Parkland couple’s old-school bakery rises to the occasion

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This article was published 02/04/2015 (4141 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ROBLIN — Nothing about the Parkland Bakery stands out at a glance — not the name, the furnishings or the plain storefront between a boarded-up pool hall and a financial services outlet.

And the fare is not unusual — doughnuts, jambusters, cinnamon buns, various breads, dinner buns, cookies, muffins and hotdog and hamburger buns. You might walk right by.

But are the baked goods here ever fluffy.

The doughnuts are about a third bigger than normal, and that’s just from air. The jambusters? The texture is like angel food cake. You could sop up an oil spill with the thing.

The secret? Parkland Bakery in Roblin, 14 kilometres from the Saskatchewan border, is a “scratch” bakery, one of the few in Manitoba that still bakes from scratch. No premixes. No frozen doughs.

“There are no shortcuts. It’s all done by hand,” said owner Chuck Brade. “We have to stop and measure out every ingredient, and that’s for nine or 10 batches a night. It adds up.”

So what? Well, baking from scratch is as close to homemade as you can get.

The trouble with frozen doughs is they aren’t as moist and dry out more quickly, according to Parkland staff. And the baked product isn’t as puffy. Preservatives are needed to keep them moist.

Premixes are a shortcut by another name. They are powdered milk, powdered shortening and other ingredients, including preservatives to lengthen shelf life. The buyer buys the premix and throws it into the flour.

Most baked goods in stores today are made with either frozen doughs or premixes. “It’s faster, easier and cheaper,” said Brade. Other bakers have told Brade he’s crazy not to use them, he said. “They claim the product is just as good with the premix, but it isn’t,” said Brade. The differences are subtle, but subtle can mean the world in baked goods. “I wouldn’t want to lose the quality,” he said.

The Parkland Bakery isn’t a nouveau bakery such as the Tall Grass Prairie Bakery in Winnipeg, which also eschews premixes and frozen doughs and even mills its own flour and uses only organic grains. Parkland is more like a bakery stuck in the ’50s, before bakeries started to fall like dominoes to the efficiency argument of premixes and frozen doughs.

One of the bakery’s biggest sellers is still white bread. Bite into one of its jambusters and it triggers flashbacks to when you were eye level to the kitchen counter if you stood on tiptoes, and you didn’t just get to lick the bowl but sprained your tongue trying to reach dough on the inside edge of one of the mixer’s beaters.

The Parkland Bakery is open from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m most days except Sunday. But the baking in back runs from midnight till about 8 a.m. “I tell the RCMP we’re open all night if they need a coffee,” Brade said.

The Free Press was late for its shift, not arriving until 6:30 a.m., but I was soon put to work stretching dough and feeding the round blobs into the roller machine to make loaves of rye bread. So if the rye bread tasted a bit off this week…

“Big time,” said Betty Mason of nearby Grandview, when asked if she can tell the difference between “scratch” bakery and the frozen or premix kind.

Mason, head cashier at Parkway Co-op in Grandview and in charge of baked goods, began stocking Parkland Bakery products because customers were heading down the street to buy it at another store. Now it’s a bestseller for the co-op. “His bread is great. You can put it in the freezer at home and take it out a month later and it’s completely fresh,” she said.

The old-style baking travels well, too. “It’s nothing for someone to take 20 dozen doughnuts to Toronto or Vancouver,” said baker Carol Puritch. People have gone away from scratch baking because “everyone just leads busy lives. It just depends on your priorities,” Puritch said.

The bakery couldn’t find a buyer and was about to shut down when Brade bought it seven years ago. It still has the original recipes from when it started 80 years ago. He has quadrupled its sales, delivering across the Parkland, including to Benito, Russell, Wawayseecappo and eastern Saskatchewan, including Yorkton, Canora and Spy Hill.

He lets his product do the talking. “I found that if I took along a box of doughnuts and a loaf of bread, it’s not hard to get your foot in the door,” he said.

Easter breads are popular at this time of year. The Parkland Bakery also has a fergassa bread made with green onions, real cheddar cheese and garlic powder. The bakery employs six people, in addition to Chuck and Karen and their daughter Tammy, a nutritionist and former leading scorer with the University of Manitoba Bisons women’s hockey team.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca