hello welcome to Kate's Ag today i am in Denver colorado at LowDough Bakery on the Dairy Block
which is very exciting and we're going to be taking a tour and learning all about the bakery
now we are going to head inside the bakery
i am now inside the bakery with Jan the owner of LoDough Bakery which is very awesome so thank you
so much could you give me an overview of what you do here yeah so um our main business is uh we're
a wholesale bakery with a small batch storefront um in our small batch storefront concentrates on
local organic grains that's phenomenal yeah so we get all of our flour freshly milled every
week up in boulder and bring it down here and then make some delicious sourdough that you can
see right behind us oh it does look delicious as well as some pastries um and then our wholesale
part focuses on just like providing restaurants around us in the community with some fresh bread
every day that's phenomenal so you're really doing wonderful things for the community yeah thank you
all the we use is local wheat which is just phenomenal and it's also locally milled so
throughout the whole process of creating your delicious pastries you're really supporting local
businesses yeah exactly so um the flour does come right here from Colorado and then it's milled up
in Boulder um i go grab it every week and we right now have red turkey wheat in house we have a whole
wheat and a sifted one so this is all used for our storefront so all of our pastries that you can see
here that's amazing all right so we have we make puff pastries everything is rolled out by hand
so strawberry danishes here hazelnut crowns scones and cookies and then we do all kinds of breads so
we do everything from sourdough hoagies brioche challah focaccia wow that's absolutely incredible
thank you and what would a typical morning look like in the bakery yeah so i get here at four in
the morning and then i start making all the doughs the sourdough does rest overnight so it's actually
made the day before so it's basically just shaping the next day then i start the challah in the
morning i start production for the restaurants and baking off all the pastries basically
um so we open at 10 o'clock so from 4 to 10 is like crazy time and then like right when
we open i can relax a bit oh well that's very nice and are most of your pastries sold in-house
yeah all the pastries um so everything in the storefront is sold just here um and
then everything we do wholesale um just goes to restaurants that's really great here right here we
have um our sifted red turkey it's kind of like an all-purpose flour if you want to see it that way
and we also use over here a whole wheat we basically just have
the outside of the wheat on there as well and we also have organic rye flour wow
right in here and rye flour is just really fun to work with it doesn't have gluten so it's very
interesting in bread and what's very awesome is to see how you use all of your flour and what
wheat is used for because my family actually farms wheat in Montana that's awesome yeah it's really
fun to see like it all come together yes and how it gets to the end consumer yeah exactly
so i grew up on a farm as well in Austria we did not have grains but we had vegetables and lots of
fruit oh wow that's very cool yeah my family was always very focused on eating organic and fresh so
when i moved to united states like eating grocery store bread was kind of disappointing um so i'm
self-taught actually and breakfast is like very important to me in my diet especially um and i
was missing like really good flavorful bread and that's where like local grains come in and organic
grains it's just because like the one the fact that they're freshly milled just keeps all the
oils in them as well so it's just a really full flavored robust loaf and a really great quality
product at the end yeah wow so here we have our loaf of sourdough and i think we should cut in yes
that would be marvelous and what wheat is this bread made from um so this is uh
uh turkey bread so yeah that's got a nice piece there do you prefer butter and jam or
how do you like to eat what would you recommend um i'll usually just eat it with some butter
and then i have some fresh house-made strawberry jam as well that sounds phenomenal there you go
wow thank you absolutely oh my goodness this looks so delicious i cannot wait
it's still warm too it's good i don't think i've ever had better bread in my life oh thank you if
you're ever in Denver you have to stop at LoDough bakery that's a must yeah thank you this is the
absolute best part of my entire trip so far so thank you okay so like i said i grew up on
a farm and my parents were very focused on like local organic food already like almost 20 years
ago well 20 years ago now um and we milled our own grains so we would go pick up fresh grains
from the farmers take them home and then whenever we bake we just like freshly mill it and we had a
little household meal oh gosh that's amazing yeah and it really just like changes the way you like
see things and taste things moving forward from there completely it really shapes your
perspective yeah absolutely around food and and purchasing local ingredients
how to end up at that really quality end product exactly and the more we can like show people that
type of lifestyle the more we can like all be part of it and make it more affordable as well yes and
the process of going from the farm direct to the bakery the consumer can see the whole process
all the way throughout exactly yeah so you create all of your recipes yourself as well yeah exactly
especially with us being at a very high altitude as well 5280 feet um you're gonna have to work
with like higher hydration and um there's quicker leavening around here so yeah all the recipes are
developed in my head here wow that's amazing yeah so right here we're currently shaping um our bogey
holes uh that's one of our wholesale products and it goes right next doors to the milk market
so once they're fully baked i just run them out over there and they have fresh sandwiches every
day with this beautiful bread that's amazing basically what we're doing we have a pre-shaped
dough here already um pre-shaping just gives the dough a little bit of uh structural integrity
uh and then the final shape like it suggests we'll put it in its final form sealing it up and then we
just lay it on these little trays there to proof it and get special baked then send off to the
restaurant so LoDough bakery we just opened two months ago actually so we're brand new oh really
yeah i was working as a bar manager for one of the restaurants here in town and the owners of
the bonannos they have 11 concepts here in Denver and they knew that i wanted to bake and my dream
was opening a bakery so after lots of persuasion i was able to like develop a partnership with them
oh that's very cool well congratulations this is just phenomenal yeah and we also just last
week got this brand new opening which we're really excited about i was baking everything out of the
pizza oven and cast irons before that wow so now we've just like won a lot more capacity and two
which is like way better equipment that must be very nice these look spectacular thank you
so just a little finishing touch there what would be your most popular item at the bakery so far um
probably these actually right here are strawberry danishes hand rolled puff pastry some lemon cream
cheese our house makes strawberry jam and some fresh strawberries on there and they're just a
delight nice light and crispy do you want to taste one sure thank you oh my goodness
um
absolutely to die for and then these things are a childhood memory of mine um so i used
to help out on this farmer's market and this pastry is called a hazelnut crown
and the lady that helped out would pay me in little pastries which were those really yeah
so with again puff pastry uh filled with um
a hazelnut pastry that's really neat it's almost like a bear claw your pastries are beautiful
have you been baking your whole life um so i actually started out in the kitchen so i went to
culinary school and never really enjoyed being in the kitchen so i switched to front of house
and worked as a bartender in four countries so oh wow in Austria moved to Switzerland i
bartended in Scotland and the United States and just about four or five years ago or so i got back
into baking really so that's when i started just learning everything i could that's really neat
really an art that must take a while to learn yeah for sure i think most of everything in baking is
just like practicing the same things over and over again it's a lot of a lot of failure involved in
it um but with books and youtube really i was able to teach myself pretty much everything wow that's
amazing yeah i think the hardest thing is just like something that comes with experiences like
understanding though what time does to the dough and fermentation etc well this has been wonderful
thank you so much thanks for coming in and what a lot of the concepts for your pastries come from
your roots back in Austria yeah exactly so we know australia actually originated in austria
so basically bread making was turned into adding a bunch of butter folding it on top of each other
and we had these lovely puff pastries developed from there wow that's amazing thank you so much
for the tour of your bakery this has been absolutely wonderful and i don't think i've
ever had anything more spectacular and delicious in my life thank you so much for coming in it's
been a true pleasure having you here and where can people find you um so you can find us on instagram
at LoDough underscore bakery our website is lodooughbakery.com we're located right here
in the lower downtown neighborhood in Denver right at the Dairy Block make sure to like and subscribe
i hope you learned a little bit more about where your wheat goes and how these delicious pastries
and bread end up on your table and all the hard work and effort that goes into it yeah from
both sides yes oh very true yeah well thank you so much thank you okay bye
you