A Bird’s-Eye View of the Sweets at Benicia’s One House Bakery

By Cheryl Angelina Koehler | Photos by Stacy Ventura

 

 

Bakeries, by nature, are halls of fantasy. But there was something more to the vibe at One House Bakery in Benicia. It sparked a distant memory of stepping into the great hall at New York’s Port Authority to find a huge Rube Goldberg–type installation. Commuters stood rapt watching a ball descend from the top of the contraption for a long and ridiculously eventful journey through a hodgepodge of impractical scenarios of parading pails and paddles, springs, scales, mills, gears, catapults, pulleys, steaming pots, sizzling pans, a toaster, and a panhandling parrot before arriving at its dubious destination.

A bakery sees similar commotion throughout the day, but it’s all in pursuit of a worthy mission: turning raw ingredients into sweet satisfaction for hundreds of customers. And like the commuters at Port Authority, those who enter One House Bakery can watch the action from several vantage points: along counters, through windows into workrooms, even from a balcony with café seating. The views take in dozens of workers—64 at a recent count—mixing, molding, kneading, baking, and glazing the goods, also turning their hands to filling jars with house-made jams and curds or whipping up nourishing salads, soups, and sandwiches. It’s like an interactive theater performance, and that’s not a stretch of the metaphor given how One House Bakery was retrofitted into the 4,000-square-foot shell of a former movie theater.

 

 

“The floor sloped four feet,” says the operation’s acknowledged leader, 39-year-old Hannalee Pervan. “We had the construction skills,” she adds to explain how she and her “retired” parents, Catherine and Peter Pervan, founded and built the bakery in 2018, calling up skills from the family’s 30 of running a construction company in Ontario, Canada. They even raised the roof to get more vertical space for adding a beehive of small rooms where her father now mans the bakery’s computerized control station and her mother constructs chocolate confections.

A room the size of a walk-in closet built into the ground floor houses a flour mill—the only one in Solano County, as far as Hannalee knows. She ordered the stone mill from Vermont, so she could showcase the flavors of freshly milled flours. “About seven pastries are made with 100 percent whole grains,” she says, admitting that whole grain goods are more of a personal interest than for meeting any customer demand for healthier carbohydrates.

 

 

Hannalee Pervan was destined to be a baker. “It’s been my singular focus since age 10,” says the artisan-entrepreneur, who became the mother of Juniper Pervan Ward-Henninger in June. “My mom and grandma always cooked, and every happy memory is associated with baking and cooking for people—making food with happiness and love.”

Following a typical route into a culinary career, she earned a certificate at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and entered Skills Canada competitions, “winning awards at all levels,” she says. She stepped into a competitive food scene as she baked at Porto’s in LA, La Parisienne in Miami, and Bouchon Bakery in Yountville, where she served on the bread team for the French Laundry. As she encountered situations where oversized male egos bred unsafe work environments for women and lower-rung workers, she set an intention that when she had her own bakery, it would be “one house,” a place that honors everybody who works there.

“Initially, I wanted to employ veterans,” she says. “I wanted to facilitate people’s lives. We try to create a place where women, minorities, people of all sexual orientations feel welcome; a safe environment for everybody.”

The Pervan family chose Benicia as the place to realize Hannalee’s dream because the building was just right for the bakery they envisioned and because they saw potential in this almost-hidden community on the Carquinez Strait.

“Hopefully, we’re making this a bit of a foodie town,” she says, and it seems so as customers flock in on a Thursday morning.

Hannalee’s marriage to sportscaster Colin Ward-Henninger—a U.S. citizen—was instrumental to the Pervan family’s move to the United States from Thunder Bay, Ontario, an Ojibwe community on the north shore of Lake Superior. “We had a 200-acre farm. My sons were bow hunters,” says Catherine Pervan, a strong and warm individual who speaks openly about her dear son PJ, who died 10 years ago. A former sometimes lumberjack, Catherine deftly outfits milk chocolate moose with dark chocolate antlers and recently came up with a unique item called “s’mores logs.” The marshmallow-filled disks so closely resemble real evergreen tree crosscuts that you have to touch the rough-hewn surfaces to know they’re not wood. She crafts confections throughout the year—moving seamlessly from seasonally expected chocolate Santas and bunnies to offbeat subjects like Oscars statuettes, dinosaurs, toolboxes, vintage cars, eyeballs, and skulls listening to tunes through earphones.

 

 

Benicia locals have made One House Bakery a beloved institution, a go-to place for coffee meetups, light meals, fresh breads, and daily indulgences. But again, there’s something more to the vibe here, and that gets picked up by news outlets as far away as New York City…since what reporter can pass up the chance to share the wonder of bread sculptures with names like Pain-dough-lorian, Pan Solo, the Groot, and Jedi Master Yaddle, which Hannalee and Catherine fashion from bread dough scraps. Yaddle, created in May on commission for Lucas Films, was invited to live out its doughy days in the Rancho Obi-Wan Museum in Petaluma. ♦

Located at 918 1^st St, Benicia, One House Bakery is open Wednesday through Sunday, 8am to 6pm. http://onehousebakery.com

Cheryl Angelina Koehler is the editor of Edible East Bay.

Stacy Ventura’s photography has been featured in San Francisco Magazine, Food Arts, 7×7, Food & Wine, and several Edible Communities publications. She can often be found in the garden with her chef husband, Brian, or at the beach with her big white dog, Bianca.

 

Butter Shortbread Linzer Cookies

By Hannalee Pervan, One House Bakery | Photo by Stacy Ventura

 

Makes about 15 assembled cookies

• 100 grams pastry flour
• 100 grams all-purpose flour
• 135 grams butter (room temperature)
• 3.4 grams vanilla extract
• 50 grams granulated sugar
• 1.6 grams kosher salt
• Your favorite local jams
• Confectioners’ sugar for dusting

Sift the pastry flour and all-purpose flour together in a medium bowl and set aside.

In the bowl of a mixer, cream the butter and vanilla with a paddle on a low speed until combined. Add in the granulated sugar and salt and continue mixing until combined. Add in the flour and mix until combined. Remove the bowl from the mixer.

Using a rubber spatula, incorporate any dry patches of flour on the bottom of the bowl into the dough. Empty dough onto a piece of parchment paper, place another piece of parchment paper on top, and roll out the dough to ¼ inch thick. Chill the dough for roughly an hour or until hard.

Using a cookie cutter (any shape you like), cut out as many cookies as you can from the rolled-out dough. Then cut small windows into the centers of half of the cookies so you will be able to see the jam through the windows when cookies are assembled after baking. Chill cookies again until firm.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Bake until cookies are golden and slightly dark around the edges. Remove cookies from oven and let cool.

To assemble the cooled cookies: Spread some jam on the lower cookies and place the cookies with the cutout windows on top. Dust with confectioners’ sugar to finish.