Inside San Francisco's Best Bakery with the Oven Master

The role of the oven master is almost like a NASCAR pit crew. I'm responsible to bake off all the pastries. Bread Belly is an Asian-American bakery in California. In the morning, I have to bake off many items. So, I have such a small windows to bake off, putting the final touch on those items. If you come to Bread Belly, pretty sure that I'm the one who baked the products you have on your hands. Hi, good morning. Welcome to Bread Belly. My name is May Lyen and I am the oven master 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. In the morning, I have about 2 hours and

half window to bake, finish, and garnish everything before the delivery person comes in. This is the oven. Usually, we set it to automatically be turned on around 3:30. This is our walk-in proofer. It's literally the size of a closet. It's got a lot of humidity. This is black sesame bramble berry Danish and our blueberry croissant tart with brown butter financiers. So, I'm going to pop these into the proofer right now. We're going to have the oven occupy 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 going to do is to set up my egg wash station. We recently changed to the gun because our

production volumes has been increased twice substantially in the last few months. And also, with the gun, I get a nicer, even brush cuz like the brush depends on the pressures of your hand. You can mess up the layers of the laminated pastries. It gives the products a really nice, shiny, deep amber colors. I love my team, but honestly like the first 30 minutes before my oven master assist comes in is like my favorite time of the day. It's 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 going to be quick fix. I have to reset it for 10 seconds. It happens once in a while. I don't know what caused 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 going to pop it in real quick. I'm going to set a timer. Timer is like the most essential tool. The oven itself has its own timers and then I have one over there next to my stations. Usually I use this one for like the total times of 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 going to 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 in the morning just to like wake me up.

It's a vitamin C's and lemons and also olive oil. It's very tart. This is my tea. The only thing I would need in the morning. But, the next thing I want is set up my kaya buns. This is our milk bread dough that got proofed overnight. It will be added a we call it kaya hat. It's almost like a almond cookie. We put it on top so it's like a cracklings or like contrast. We always kind of want to give our pastries a lot of contrasting texture. So the milk bread is going to 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 it's going to 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 mise like making these kaya hats or like portioning doughs. We have 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 putting some pearl sugar on top. Yeah, at least within the 30 seconds of the timers goes off you should check. The reason why I have a timers in the middle of the bake for this items the monkey bread because sometimes all the pieces kind of falling. Most of the time

everything looks good but sometimes like for example this one I'm just going to give it a little bush so that it stay nicely in the ring. This is getting hot. This is a very special gloves that needed to 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. So the fan is blowing and this is a convection oven so every time that I open the door cool air blowing so it's like the temperature is dropping and then the moment that I close the door the temperature is going to 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 timers my Danish. I'm going to pull it out now so that it doesn't go over. Time left for my almond croissants. It seems like I get a nice golden top, so it should be done. It does need to get some finish, but we do want everything to be cooled out properly before we can garnish. Okay. I'm going to check my

croissant in the Revent 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. Oh, I just pulled my monkey bread and some trays of the ham and cheese out from the oven, and then I just popped in my soba cookies and the sesame cookies. The next thing I'm going to do is going to pop in all these kaya buns into the Revent, and then once it's done, I can do my Danish and croissant tart. I can check out 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 dragée but with which is like a caramelized buckwheat crusted on top. It's got dark chocolate and also a dulce 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 bags, but because it's get baked at the same temperature with the

soba cookie, so that's why I just pop it in right now. I'm just going to head over to my Thermomix areas and get set up for my cheesecake. This is Daniel, my oven master assist. He comes in at 4:30 to help me with a lot of things that I would not able to get to. One of them is gyeran bbang, which is our take on the Korean street food. Gyeran bbang has a cake-like cornbread and an egg on top and cheddar cheese. Our basket cheesecake is also very popular item. We also use mountain thyme cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, which is like right over there in Marin County. So, this is just heavy cream. I usually try to keep it like around 15 minutes because I know that I also have things going on in the

oven net. 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 going to go check my ovens quickly. I have about 36 seconds on this oven, so I'm probably going to 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 kind of comes out soon and this bread is beautiful, so I'm just going to grab another one.

Seems like the color is where I want it to be, so I'm just going to pull it out now. This is our blueberry croissant tart. They have a brown butter financiers and our blueberry comes from the Triple Delight Farm in Fresno. Blueberry is so good right now. And I every time that we have a delivery from the Triple Delight, it's very dangerous because it's staying the walk-in and every time I goes in, some blueberry is going to disappear. So, I'm just going to palm it to four sixes for my gyeran bbangs 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 bottom is going to get hardened and set and the layers will get stick to the mold, and it's going to be impossible to unmold. I'm in a good spot with my oven, so I'm going to move back to finish the cheesecake. Everything is blended well and emulsified, so I'm just going to portion this into 390 g each. The Basque cheesecake will have a burnished crust, but still very gooey in the middle, so that's why we use these springform mold with parchment lining so that we can easily unmold them later.

This is our packing stations. We have a lot of clipboard just to help us with organize and know where things goes, and it's organized by the priorities. The Bread 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 them will get picked up by the same delivery persons, so I'm just going to pack for both of these right now. That's a queue for our Geranium. Back to packing stations. So, every part of those get cooled out properly before we can pack them, and also we're using these green rack really helps us with prevent condensations or steaming the products. Once I pack something, I'm

just going to put a quick check mark so that Daniel's or the delivery person will know that this is ready to take. Oven time. I think this is good. I'm going to pop in my milk bread rolls well. It's almost like a dinner rolls. Each different items will get a slightly different garnishes to finish. Daniel is finishing the blueberry croissant tarts with persimmon jams, and we're going to put something we call foodie pebbles on top. So, this is our black sesame raspberries Danish.

This one will get black sesame financiers and fresh raspberries inside and I'll just finishing off with the guava jam and raspberry powders on top later. Right now, this is my favorite cuz I love black sesame seeds and it's have like a nice tart from the raspberries, very rich taste from the black sesame. Compliments each other really well. With pastry, it's just the 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 6:00 right now. We have about 15-20 minutes to finish. Usually my last thing to do going to be filling these babies with pandan coconut cream. This hopper is very efficient for me to pipe in the pandan coconut cream. Pandan is very prominent ingredient in pastry, especially in Southeast Asia. A little bit grassy, but it's pairs really well with coconut. This is our most popular items. It's kind of what we known for beside the kaya toast. So, that's 40s that need to get sent to 1408. I think everything is already get packed. Danielle's going to get them load 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 going to grab some biscuits from our freezers. The biscuit is used by our savory teams for the biscuit smash. We bake these biscuits from frozen just to make sure that it will get a very nice lift and then all the layers from the frozen butter. The frozen butter basically when it melts, all the steams 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 harder to bake. Right now, I'm just input the amounts of the pastry that we have for this locations into the iPad so that the front of house can take over.

These are tart shells for the nut ube tarts. It will get baked the day before so that the next day, when it cool down, we can fill them with the sweet potato fillings. They're just making sure that we have a flat, nice, round 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 their 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 carryover cooking. I'm just going to move them out on some of the ones that I think it's ready.

Okay. I think that's all done. So, the second part of the day is will be our production mix off. Production mix off are all like the pastries that can be sold tomorrow. This is kind of like the time that I can slow down a little bit. And today, honestly, like production bake doesn't look too bad. I'm still constantly making things. It's like a game for me to like find all these pockets of time to like, "Okay, maybe I can grab something from the dish pits, or I can set myself up tomorrow." Now, I'm just going to go pull the almond cookies, which already been staged for me the day before by my team. Our almond cookies, 80% of the products are made from almond paste.

Just going to 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 have round them up again. And now I'm going to fill them with strawberry jam. Next going to be the umeboshi, which gives a very nice contrast of the saltiness and the sweetness of the cookies. Because I have some time to waiting for the almond cookies, I'm just going to set myself up for the banana cakes, which going to be the next thing that I bake. I started working at Bread Belly about a year ago. I started out laminations, which is making all the laminate pastries, chocolate croissant, ham and cheese stuff. And then I move on to dough productions as well as pastry prep. This position opened up

like about 3 months ago, and I'm very grateful that Chef Kit offered it to me. So, it's kind of nice that like I get to work at all the stations before moving here, so I know how much labors 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 really 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 going to top this off with oat streusel. The black sesame cookies that we make out this morning, I fill them with dulce de leche fillings and I now just sandwich them. With the not obey tart, it can be a

little bit too sweet, so that's why we have the bitterness from the burnished meringue. And then I'm going to 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 steamed inside the mold. It's about 12:00 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 going to finish setting myself up and it's time for you to go.