, and--- we’re concerned about serving a product that really tastes good.”

*******************************

As Dave zests fresh lemon rind for some doughnut dough just before five on another Saturday morning, he squints a little, then looks up from the acid brightness of his small pile of shavings. Without slowing the scrape of lemons across his file, he talks about his craft.

“Generally speaking, the older a dough is, the better the flavor is, which is why commercially made bread -- when they put all kinds of enhancing ingredients in to make it rise faster -- doesn’t taste good.” He trades a skinned lemon for a fresh one, and continues. “The thing about this community is--- you have a pretty well-educated community. Amherst has an excellent school system. A lot of the parents of the kids in the school system are education professionals, they have been around, they’ve traveled, they know what they like and what they don’t like. You know, we have a pretty well-educated clientele, and those who know the difference and care about it, they’ll seek us out.”

Dave stops and glances at the heap of lemon zest, sizing it with his eyes. “We use mostly white flour, white sugar. We’re not trying to be a health food place.” Bright shavings drift into his batter and disappear as he stirs. “But I do use unbleached and unbromated flour whenever I can.”

The doughnut dough becomes pillowy, an expanse of creamy white; when Dave turns it out of its basin, he has to splay the fingers of both his big hands to keep it contained while he kneads it. Good donut doughnut---when it's made the right way, with fresh ingredients--- is actually a coffee cake dough. Even fried, it'll still be soft and light.

As Dave kneads the dough, he starts talking about the chemistry of what he does. He doesn't so much change the subject as deepen it:

“Bromine is a deadly gas, a deadly element. A kind of poison.” He crosses the kitchen in ten quick steps, skirting a hip-high rolling cart, stacked with basins of dry ingredients and waiting baking trays. “When they refine flours, at some point in the process, they pass bromine gas through it.”

He disappears through the door of a walk-in freezer, and comes out, talking.

“ The bromine kills any larvae from weevils or any insects that might have been growing in the wheat in the field.”

Dave stepped into the freezer to retrieve a plastic bag of frozen, yeast dough buns. He spins open the bag with one hand, as he walks. “ The bromine also helps flour give more lift to baked goods, so that things made with bromated flour wind up being larger, volume-wise, and looking good.” He shakes the raw, frozen buns onto a baking sheet. They clatter onto the sheet, pale and silky, each the size of a child’s fist.

“Bleached flour goes back a long way.” He shuffles and spaces the buns, his fingers skittering across the pan’s surface. “When they only had first grown flour, it didn’t have a way to separate the bran from the white part, the endosperm, except by sifting.” The oven door swings up. “So, people who were really wealthy could afford to have people sift the flour to get out most of the particles of bran.” Dave reaches for a new sheet. “It didn’t make the flour white, but it made it a lighter color and it was more expensive.” The frozen buns skate into three orderly rows. “In any event, white flour’s always historically been equated with higher quality and more prestige.”

Dave grew up Connecticut. “With five kids, my mother would go to the grocery store and she’d buy a pack of cookies or something like that and they’d last like...” He snaps his floury fingers. “I discovered that if you opened up a cookbook, you could make yourself a batch of cookies…" he slices off a chunk of dough off with a rectangular knife “...and, you know, share 'em with everybody else, too. Baking your own was sort of like solving a problem.”

When Dave was ten, his mother suggested he could earn extra money by staying home on Saturdays and baking bread. Dave loved the idea.

When he was in high school, he took out an ad in the neighborhood paper: Fifty cents a loaf for Dave's Home Made, White or Cinnamon-raisin bread. Some Saturdays, he'd make as many as thirty-five or forty loaves, all mixed by hand, in batches of five or six, and baked in his mother’s electric oven.

He went to college for a year. Dropped-out; worked in an Italian bakery. Then applied to the C.I.A.

“The place itself is in a former Jesuit monastery. It’s a beautiful campus, right on the Hudson River. The property’s right below FDR’s estate.” Dave flattens a lump of dough into a circular pan, prodding it, outward, toward the rim.

“The thing about the Culinary is, it gives you a broad exposure, across the spectrum of food service.” He slides the pan into a squat, iron, Dutchess press near the door. “You don’t do anything enough to actually be good at it, or to really know it, but it makes you someone who’s really trainable. You can get a job, if you’re smart and a little bit humble. You’ll know the theory; you'll be a good employee.” Dave twists the crank of the Dutchess towards his torso. With a noise of a nail gun, the press crushes the dough and divides into three, flat radiating circles of perfectly round rolls.

A block of cold, white dough hits the counter with a smack. “Croissant dough is what’s called laminated dough,” Dave says, as he peels away layers of plastic wrap. “You have a piece of dough, usually a little bit on the thicker side, and you get a block of butter. You put the butter between the dough, so you have dough, butter, dough.”

Under the rolling pin, the supple dough spreads easily until it's barely half an inch thick, and nearly covers the whole counter. “You roll it up and fold it, so you have three layers of butter when you fold it in thirds. Then you roll it and fold it again so you have nine layers, then you roll it and fold it again.” He brushes away a few patches of flour with a stiff-bristled brush, and folds the dough in half.

“I like the speckle of the whole wheat in there.” The French recipe Dave remembered from the bakery where he worked a decade ago was pure white flour. Then the owner of The Gold Mine Restaurant in Easthampton asked Dave to develop an all-butter, whole-wheat croissant for the restaurant's breadbasket.

Dave flicks his wrist and scatters an arc of flour across the counter. “God knows, his customers probably loved ‘em ... I never really went there to eat. It was a very expensive thing to give away in a bread basket, an all-butter croissant...”

He trims the edges of the newly rolled croissant dough with a butcher’s knife, then divides the rectangle into narrow triangles. He rolls-out the sections with both hands, smoothing and tugging the dough flat before drawing the wide ends toward the tips in tight curls.

“Everything takes a little twist, I suppose. When I worked at The Black Sheep , they didn’t have a croissant recipe, so I gave ‘em my recipe. But then, when we opened this place, I didn’t want a croissant that looked like Black Sheep croissants, so I had to change my recipe a little bit more.”

He slides a dozen rolled croissants s into the oven on a dented aluminum tray, then pulls a yellow bucket of almond paste off the shelf to daub in the center of the next batch. Cubes of cheddar cheese and a bag of semisweet chocolate sit to one side: The Henion makes three specialty croissants in addition to the regular wheat.

*****************************

Just after six, the front door swings open with a little shriek, and a middle-aged man in a gray coat approaches the glass cases. Dave brushes his fingers against the towel folded over his apron strings, and walks into the front.

“Good morning.”

The man peers into the case, seeing only refrigerated pastries from the day before. Rolls and loaves of bread still warm from the oven are cooling on the wicker shelves behind the case.

“Oh, you don’t have anything out yet...”

Dave stares at him over the gold edges of his glasses. “What do you mean, anything? What do you want?” It's the same tone he used when he spoke with Cory, but it sounds brusque coming from behind the display case. The customer edges toward the door, mumbling something about dropping his son off at school.

“Actually, I didn’t know you weren’t open, I’m sorry to bother you.” He smiles as he reaches the door. “Maybe I’ll drop in later.”

“I can get you coffee...” Dave says, but the man is already outside. Dave shrugs and walks back into the kitchen.

“There’s sort of this informal rule, the Eighty-Twenty Rule, where twenty per cent of your customers will give you eighty per cent of your business.” He hits a button on the radio on the shelf, and the Clash pounds out, halfway through a song. “The kind of business we’re in depends on lots of small sales. If you work at, say, Target , we’ll say -- and I have no clue -- the average customer spends, say, thirty dollars at Target, so that’s a relatively big ticket.” He picks up his rolling pin and sets to work spreading sweet dough for sticky buns. " The clothing store across the street--- the average ticket there is probably like seventy dollars or something ... But here at the Bakery the average ticket is less than three dollars. Mostly you’re talking about a cup of coffee and something to eat.”

“There’s people who come in once or twice a week, or there’s people who come in like once or twice a year, and they all consider themselves our customers, 'cause they just need a birthday cake, and that’s all.” He slaps egg wash across the dough’s surface with a soggy pastry brush. “But repeat business is really the only way you’re going to survive as a small business doing small numbers like that.”

Handfuls of sugar and cinnamon drop onto the sticky dough, moving outward in circles under the light touch of his hands. “So, those people that come in frequently, you recognize their faces. You say hi to them. At Bruegger’s they say, ‘Next.’” His voice drops into a monotone. “Customers at Breuggers don’t know who you are; you don't know who they are. It’s nameless, faceless. But here, we’re talking about people who live in a community, who-- hopefully--- are going to be loyal customers.”

The long slab of sticky bun dough needs to be wrapped tightly as it’s rolled, but not so tightly that the walnuts and raisins inside bulge through the dough and tear it. The edges must be pinched gently as the knife slices through, separating the three-foot long rod into rolls, two inches wide. The bottoms of the muffin tins are covered in a mixture of honey and sugar, which will melt and caramelize in the heat of the oven. When Cory tips baked sticky buns onto a tray, the bottoms become the tops, shining with hardening sugar glaze.

“So, over time you realize, 'Oh--- this guy comes in a lot. So I say,' Hi, my name is David. I should know your name, ‘cause you’re in here a lot. And he’ll say, ‘Oh, my name is Paul.’ So the next time Paul comes in, I say, 'Hi Paul, how ya doin’?'….

“Over a period of time, this guy becomes a loyal customer. You know that Paul, his house is for sale, he wanted so much money for it, he lives in an apartment someplace. You know a lot of information about this individual. Then you discover that Paul is actually married to this person who comes in separately…before you know it, you know pretty extensive histories about a lot of people. And that’s the really rewarding part about having a business like this: You meet a lot of people and you learn a lot about the community.”

Dave’s face lights up as he talks about his customers. He never smiles superfluously, but there's an energy that comes from his knowing the people who will eat the bread he kneads each morning. “There’s one guy,” he says. “Who’s a psychologist up the street, Peter Spencer. I remember the first time Peter came in here, I actually waited on him, and he ordered an apple turnover.”

Dave brushes walnut dust from his palms, and reaches for some more eggs--they'll be the base for a sour cream coffee cake. “About a half hour later, the phone rings and it’s Peter. ‘I just wanna say, that’s the best apple turnover I ever had in my life.’ And you know, that makes you feel really good. Then, so I say, who are you, blah blah blah, ‘I’m Peter Spencer,’ and before you know it, you know, it turns out that he’s got three kids… Two of ‘em end up working here.”

A pungently sweet smell rises from the basin as he whisks flour into the eggs and lumpy sour cream. “It turns out-- I go fishing with Peter. That’s an example of one good friendship that evolved from someone who had a very positive experience here with their apple turnover.” He stirs more vigorously now, the dough clinging to itself in a buttery lump.

“You know, some people….” Dave’s laughs a short, punctuation mark. “There’s a guy named Norton Juster; he wrote The Phantom Tollbooth. He lives over on Lincoln Street over there. A really interesting character… He came in -- he’s a short guy, Jewish, a New Yorker…. He'd come in and say….” Dave raises his voice a pitch, lifting his eyebrows. “‘You don’t have , do you...?’ He always wanted his boxes tied with string, because when he grew up in New York, they had one of those machines that ties the box up in string…. He says to me, ‘Going to the bakery is not a bakery experience without string.’ So--- we buy a ball of string for Norton Juster.”

Coffee cake dough doesn’t rise. Dave dumps half the sticky dough onto a sheet pan and spreads it into a neat square. Cory's already peeled and cored and sliced the apples for it. Dave takes only seconds to chop and layer them on the top of the cake.

“You’re trying to please everybody. It turned out, Norton just liked to get the same kind of abuse he gave. It took me a while to learn to start yelling back at him the same way.” Dave cut into his own words with a laugh. “It just turns out that Norman Juster is just someone who needs to be razzed as much as he razzes you. And you know, he’s a really sweet guy.”

Frying doughnuts have a scent that pulls in people off the street. By the time Cory begins to fill the charred doughnut tureen with oil, he's already carried most of the day’s fresh loaves to the front to cool. It's quarter to seven in the morning. Pale sunlight and the coos of mourning doves infiltrate the bakery. Dave punches a round cutter through the donut dough; it makes a satisfying "puufff.” He tosses the rings into one pile and the holes onto a waiting bucket lid.

“This other woman," he says." She passed away last year. Mrs. Waldman. She lived down on Southeast Street.”

“Mrs. Waldman died?” Cory says. He turns up the heat under the donut . A warm, greasy scent mingles with the wheaty sweetness of baking bread. The twin aromas float out, through the door.

Dave shakes his head. “Yeah, she died. She lived to be a hundred. Somehow, one of my fondest memories of Mrs. Waldman …” He pauses to shove a platter of raw doughnuts across the counter, into Cory's reach. “She was still driving around in her mid-nineties, albeit very dangerously.” Dave laughs. “We used to make this kind of a German Christmas bread called stollen . It’s a popular bread; we make it every year.”

The sun grows brighter and more direct with each minute; Dave and Cory’s hands fly over the dough. Croissant dough is sliced with razor wheels into squares for danish. Heavier éclair dough is twisted for crullers. Fruit and custard slide from spoons into the hearts of small pastries.

The first person to walk by in the light passes the pink-rimmed front window.

“She, being from Austria originally, liked our stollen . But she couldn’t eat nuts, and traditionally it would have almonds in it. So we would have to make a batch of stollen and pull out a chunk of dough--- before we added the almonds--- so we could make a few for Mrs. Waldman.”

The first doughnut plops into the hot oil with a crackle. Dave snaps the corners of the last danish together in a windmill pattern and gives the center a pinch. “One of the first years we’re in business, she conned me into making a batch of stollen for her, like, in February.”

The moment the black minute hand on the kitchen clock stutters across the twelve, a woman walks in . It's seven o’clock. The Henion is open.

The rich, buttery smell of doughnuts rises from the pot in the back and mixes with the heady marzipan aroma from the danish filling. The sun hits the window full-on now. It sparkles across display cases full of muffins and muffin bread and whole wheat croissants.

Dave doesn’t know the woman--- but by the end of the five minutes it takes Dave to wrap her bread, they’re comparing mutual acquaintances and talking about her kids in New York and Pennsylvania. Walking back into the kitchen, Dave calls, “Bye, Virginia,” over his shoulder before finishing his story.

“So, I made a very small batch of stollen for Mrs. Waldman, and she comes to pick it up -- this is in February -- and she drives and parks in the back. The parking lot, I mean, it was a skating rink. And here’s a lady who’s, like, ninety-two, and she’s walking across this -- this -- this sheet of ice. If she fell and broke her hip it would mean she’d be in a convalescent home for the rest of her life, or at least what might well seem like the rest of her life.” Dave shakes his head, and leans against the counter, standing completely still for the first time that day.

“...And she’s doing this for a stollen . You gotta really respect someone who’s -- well, she was tough and spunky. 'You gotta be tough to live that long,' she said. But anyways…” Dave laughs, and picks up a block of yeast for tomorrow’s sourdough. “She liked our stollen enough that she was able to risk her life for it.”