Transcription of Briana Holt for the show Neighborhood Nourishment #279
Lisa Belisle: Today in the studio with me, I have Briana Holt, who is the head baker at Tandem Coffee and Bakery in Portland. She moved to Maine in 2013 and helped owners Will and Kathleen Pratt open the bakery on Congress Street in 2014. Thanks for coming in today.
Briana Holt: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a pretty fun place to work over at Tandem, I would imagine, I don’t want to assume anything, but….
Briana Holt: Yes. It’s a total blast every day. It’s really fun. I think if you get to work with your closest friends, it can be challenging and fun, but mostly it’s fun for us.
Lisa Belisle: I brought both of my daughters this weekend to Tandem. I was doing a little tour around Portland.
Briana Holt: Oh, awesome.
Lisa Belisle: I have been to the Tandem over… I think it’s where the coffee is actually roasted.
Briana Holt: Yep. In East Bayside.
Lisa Belisle: In East Bayside, and I had never been to the bakery and oh my gosh, my daughters, 21, 16, they were both, like, “When can we come back here again?” It’s such a fun, vibe but the food is really great.
Briana Holt: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: Tell me about baking for you. Why is this your thing?
Briana Holt: Well, I think that’s a huge question. Let’s see. There’s a lot of reasons. I started doing it when I was really young, watching my grandmother and mother do it all of the time, which was pretty special. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, is from was from, Austria, and so she had, like, a little bit of an Eastern European bent to her cooking and her baking, which was really interesting, and so I got into it there. I started baking pretty young, 13 I think I was when I got my first baking job, which was at this really tiny bakery down the street from my house that had been there since the late 30’s, early 40’s. I just made donuts and hermits and lemon bars and all kinds of weird vintage, old school pastries.
Lisa Belisle: I actually know what hermits are. This is what my meme, my grandmother used to make for us, gourmet.
Briana Holt: Nice. I think of them as a Massachusetts thing because people have them all over the place there, but really they’re just kind of like a 40’s, 50’s bakery staple.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. What do hermits actually have in them? I’ve eaten….
Briana Holt: Molasses. They’re like a molasses thing. It’s a bar.
Lisa Belisle: They have raisins?
Briana Holt: Yep. Normally raisins. Sometimes nuts, but I think that’s sort of a divisive, polarizing ingredient.
Lisa Belisle: A little powdered sugar on the top sometimes?
Briana Holt: Unclear. I don’t know the answer to that.
Lisa Belisle: I think my hermits did used to have those.
Briana Holt: Ours did not at the place where I worked, but I was also 13, and I don’t really remember to be honest. I may have just forgotten the powdered sugar, which could be what I remember.
Lisa Belisle: I’ll have to go back to my meme on that and find out if I’m actually just misremembering this. Doesn’t this speak to something interesting, that you’ve just brought up a whole bunch of different really fascinating themes and one is the cultural aspect of food and one is almost the historical aspect of food, if you’re talking about hermits being from the 40’s and 50’s. How is it that something gets baked for a few decades and then doesn’t get baked anymore?
Briana Holt: I think it’s a really interesting question. I think it’s a lot of different reasons. I think you’ve got, you know, the idea of food trends, which, believe it or not, is not a new thing. People wanted, in the 40’s and 50’s, they wanted things that were really easy. That’s when industrial food started really making its way into everyone’s homes, things in cans, things in boxes, boxed brownie mix, stuff like that. That changed people’s tastes a little bit. I think anything can fall out of favor, especially if it’s hard. Things that people used to make that their grandmothers used to make, things you’d have to roll out a lot, puff pastry, strudel. Strudel, my god, like, my grandmother would make it, but you need a farmhouse table, and you roll out this dough and it’s like, ten feet long and really thin, and then you just keep doing it and keep doing it. People don’t want to do that anymore. Things that are troublesome or tricky, I guess, fall to the wayside and things take their place. I don’t know, I think people come back to flavors a lot is what it is. Something that’s comforting or exciting because they haven’t had it in a while.
I don’t know, I think now, there’s this huge resurgence of whole grains, heritage grains, and I think it’s really wonderful, but I also think what it does is it reminds people how things maybe used to taste and then they start to look elsewhere for those older flavors or older ways of baking or making things.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think that we got to the time of wonder bread, where even the bread was basically blank, and now we’re getting back to this….
Briana Holt: I wonder what’s in there?
Lisa Belisle: That’s exactly right. Now we’re getting back to a time where we want to kind of recognize the little bits that are actually popping out of the crust in our whole grain breads.
Briana Holt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And where they came from and who grew them. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You grew up on Martha’s Vineyard.
Briana Holt: Mm-hmm. Sure did.
Lisa Belisle: Not to be confused with Nantucket.
Briana Holt: Not to be confused with Nantucket, a smaller, fancier island.
Lisa Belisle: But it’s still an island.
Briana Holt: Yeah. The vineyard?
Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Briana Holt: Oh yeah.
Lisa Belisle: What was that like?
Briana Holt: It was pretty special and wonderful and perfect. I really love it there. I loved growing up there. Even if I wasn’t clear at the time on how wonderful it was, which, I guess, you’re not when you’re 14 through 17. I loved it. It’s small, and it is surrounded by the big, beautiful ocean, which I love to be around. It is full of farmers, dairy farmers, artists, cooks, musicians, and I think that I’m so lucky to have grown up in a place like that. I think it breeds a desire for creativity and also a really strong sense of being interested in things, you know? I guess if you’re the right person, and for me, that’s what it did. I think being surrounded by farms and cooks was pretty intrinsic to learning that I loved food and wanting to know what ingredients are or how to use them or why this cheese is different from this cheese or whatever. I’m pretty lucky to have grown up around that, I think.
Lisa Belisle: Trace your steps from growing up on Martha’s Vineyard to getting to Maine in 2013. What was your path?
Briana Holt: Well, it was varied. One of the things that kind of jump-started me, even if it took a break in me with the baking was working at that place I mentioned earlier, that old bakery. It was quite, quite old, you know, like wobbly wooden planks and huge, industrial-sized mixers that were made in the 30’s. Looked like they could’ve been on a warship or something. Like I said, I made donuts and things there, and it was just they had this huge, wooden table in the middle. Just huge. Like, larger than a king-sized bed. Like two king-sized beds. That’s where everybody kind of worked, rolling things across from each other, next to each other, and I just loved it. Even though I was young, I worked there from 13 to 15 probably.
Then I got through high school and went to college and kind of tried to find that culture, you know, anywhere that I could. I worked at a macrobiotic, hippie, kind of restaurant when I was in college in Northampton, which was pretty funny. Mostly it was brown rice and salmon that was served there, but there was some really good baked goods, and I kind of learned about using less sugar and things like that. That was fun to do. I would come home to Martha’s Vineyard in the summers and work at this kind of dingy, sweaty little pie shop in the back of a general store in my hometown called Alley’s and the little pie shop was called Back Alley’s. We served sandwiches and breakfast sandwiches and stuff and I made all the pies there and the muffins. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of muffins. I don’t make muffins now because I can’t…. It’s like some sort of PTSD. I worked there in the summers and then, it’s actually funny, I came back….
I worked at a few different places while I was living in Western Massachusetts but then I came home to Martha’s Vineyard and lived for a couple of years. My mother was dying of cancer, and I came home after college and lived with my parents to spend as much time as I could. Eventually, I found my way to Montauk, Long Island, where I was the pastry at a very, very fancy-pants kind of yacht club called the Montauk Yacht Club. Montauk is a very weird place. It’s pretty strange. It’s a little bit like Martha’s Vineyard, maybe a little bit like Portland. It’s full of weirdos. It’s full of people who truly believe they’ve been abducted by aliens and experimented on. There’s a old army base with a lot of ghosty stories surrounding it. There’s also quite a bit of money and several really fancy yacht clubs. I had this opportunity to run a very fancy kitchen. Lots of employees. Plated desserts, the whole nine yards, which is sort of a step in a different direction than anything I had ever done before, and it was a really great learning experience on how to tighten everything up, make everything really professional, work in a more efficient manner, learn to make things ahead of time. It was sort of like the grown up version of everything I had been doing. That was pretty special.
Then I moved to New York City, where I became one of a couple of bakers at a place called Pies & Thighs, which is a really wonderful fried chicken shack in Williamsburg. That place had been owned by a couple of friends. I was again moving forward in my baking career, always step by step, working with people that I already knew and loved. I feel like not everybody gets to do that and that’s pretty special. I baked pies and donuts at this place in Brooklyn for about four and a half years. That was really great. I made a lot of connections there, met a lot of people. Working in New York City is really great and I think that if anybody ever gets the chance to do it, they should. It’s exciting, it’s really hard, it’s really romantic. You take the train to work at 4:00 in the morning and walk through the streets of Bushwick, I don’t know. It’s just, I loved it. I loved every second of it.
I moved back to Martha’s Vineyard, where I ran a very tiny, little pastry kitchen at the renovated dingy pie shop that I had baked before. Some other friends of mine, Dan and Noni, took it over and turned it into a beautiful, beautiful spot called 7a. They have a little farm, they grow vegetables, they bring them there, they make sandwiches, soups, salads, and I took over one little corner with a table and made pies and scones and biscuits and stuff. I did that for two seasons while my dear friends Will and Kathleen were here building their coffee roasting company Tandem. Then I heeded the call and showed up here, and I was actually a barista in East Bayside for a little bit, and then we found this really great garage on Congress Street. It sort of fell into our laps in this funny way and we couldn’t say no. We jumped at the chance and built a kitchen, and now that’s where I go every day.
Lisa Belisle: It’s also where there seemed to be… I think we were there at 5:00 on a Saturday or something, and there’s still tons of people there and little families. It was the sweetest thing to see, that there were moms and dads and their toddlers and people just seemed really relaxed and the people who were working there knew the people who were eating there. It was like this little community.
Briana Holt: Yeah, and I think that is, if anything, like, the zenith of what we want to create is a little community hub. All three of us care so much about having a place where people know each other and know the people working and come and feel comfortable. I think in some ways, we’re so happy that that is something that has happened, and it is a really warm, welcoming space. It’s got those huge windows, it’s got the awning, it’s practically reaching out to you on the street. I think we’re so grateful that that fun space landed in our laps. It’s such a beautiful old building. Used to be a gas station or a place where they worked on your brakes and stuff. It still has that awesome sign that says Brakes & Shocks. For a while, I don’t know all the details about this, it would be fun to find out, but for a while, it was an eBay store. I think before it was empty for quite some time, it was an eBay store. You could go there if you didn’t have the skills to open up your computer and sell your own items on eBay, you could pay someone a hefty fee to do it for you.
Lisa Belisle: You have a very lyrical bent to your descriptions.
Briana Holt: Thanks.
Lisa Belisle: When you’re describing the large tables and the working side by side and your grandmother rolling out the dough, I can picture it. I can feel it. I can be there. Where does this come from in you?
Briana Holt: Huh. I don’t know. It would be fun to find out. I love music, maybe that might have something to do with it. I love it a lot. Listen to it all the time. I certainly don’t play, but I pretend. I learn a song here and there on my roommate’s ukulele or something. Maybe it’s some sort of deep desire to also be a singer that is reaching out through the ether. That could be it, who knows? That might be it. I read a lot, too.
Lisa Belisle: What did you study when you were in school?
Briana Holt: Well, when I first went to college, that was at U Mass Amherst, and I studied film. I was taking all the avant-garde film classes and film theory classes. I took as many as I could as a freshman. They also make you take all kinds of other classes that didn’t seem important to me, so I didn’t come so eventually they kindly asked me to leave. When you only go to your film screenings, you can’t really keep up your GPA. When you live in a town like Northampton and you have just moved from Martha’s Vineyard where your parents don’t really let you do anything, you tend to take a lot of trips in your brand new 1971 Ford LTD, and you don’t ever come back and go to class.
By studying film, really what I did was party a lot and go to film screenings. I wouldn’t change a thing, I met some really great people, and I cemented my love of film, which is something that is really important to me. I took a bunch of time off and then I went back to school at Greenfield Community College, where I studied drawing. I majored in drawing and minored in photography, I guess, but really it was drawing for me, which I still do as much as I can, or as often as I can. Taking a bunch of time off and going back to school was really great and I recommend it to anyone.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that you have this remarkably creative spirit, and you physically create things, that you are actually putting your hands in dough and forming it into shapes and people eventually eat it.
Briana Holt: Yeah. That’s like the drug for me is making the thing and pulling it out of the oven. That moment of pulling it out, you know, a tray of biscuits is… when it comes out, and they do the thing that I have asked them to do with my hands, they pop up in the right way, the top looks right, they lean over just a little, that is the moment that keeps me doing it. That’s the thing that I’m addicted to, I think. It is kind of like drawing in a way. I guess it’s really important to me to share that kind of a thing with people, which is why baking in a bakery is so special, is because I can’t help it, I’m just watching people look at the biscuit they’re about to buy and hoping and wondering if they notice how it looks or how it feels. It’s really important to me…. Collaboration and sharing is really important to me, and I think that making a thing for a person and having them hold it and look at it and put in their hand and notice what it is that I’ve done is… that’s it, that’s the moment that I’m looking for every day, all day.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that this is something that’s important to you and yet we have in this culture and country, we have an interesting relationship with food. We both want that, we want that intimacy, we want that beautifully created, carefully concocted piece, and then sometimes, we just think, “Oh. I just need fuel,” and we completely overlook the fact that somebody made something and put it in front of us. That’s kind of an interesting place for you to be, that you’re putting something out there into the world, and you have no idea whether somebody’s going to actually appreciate it or not.
Briana Holt: Yeah, and in some ways, it almost becomes a meditation and you, or I at least, think to myself, it doesn’t even matter if someone notices in some ways because I am making it, and I am putting it out there, and I’m doing it for someone else. In a way, that’s like a kind of energy that moves forward, regardless of what the end result is.
Lisa Belisle: That’s very Buddhist of you.
Briana Holt: I think that it is.
Lisa Belisle: This whole non-attachment thing.
Briana Holt: Yep. You have to practice non-attachment in some ways, I think, as a person who creates food, especially in a restaurant where you are kind of closed… An open kitchen may not seem this way, but it can be this funny thing where the non-attachment is harder to pay attention to because you make a thing, you watch a person take it away, so that I’m paying attention and I’m looking. In other kitchens, you make your thing, you’re looking at it, you’re making it perfect, and then you send it away. It is this funny combination of the desire to feed people and be nurturing and also just make something beautiful and just send it off into the world and hope that it does its job.
Lisa Belisle: Which is not unlike art in general. It’s not unlike writing a song or writing a story or whatever it is, that you create something, and you hope somebody will appreciate it, but you just don’t know.
Briana Holt: You don’t know. In terms of food, the thing is though is that we’re lucky because we do kind of know. Someone is eating it. It is doing it’s job. I do think there’s a brand new level of consciousness about what people are eating that, it’s meeting this idea in the middle, this idea of nourishing people, and now people who are consuming things and eating things, you know, whether it’s because healthier foods or local foods or farmed foods are definitely a food trend. People wanting to know where their food comes from or who grew it, even if they’re not sure why they want to know that. They just want to because it says so in this cool food magazine. I don’t care because I think it’s pretty great that that’s happening, but I do think we’re working towards this thing where my desire to make something and nourish someone is meeting in the middle with someone else’s desire to be nourished, a little more than it has been in the last ten, twenty, thirty years.
Lisa Belisle: I like this idea of putting energy out there and the energy of food is something that, you can look at Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine or probably Western medicine….
Briana Holt: Ayurvedics love butter, I will tell you that right now. They love it.
Lisa Belisle: I don’t know what the energy of butter is specifically, but in other cultures, food actually has a specific energy to it. You’re describing a human energy that is put into the food, and I think there’s also this idea of energy that is put into growing a food. I’m not sure that all of us, it seems like kind of a, it’s almost an unprovable thing that there’s energy that goes into this, and yet we know it’s so.
Briana Holt: Yeah. It’s funny, I do feel like we all have to come together in general in the world, especially now, but in some ways, you have to get a little bit of the way on your own and figure something out, and sometimes I think that involves just trusting a feeling you have and knowing even if you don’t understand necessarily what, for instance, what a certain type of food, like what kind of energy that has, which can come from anything. It can come from a culture or a religion, like saying, “Oh, oil has this property, this spiritual property.” It can also come from, “This oil was produced in this type of way with this type of machinery and that produces this kind of energy and hires this many people.” All those things are real. All those different energies are real. I do think that in some ways, you have to figure that out for yourself or hold that within yourself in order to offer it out. It’s something that I’m growing and learning about right now as well. I think everybody is coming together in this new understanding of what eating is and cooking, which is exciting.
Lisa Belisle: Each of my daughters bought something that had a biscuit in it. They get a lot of good food, they’re very lucky that way. One of them ate the biscuit, loved it, ate it right away, she just couldn’t stop raving about it, thought it was wonderful. The other one, who, you know, she’s a little picky, if something doesn’t taste good, she’ll throw it away or compost it, whatever. She actually ate half of it and saved the rest for the next day and then went to the trouble of heating it up in the oven so she could eat the rest of it the next day. Whatever energy it is or ingredients or combination of things, even going to Tandem itself and having that experience, really made for these little special delicacies that both of my daughters appreciated.
Briana Holt: That is so nice to hear. I love when someone doesn’t finish something, saves it, and heats it up, or even just eats it the next day. I think that’s a true compliment. Something I know about myself is that I am very celebratory, whether or not there’s something that needs to be celebrated. I think that’s kind of how I spend my days is getting excited about things and wanting to celebrate. It comes out in my food. If you stand at the pastry counter on a Saturday morning at 8:00 when everything is out, you won’t really find too many things that don’t have a little bit of fireworks in them. There’s a few things, more than a few things, topped with flaky sea salt. There’s more than a few things that have too much butter in them. There’s more than a few things that are frosted with brown butter cream cheese. It’s something that’s in me that I can’t deny, and so it’s nice to hear when people get something there and eat it and feel kind of, like, celebratory in that way. I get excited, and I think it comes through.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to go to Tandem, actually, either one, but if they want to go to the bakery, then they need to go to Congress Street.
Briana Holt: Yep. Although we do send every day some tasty things down to the little shop.
Lisa Belisle: I will definitely be doing that myself and I’m sure anybody who’s listening now probably wants to go have a biscuit with maple butter on top of it on a Sunday morning. That’s probably going to happen, so you just now started a big stampede towards Tandem.
Briana Holt: I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m going to make more.
Lisa Belisle: That’s good. That sounds great. I appreciate this. I appreciate the fact that you’re bringing this great energy into the world and great food into the world, and thank you for feeding my daughters.
Briana Holt: You’re welcome.
Lisa Belisle: That was very nice of you. I’ve been speaking with Briana Holt who is the head baker at Tandem Coffee and Bakery in Portland. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. Thank you so much.
Briana Holt: Thank you. It is what I do, and I can’t help it, and I just can’t wait to do more of it.