SUNDAY NEWS: At Dopest Dough, bagel zen and the art of relationship maintenance

Four nights a week, at 2 a.m. the lights go on in Dopest Dough’s two-story Manufactory in 500 Seneca, next door to the former Dobutsu space.

While Buffalo sleeps, Joe White and Anna Hartzel’s hands never stop moving. Portioning, weighing, and shaping sourdough, they’ll finish 1,000 or more bagels a shift. Boiled, topped, and baked, 700 bagels will head for their East Aurora retail outlet. The rest are for wholesale accounts. They’ll leave around noon.

Working four or five days a week, the couple usually spends about 42 hours together at the bakery, usually in the same room, their hands shaping the dough that makes their living.

Dopest Dough has six employees, and is looking for more bakers. Eventually the Manufactory space should become another retail outlet. 

But right now, White and Hartzel are taking it one batch of sourdough at a time. “The rhythm is great,” said White, who originally got into bagels as physical therapy after his pro musical career left him with tendonitis. “Because we know exactly what to expect when we clock in, and what it takes to get us to clock out.”

In East Aurora, the day’s bagels are usually sold by the time the bakers sweep up.

Joe and Anna have been a thing since her friends introduced them in 2010. When his musical career hit the wall, he started Dopest Dough in 2020. Formerly a server at Dobutsu and elsewhere, she joined him in the work after the pandemic.

“I think once COVID hit, I was just over it,” Harzel said. “I knew I didn’t want to go back, but I didn’t necessarily know what my next move was. So it kind of ended up at the perfect time that Joe needed help when I was feeling a little bit lost.

“There are things that I would like to pursue that don’t involve the bakery,” she said, “but this has kind of been what we’ve been doing as I’m kind of figuring it out. You know, my place in the world, as cheesy as that sounds.”

“We’ll build our leaven throughout the week,” White said. Leaven is a mixture of flour and water that naturally starts bubbling with bacterial growth.

He starts with 50 grams, slowly building it up Monday through Thursday. Then adds more flour and water to keep it growing, and fast-tracks the growth by introducing yeast. 

“We’re reserving a small amount of the original leaven or starter for the next batch,” he said. “The sourdough starter or leaven I’m using is one my older brother gave to me almost 10 years ago now. It’s gone everywhere from Woodstock, New York, to Ohio to Ithaca to Louisiana. 

And back to Buffalo, where it powers the next generation of Dopest Dough bagels.

Everything bagel breakfast sandwich
Everything bagel scallion schmear
Smoked whitefish salad on sourdough

Worked up into levain, augmented with more flour, water and yeast, it bulk ferments at ambient temperature for two to four hours. “The shaping process right now takes about anywhere between two and a half to four hours,” he said. “It depends on the speed, the temperature, how on top of my levain build throughout the week I was.”

Q: You’re tending to a vat of bacteria, flour, and water. The levain grows out of that starter. Then you mix levain with flour and more water to make the dough. So it’s a living, breathing thing you serve. Do you see bagels in your sleep?

Joe: I’ve only had four bakery dreams or nightmares in the last six plus years. Usually it’s a recurring one where I’ve got dough bins stacked up to the ceiling, and they’re bubbling up, blowing the lids off, seeping over.

Q: Sounds like a nightmare. The millions of little beasties that you let loose in the flour got out of your control, and now they’re running your life instead of instead of the other way around. Haven’t you seen the movie about what happens when you feed them after midnight?

Joe: When you wake up at midnight, one in the morning, you can think of a lot of scary stuff that’s not necessarily accurate or true representation of what’s going on in the business.

Q: How do you guys get through overnights?

Joe: It’s easy at this point because there is an unspoken agreement of what needs to be done to get through it. We’re not forcing conversation on each other every moment. We do our best to get in a flow state and keep our heads down. The only way out is through.

We’ve been hands on with the business for a long time now. Until these last few months, we’ve been the ones to shape every single bread and bagel that has gone out of the door. Gilmore Girls marathons while we shape bagels also helps.

Getting through the overnights is another thing. A lot of Ice Road Truckers episodes, Steely Dan, hours of podcasts about Bigfoot, hours of dissecting the series Severance. 

A lot of late night Waffle House emulations, a lot of grits, many Art’s Cafe pain au chocolates, gallons and gallons of Tipico coffee, portable swamp coolers, fielding random drunken visits from friends looking for cheese snacks or bagels after they’ve left the bar next door.

Baking in East Aurora was a wild ride but honestly moving all of the baking to the new production spot has made our lives exponentially easier.

Q: Do you ever get a break?

Last year we went to Louisiana for our anniversary. Occasionally we’ll go on a three-day trip to someplace like Ithaca. 

Q: Of all the tribes that cook for the public, bakers are the most interesting. Your schedule is not the world’s schedule. It’s a solo or solitary act against the grain of society, almost monastic. You have to set your clock to a different daily routine. You have to also master ancient, eternal forces, summoning and deploying microscopic hordes. Getting into a relationship with them, really. I’ve heard about baker nightmares, people waking up, like a bolt out of the blue, “Oh my God, I have to feed the starter.”

Anna: That’s literally us laying there at night. 

Joe: We forgot to feed it four times in the last 10 years.

Anna: We always remember to feed our cats. The starter is secondary.

But so far, it’s working. They’d like to hire more bakers, but for now the two of them are happy making dough making dough.

“It’s wild,” Anna said. “They sell out of the bagels that we send to East Aurora before I’m done sweeping the crumbs and leaving here. Every single time they text me ‘They’re gone.’”

Owno khao swe, coconut noodle chicken soup, at Family Thai Riverside

REVIEW ON DECK: Family Thai, the humble Thai-Burmese restaurant in Riverside with a sister operation in South Buffalo, is worth considering for your next family dinner. The dishes might be unfamiliar at first, but its extensive menu of fried snacks, soups, and salads offers something for just about every appetite. Hardboiled eggs in comforting Burmese curry of ginger and caramelized onion, seafood salad of tender shrimp and calamari in lime vinaigrette, and owno khao swe, coconut noodle soup with chicken, are all good reasons to stop by. (For patrons, later this week.)

Casa Azul sous chef “Alex” Martinez, right, with his wife Milasus Del Rosario Colon

HELP CASA AZUL HELP ALEX

Keiber Alexander Esposito Martinez goes by “Alex.” He’s from Venezuela, came to American seeking asylum, and is authorized to work in the U.S. He is married to Milasus Del Rosario Colon, a U.S. citizen. 

He started at Casa Azul as a dishwasher three years ago. Over the years, he worked his way up to sous chef.

Last week he was detained by ICE, for no apparent reason, said Casa Azul owner Zina Lapi. Martinez is currently in the Batavia federal detention center. While his attorneys work to seek his release, Casa Azul is holding a fundraiser Sunday, Sept. 6 to raise money for his legal bills.

It’s noon to 5 p.m. at Casa Azul. Tickets are $20 and all ticket and food proceeds go to Martinez’s defense fund, Lapi said. Get tickets here.

CRITIC ASKS FOR HELP

This okra plant seems to be doing well, with three largish pods. Harvest time nears.

But I’ve not cooked much with okra, and I only have three at the moment.

If you’ve cooked okra that worked for you, would you mind sending me a recipe you’ve used.

Of course, I could google a gaggle of okra recipes. This time, with only three tender pods, I want a can’t miss, guaranteed win.

If you have a recipe that you’ve made that fits the bill, be a dear and send it to andrew@fourbites.net.

More local food and restaurant stories compiled by Michael Chelus of Nittany Epicurean:

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