Feature article
|
 |
|
 |
Pies, pastries flying off Blackbird’s shelves
By Fred Sauceman
 |
Mazie Wyatt displays a tray of chocolate and butterscotch “mini-pies.” Photo by Larry Smith, ETSU Photo Lab.
The Blackbird Bakery
LOCATION: 56 Piedmont Avenue, Bristol, Virginia
PHONE: 276-645-5754
HOURS: Open from 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday |
Randall Perkins was looking for lightness. His hunt for the perfect doughnut took him from New York City to Clarksville, Tennessee, to the banks of the Ohio River in Paducah, Kentucky. He hit all the national chains and counterbalanced those visits with stops at obscure, small-town doughnut dispensaries.
He absorbed all the knowledge, assimilated the best of the various techniques, studied temperatures, textures and toppings, and then merged all that information with his wife Carla’s encyclopedic familiarity with croissant dough.
Randall and Carla were so confident in what they’d learned and so anxious to share their discoveries with the public that they sold their home, bought the building that the Masonic Temple of Bristol, Virginia, was using for its meetings and opened the Blackbird Bakery in June of 2008.
There was another source of culinary know-how that Carla relied on: the kitchen of her mother, Ruth Settle, in Belfast, Virginia. Carla took Ruth’s old-style coconut cream and butterscotch pie recipes and created the line of meringue-topped “mini-pies” now sold by Blackbird Bakery.
“Mom always wanted to teach me how to cook, and I never would learn, although I come from a long line of wonderful cooks, except for me,” Carla tells me. “It wasn’t until I got married, 15 years ago, that I found myself in a kitchen facing stoves, ovens and things I really didn’t know how to use.”
But Carla moved from novice cook to tackling some of the culinary world’s trickiest jobs, making puff pastry and French croissant dough — “all the stuff nobody wants to fool with,” as she says.
“I studied and practiced, read and read. Pastry is my passion, and I love making pies.”
At Blackbird Bakery, that laborious croissant dough is rolled around French chocolate, formed into rectangles, painted with an egg wash and decorated with almonds.
Danish wedding cookies, rich in nuts and covered in powdered sugar, accompany Middle Eastern baklava. Ratha Shabeldeen, a native of Lebanon, makes them both, and she’s also mastered a Southern classic, the egg custard pie, which Carla says is getting harder and harder to find in grocery store bakeries and in restaurants.
For doughnut making, Carla and Randall recruited Larry Pope, who once worked for both the Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts companies. “Doughnuts are hard products to get consistent,” Carla says. “The weather affects them. Some days they rise better than others. Larry’s always fretting over the dough, measuring the temperature of the water, of the mix, everything. He brought a wealth of information, talent, and skill to the table.”
Randall Perkins’ cross-country doughnut hunt yielded its best results at Red’s Donut Shop in Paducah, Kentucky. Carla remembers that Randall traveled 12 hours with samples of Red’s products before she got to try them, and the doughnuts were still “awesome,” she says.
One customer called them the “best waist-stretching, gut-busting, deep-fried sweet doughnuts on the planet.”
On the day I visited Bristol’s Blackbird Bakery, a lady had driven an hour and 45 minutes from Dickenson County, Virginia, just to buy doughnuts, and Carla says that “happens every week.”
Blackbird sells freshly roasted coffee from Marion, Virginia, but the business hasn’t gone the latte-cappuccino route. For those types of coffee drinks, Carla sends customers down to Java J’s on the Virginia side of State Street.
“We love our downtown and believe in the downtown concept,” says Carla, as we talk on the upper level of her building that dates to 1931. “We want to do our part to rejuvenate Bristol.”
Hummingbird cupcakes, cheesecake tarts and chocolate éclairs for the sake of economic development. There’s an altruistic reason for another slice of pie.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
|
|
|
|
|
