Jenny Wilson, Jake Marks and Christopher Scheets are well known for their baking at Red Fox Bakery. The friends are also competent home cooks, whose fresh, inventive creations fuel their workday with healthy snacks and lunches. One special spring favorite is the Spring Beet and Apple Salad.
Jenny Wilson varies the ingredients with regularity, but her business partners know the combinations of fruits, nuts and greens she chooses to complement the beets will work just fine.
“Sometimes Jenny will use a sweeter apple or a pear. She’ll mix spinach or kale with the greens or use a sharper cheese.cheap nfl jerseys http://www.cheapnflsalejerseys.com We’ll eat it with different breads. Just thinking about that salad makes me salivate,” Marks says. “We all like to eat a lot.”
“We have a lot of salads,” Wilson says. “We try not to snack on bread all day, but when we’re developing a recipe, we do taste every version, every day.”
The three partners most often eat meals at the bakery. The rhythm of baking doesn’t allow them to close up shop, leave and grab a bite. They share the cooking chores, however.
“Jake made this amazing black eyed pea soup for lunch today,” Wilson says. “His gnocchi is great, too.”
“Chris makes incredible meats, especially lamb,” Marks says. “We all like to eat and we snack a lot here. We’ll eat handfuls of nuts, fruits or dried fruits, the stuff we have on hand.”
Wilson often uses what’s in the bakery larder when lunchtime comes around. “Pizzas. We make pizzas in our wood fired oven. I cook porridge from the grains we use in the breads. The other day we made a variation of a Korean dish, bibimbap, which is usually a rice bowl with meat. I used barley porridge as the base and pan fried a little of the kimchi we’d started the day before. Topped with an egg, it’s lunch.”
Eating in provides time for the three friends to catch up with one another. Their demanding work requires them to stagger their hours. Scheets takes the early shift, arriving early in the morning to start the prep work. Marks and Wilson show up in the late morning and early afternoon to mix, shape and bake their naturally leavened breads.
Wilson and Marks didn’t cook when they were younger, but Scheets started cooking early.
“When I was a preteen, I watched ‘Great Chefs of the World’ on the Discovery Channel, before the cooking channels. I started cooking meals for my parents. At 18, I took a job in a restaurant, and I’ve worked with food ever since,” Scheets says.
“We’re all gardeners here,” Wilson says. “We’ve got a garden in back of the bakery and gardens at home. We planted an orchard on a vacant lot next door to my house. Before I grew food, I didn’t cook much. Now, what’s fresh determines what we eat.”
“Our philosophy is to treat food simply and let the ingredients shine,” Scheets says. “Jake made sauerkraut recently, so we made Reuben sandwiches with tomato aioli on our orange caraway rye.”
All three bakers look forward to the return of gardening season and to the great produce available at local markets. They’ve perfected a few new things over the winter to tempt shoppers, like the Danish rugbrt (pictured with the beet salad), all rye flour bread and a salted chocolate rye cookie Scheets developed.
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