A Day with the Oven Master at San Francisco's Best Bakery

[upbeat music]

The role of the oven master

is almost like a NASCAR pit crew.

I'm responsible to bake off all the pastries.

Breadbelly is an Asian-American bakery in California.

In the morning, I have to bake off 20 items.

I have such a small window to bake off,

putting the final touch on those items.

If you come to Breadbelly,

pretty sure that I am the one who bake the products

you have on your hands.

[upbeat music]

Hi, good morning.

Welcome to Breadbelly.

My name is May Nguyen,

and I am the oven masters of the bakery.

It's about 3:45 right now,

and we got a lot of pastry waiting for us in the proofer.

So let's get going.

[upbeat music]

In the morning, I have about two hours and a half window

to bake, finish, and garnish everything

before the delivery person comes in.

This is an oven.

Usually we set it to automatically be turned on around 3:30.

This is our walk-in proofer.

It's literally a size of closet.

It's got a lot of humidity.

This is black sesame, bramble berries, Danish,

and our blueberry croissant tart

with brown butter financiers.

So I'm gonna pop this into the proofer right now.

We're gonna have the oven occupied all the time.

It's very fun.

It's like playing puzzles.

I think the ham and cheese is ready.

The layers are separating nicely.

The next thing I'm gonna do is

to set up my egg wash station.

We recently changed to the gun

because our production volumes has been increased twice,

essentially the last few months.

And also with the gun, I get a nicer, even brush

'cause the brush depends on the pressures of your hand.

You can mess up the layers of the laminated pastries.

It give the products a really nice, shiny,

deep amber colors.

I love my theme, but honestly,

like the first 30 minutes

before my oven master assist comes in,

it's like my favorite time of the day.

It literally just me moving around,

trying to get things done, and I'm just in the zone.

So it's my favorite 30 minutes of the day.

It's ready to be pushed to our rack oven.

This is our walk-in oven.

It's a rotating rack.

It's super nice because it helps us

to really increase our volumes in the productions.

So sometimes things like this happens,

the oven is not rotating.

It's gonna be quick fix.

I have to reset it for 10 second.

It happens once in a while.

I don't know what cause it,

but usually just like reset the ovens will fix it.

Nice, it's moving.

This is our monkey bread, which use croissant trim,

not to waste anything.

So that's why we comes up with these products.

I do try to tidy it up a little bit

so that it doesn't get overflowed.

It seems like it's also ready to be put into the oven.

So I'm just gonna pop it in real quick.

Just gonna set a timer.

Timer is like the most essential tool.

The oven itself has its own timer.

And then I have one over there next to my station.

Usually I use this one for like the total times

the bake off that I think it would need.

And then this one, I would kind of set

for something that I need to check

in the middle of the bake.

I'm gonna drink my juice really quick.

This is definitely my non-negotiable.

I don't drink a lot of coffee, but I need my tea.

And this, I drink this juice every day, any morning.

Just to wake me up.

It's a vitamin C and lemons and also olive oil.

It's very tart.

This is my tea, the only thing I would need in the morning.

The next thing I'm gonna do is set up my kaya buns.

This is our milk bread dough that got proof overnight.

It will be added a, we call it kaya head.

It's almost like an almond cookie.

We put it on top so it's like a crackling,

or like contrast.

We always kinda want to give our pastries

a lot of contrasting texture,

so the milk bread's gonna be very fluffy and soft.

And later when it's cooled down,

it will get filled with pandan coconut cream.

So that's like very smooth, velvety,

and this gonna add like a nice crunch.

Besides oven master stations,

we also have lamination stations,

dough mixing stations, and pastry prep stations.

So pastry prep stations pretty much handles

all of the productions of mousse,

like making these kaya hats or like portioning doughs.

It's about four teams.

We have about eight people in our team,

so it's a lot to coordinate,

but it's a really fun team to work with.

I'm gonna put some pearl sugar on top.

[oven beeping]

At least within the 30 seconds of the timer goes off,

you should check.

The reason why I have a timer in the middle of the bake

for this item, the monkey bread,

because sometimes all the pieces kind of fall.

Most of the time everything looks good,

but sometimes like for example this one,

I'm just gonna give it a little push

so that it stays nicely in the ring.

That's get hot.

This is a very special gloves that's needed for the ovens.

It's quite long to protect my arm,

but as you can see I still get some burns.

That's just part of the job.

[fan whirring]

The fan is blowing and this is a convection oven,

so every time that I open the door,

cool air flew in, so it's like the temperature's dropping.

And then the moment that I close the door,

the temperature's gonna spike quite a lot.

We do try to minimize that.

Okay.

That's kind of the first thing I learned

when I moved to this station,

to be friends with all these timers going off.

Like, it will be okay.

Like you can, it can wait.

That's the time for my Danish.

I'm gonna pull it out now so that it doesn't go over.

[oven beeping]

Timers for my almond croissants.

It seems like I get a golden top, so it should be done.

It does need to get some finish,

but we do want everything to be cooled down properly

before we can garnish.

Okay, I'm gonna check my croissant in the oven,

if it's ready.

We do need to pull everything out

because the lighting in the oven can kind of be deceptive.

We look for like a very deep amber color on our products.

You will get like a very nutty, toasty, caramelized flavors.

Well, I just pull my monkey bread

and some trace of the ham and cheese out from the oven.

And then I just popped in my soba cookies

and the sashimi cookies.

The next thing I'm gonna do is gonna pop in

all these kaya buns into the re-vent.

And then once it's done,

I can do my Danish and croissant tart.

So I can check off everything that I already baked.

The ham and cheese is in the oven.

Chocolate is in the oven.

Danish monkey bread is done.

Almond croissant is done.

Soba cookie is in the oven.

Sesame cookie is in the oven.

Okay, we on time.

The soba cookie is actually something that blew my mind

when I first started.

I never seen any type of cookies like that before.

It has a drache buckwheat,

which is like a caramelized buckwheat crusted on top.

It's got dark chocolate

and also a duche de leche chocolate chunk.

I think the oven temperature is quite ready

for me to pop in the kaya buns.

The black sesame cookie is not a part of the opening bakes

but because it's get baked at the same temperatures

with the soba cookie,

so that's why I just pop it in right now.

I'm just gonna head over to my Thermomix areas

and get set up for my cheesecake.

This is Daniel's, my oven master assist.

He comes in at 4:30 to help me with a lot of things

that I was not able to get to.

One of them is gyeranbbang,

which is our text on the Korean street food.

Gyeranbbang has a cake-like cornbread

and an egg on top and cheddar cheese.

Our basque cheesecake is also a very popular item.

We also use mountain thyme cheese from Cowgirl Creamery,

which is right over there in Marine County.

This is just heavy cream.

I usually try to keep it around 15 minute

because I know that I also have things going on in the oven

and most of the time I'm just back and forth

while this one's running.

It's a do-it-all machine.

We literally use it for so many of our recipes.

You can blend things, you can cook things.

Right now I'm just putting in my chunks of cheese

because it's kind of hard to hear the ovens from this side

so I'm just gonna go check my ovens quickly.

I have about 36 seconds on this oven

so I'm probably gonna just stay here

and making sure that I can pull it out when it's done.

I want the top to be dry and the color is a golden brown.

I think it's ready.

Knowing that the Danish gonna come out soon

and this bake rack is pretty full,

so I'm just gonna grab another one.

Seems like the colors is where I want it to be,

so I'm just gonna pull it out now.

This is our blueberry croissant tart.

They have a brown butter financiers and our blueberry comes

from the Triple D Life Farm in Fresno.

Blueberry is so good right now.

And every time that we have a delivery

from the Triple D Light, it's very dangerous

because it's saying the walk-in and every time I goes in,

some blueberry is gonna disappear.

So I'm just gonna pump it to 460

for my gyeranbbangs and my cheesecake.

With this special mold, it does need to get unmold

within the first few minutes out from the oven.

If I don't unmold it right away,

the butter's gonna get hardened and set

and the layers will get stick to the mold

and it's gonna be impossible to unmold.

[upbeat music]

I'm in a good spot with my oven,

so I'm gonna move back to finish the cheesecake.

Everything is blended well and emulsified,

so I'm just gonna portion these into 390 gram each.

The basque cheesecake will have a burnish crust,

but still very gooey in the middle,

so that's why we use this springform mold.

with parchment lining

so that we can easily unmold them later.

This is our packing station.

We have a lot of clipboard just to help us with organize

and know where things go.

And it's organized by the priorities.

The best cafe, which is our wholesale clients

that need to be ready by 6:20.

1408, which is our other location on the Clement Street

and that's need to be out by 6:30.

Both of these will get picked up

by the same delivery person.

So I'm just going to pack for both of these right now.

That's the queue for our gyeranbbang.

[upbeat music]

Back to the packing station.

Every product does get cooled down properly

before we can pack them.

And also using this green rack really helps us

with preventing condensation or steaming the products.

Once I pack something, I'm just gonna put a quick check mark

so that Daniel or the delivery person will know

that this is ready to take.

Open time.

I think this is good.

I'm gonna pop in my milk bread rolls.

It's almost like a dinner roll.

Each different items will get

a slightly different garnishes to finish.

Daniel is finishing the blueberry croissant tarts

with kersis jams and we're gonna put something

we call fruity pebbles on top.

So this is our black sesame raspberries Danish.

This one will get black sesame financiers

and fresh raspberries inside.

And I'm just finishing off with the guava jam

and raspberry powders on top later.

Right now, this is my favorite

because I love black sesames.

And it has like a nice tart from the raspberries,

very rich taste from the black sesames.

Complements each other really well.

With pastry, it's just a joy that it brings to people.

I think that's kind of like draws me to this career

because I always love pastry, love sweets.

I even have a tattoo of ice cream on my arm.

I don't get to see sunset quite often,

but it's always nice that summer is coming

and we get some sunlight early.

It's a little bit after six right now.

We have about 15, 20 minutes to finish.

Usually my last thing to do gonna be filling these babies

with pandan coconut cream.

This hob is very efficient for me

to pipe in the pandan coconut cream.

Pandan is a very prominent ingredient in pastry,

especially in Southeast Asia.

A little bit grassy, but it pairs really well with coconut.

This is our most popular item.

It's kind of what we're known for, beside the kaya toast.

That's 40 that need to get sent to 1408.

I think everything is already get packed.

Daniel is going to get them loaded and drive

to the wholesale clients first,

and then to our other locations across town.

There are some items that I think

I can just put in the ovens right now

because the oven is not occupied

and I want it to run as much as I can.

I'm gonna grab some biscuits from our freezers.

The biscuit is used by our savory teams

for the biscuit smash.

We make these biscuits from frozen

just to make sure that it will get a very nice lift

and then all the layers from the frozen butters.

The frozen butter, basically when it melts,

all the steam comes out

and it makes the biscuits very tender.

This is a special biscuit wash.

Basically, we only use egg yolks and heavy cream in this.

The gun will not do the job because it's kind of too thick.

[upbeat music]

Right now, I'm just input the amount of the pastry

that we have for this location into the iPad

so that the front of house can take over.

These are our tart shells for the not-ube tarts.

It will get baked the day before so that the next day,

when we cool down,

we can fill them with the sweet potato fillings.

This just making sure that we have a flat, nice, round well

to fill the sweet potato filling later.

It's really heavy.

Ooh.

Our chef get a lot of influence from her background.

She's Filipinos and ube is kind of the staple

in the traditional cuisines.

However, here in California,

we cannot substantially source ube.

So this is our take on that.

We use purple sweet potatoes for our fillings

because this get really hot.

So I don't want to have a lot of carry over cooking.

I'm just gonna move them out on some of the ones

that I think it's ready.

Okay, I think that's all done.

Oh, the second part of the day

will be our production bakes off.

Production bakes off are all like the pastries

that can be sales tomorrow.

This is kind of like the time

that I can slow down a little bit.

And today, honestly, production bake doesn't look too bad.

I'm still constantly making things.

It's like a game for me to find all these pockets of time

so like, okay, maybe I can grab something

from the dish pits or I can set myself for tomorrow.

I'm just gonna go pull the almond cookies

which already been stitched for me

the day before by my team.

Our almond cookies, 80% of the products

are made from almond paste.

Just gonna fix them, make them look nice.

Some of them kind of get spread out

when it's baked in the oven.

So that just kind of help round them up again.

And now I'm gonna fill them with strawberry jam.

Next is gonna be the umeboshi,

which gives it a very nice contrast of the saltiness

and the sweetness of the cookies.

Because I have some time just waiting

for the almond cookies,

I'm just kind of set myself up for the banana cakes,

which is gonna be the next thing that I bake.

I started working at Breadbelly about a year ago.

I started out with laminations,

which is making all the laminated pastries,

chocolate croissant, ham and cheese and stuff.

And then I move on to dough productions

as well as pastry prep.

This position opened up about three months ago

and I'm very grateful that Chef Kate offered it to me.

So it's kind of nice that I get to work at all the stations

before moving here so I know how much labor

and care go into making each of these items.

Honestly, I could not imagine me

as a morning person at all.

Like, I love sleeps,

but it doesn't feel like a job at all, honestly.

I'm literally having fun all day

and I'm also very lucky to have a supportive husband.

He drives me to work every morning around 3:30.

I'm gonna top this off with oat streusel.

[upbeat music]

The black sesame cookies that we make up this morning,

I fill them with dulce de leche fillings

and I now have to sandwich them.

With the not-ube top, it can be a little bit too sweet.

So that's why we have the middle niche

from the burn niche meringue.

And then I'm gonna top it with the salted egg yolk as well.

We have about 30 seconds right now

for the first tray of milk bread to go out.

If I don't unmold them right away,

it will get steam inside the mold.

It's about 12 right now,

and I've been going since 3:45 this morning.

I hope it's fun for you as it's fun for me.

I'm just gonna finish setting myself up

and it's time for you to go.

[upbeat music]