The Bread Shop
"I'm not a sit at a desk kind of person. I'm always moving. So baking was just something for me, once I found out what my niche was."
"About the sixth grade, she wanted a Kitchen Aid mixer for Santa Claus."
"Got my first mixer when I was 12 for Christmas. From there on out, I think everybody just gave me baking supplies forever."
"And I can remember my dad babysitting, calling me at work and saying 'Lauren has all these kids in the neighborhood sitting along the dining room table and she's going to start baking some stuff. I said 'as long as she doesn't burn the house down, we're OK.'"
"I've been baking for fun my whole life. Professionally, I just started this about a year ago. And truly switched careers from a dental hygenist."
"She is a dental hygenist. But one thing that we always used to do together and always seemed to be Thursday nights, we would make chocolate chip cookies together. And so it was a mom and daughter thing. She is awesome at making cookies and then I came here and I saw she's even better than she used to be!""
"Hi, I'm Lauren Donati."
"And I am Meg Shimek. Welcome to the Bread Shop."
"The Bread Shop to me is like the baby I didn't have. It's our everything. It's everything that I do."
"So we're known for our artisan bread and artisan pastries that we make from scratch every day. Right now we are making a big batch of cinnamon buns. It's actually a nice, flight, fluffy, airy dough."
"So our cinnamon rolls, it's a nice and rich dough. It's enriched with butter, milk, and eggs."
"It's a sweet dough, it gets covered in cinnamon filling which is just sugar, cinnamon, butter, and flour mixture."
"Now we're rolling it."
"And once you roll them up, they start as these little buns."
"As you can see, the dough is nice and fluffy throughout. You have a nice even swirl and packed through every little inch is tons of cinnamon filling."
"They get proofed and as they proof, you can just see them just start to grow. And they just about double in size, they start to rise up. And you know they're ready to go in the oven.
"People come in and they're just awestruck by how big it is and how beautiful it is. They're about the size of a small child's head."
"To me, they're a work of art."
"It's like you're eating the center of the cinnamon roll for the whole cinnamon roll."
"It's delicious!"
"Bread is my passion. I can't imagine doing anything else. I went to Johnson & Wales for school and entered my artisan bread class. I saw my first loaf of bread come out of the oven, went home and told my parents 'this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.' Good bread to me is using old world traditions and really doing things the right way. When I was taught to make bread, I was never taught that machines are the way to do it. I was taught that you need to feel it. Bread is like a living creature, it changes every day. You have to know how to work with it. So feeling with your hands and knowing how it's living and what it's doing and how to react to it is the most important part."
"
Here at the Bread Shop, we have a couple different types of bread. We do French which is our baguette and our French loaf. A good French bread should have flavor. We're looking for this nice ear here. This is the pull open, that's releasing all the pressure from the inside of the loaf. So that we get a nice crumb. You get a little bit of crunch on the outside, that layer here, a little bit of crackle and then the inside is really soft so you get a nice soft bite. We also do sourdoughs. So this is our sourdough bread. The sourdough bread has a nice soft crumb. It's a little bit chewier than a French loaf. But you get a little bit more thickness on the crust. So it's a more hearty loaf of bread in my opinion. And then our last one is a whole wheat which is becomming a big hit around here."
"I think people should come to the Bread Shop because I think you can see our passion through what we make. I'm here 20 hours a day some days. Just because I love being here. This isn't work to me. This is like when people play sports and they go out and they have a good time, that's what I do. I bake bread."
"This is definitely worth a stop because you can't beat a fresh loaf of bread. It's made the day of. You definitely get the freshness of it, and you really can't get this anywhere else."
