“Are you ready to cook?” asked Dobra Bielinski when we met Friday morning at her Delightful Pastries — both a name and an apt description — on Lawrence Avenue.
Well bake, technically. But I wasn’t about to correct her.
Regular readers might remember my column on Bielinski from March 2022, when I featured her for Paczki Day. The holiday isn’t until Feb. 13 this year; so why am I back now, in December?
We got along so well — I described Bielinski as “a bubbling cauldron of strong opinions,” — that I said I’d like to return someday and see her bake bread. An offer that 99 out of 100 people would let vanish on the wind. But the Warsaw-born baker is that 1 out of 100, if not out of a thousand. She circled back and reminded me of my suggestion that we bake bread.
Bielinski had already been at it for hours when I got there.
“I was up at 3:45 a.m.” she said, as I donned a soft white apron. “I had to have something to eat.”
And breakfast was ...?
“One of my worker’s mom is visiting from Poland, so she made this potato cake — basically potatoes grated with caramelized onion and little bits of bacon, they add tons of eggs and a little bit of flour, and just put it in a cake pan and bake the whole thing,” she said. “Then I had my mom’s leftover goulash.”
If you wish you’d been sitting next to Bielinski with a spoon, please continue reading. Otherwise, you can check back with me later this week — I have a feeling this is going to linger into a second column. The problem with fresh baked goods: it’s hard to stop.
We started, not with bread, but cookies. Hanging with Bielinski is a study in digression — racing from the wonders of unbromated flour to the specifics of the 32-letter Polish alphabet to the glories of Wisconsin onions.
For instance. She mentioned “beet soup.” Why “beet soup” and not borscht?
“In Polish we call it barszcz,” she explained. “There’s three types of barszcz. There’s the barszcz we have on Christmas Eve, which is vegan; it’s got vegetables in a clear broth. Then we have what we call barszcz Ukrainski, or Ukrainian borscht, and that’s got cabbage, potatoes, beans and pork shoulder. Then we have the third one we do for the summertime, and it’s a cold one. that one you serve with sour cream, hard-boiled eggs, hard-boiled potatoes, and you chop them up and sprinkle them with lots of dill, lots of parsley. I’m sure that’s the one you’re more familiar with.”
Which does not really answer the question. No matter. She drew a pan of perfect little squares off a rack.
“These are cacao nib hazelnut, and I’m going to put a little apricot jam, we ‘re gonna dip them in chocolate. Ta-da! Try them,” she said. “I’m testing this cookie out. I never made them before.”
Dense, not at all sweet.
“What do you think of this cookie?” she demanded. “Is it bitter?”
We’re all a little bitter at this point. But I liked it and said so. Then wondered why, with the endless array of existing cookies, would she bother trying to come up with something new?
“Because I’m bored!” Bielinski replied. “A lot of people want to have something new. We have to have something interesting. People get bored. I get bored, with the same old, same old. We have to come up with something.”
Don’t I know it.
Bielinski is the field marshal of half a dozen bakers, plus family members. Picture us all hustling back and forth through a narrow kitchen, dodging racks and assistants bearing trays while Bielinski issues orders, shifting seamlessly from Polish to Spanish to English.
Her father shows up to collect a big pan of broken eggshells — mulch for the garden. Family backup is key.
“My mom, she cooks me lunches and dinners,” said Bielinski “My dad, he fixes everything I break.”
Her mother’s role is more than that. “Can you call my mother and ask her to taste the borscht?” Bielinski instructs a helper. “I want to make sure it’s OK.”
Do you see the problem? We’ve reached the end, and haven’t even gotten to the baking bread part. We’ll set that aside to proof until Wednesday.
