Far Breton Bakery started with a guy who loved the owner's buttermilk pie
Marie-Arzel Young, a professional pastry chef since 2000, recently added a café to her Far Breton Bakery and is having a grand opening Friday.
The 15-seat café, 1924 Fordem Ave., on the northeast side, serves sweet and savory crepes, Parisian-style hot chocolate, Rusty Dog Coffee and Young's popular baked goods.
The bakery is open 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Young, 50, grew up in Madison and honed her craft at the former Ovens of Brittany, the former Harvest, L'Etoile and Samba Brazilian Grill.
As a student at Malcolm Shabazz High School, she put on a dinner fundraiser for a class trip out West. And because her mother's side of the family came from Brittany, France, she said it wasn't hard. "I knew how to turn out a dinner."
Young said her mom became fascinated with Amish culture, began getting Amish cookbooks and trying some of the recipes.
"She made something called a buttermilk pie, which was so good. It was like a cross between a custard pie and a crème brûlée. It had a buttermilk custard, was finished with sugar, and then it was caramelized on the top," Young said.
She said she made that pie as part of the fundraising dinner and, "one of the guys in my class, he didn't tell me this at the time, but that buttermilk pie rocked his world."
Years later, before discovering her passion for baking, Young said she cooked for a friend, who in return took her to L'Etoile for dinner.
At the restaurant, she reconnected with the guy from high school who admired her buttermilk pie and who had gone to culinary school and become a chef there. He mentioned the pie to Odessa Piper, Etoile's original owner, and that led to Young becoming a baker at Madison's top restaurant.
She said she had been working as a secretary at Briarpatch Youth Services, a Madison organization that helps young people facing homelessness and other challenges, and she was enrolled in the culinary school at Madison Area Technical College.
"All of a sudden, I kind of shot to the top of the class, working for Odessa, doing her baking in the mornings, because she was starting to launch her café on the ground floor at the same time," Young said.
Young, who besides having a culinary degree from MATC, is one math class short of finishing her business management degree through UW-Stout. She's owned bakeries in Eau Claire from 2003 to 2005 and 2006 to 2009.
She moved back to Madison in 2010 and began working at Harvest. She's kept a good relationship with Harvest's Tami Lax, who co-owns the Old Fashioned, which sells Young's spiced sugar buns on weekends.
Young kept the Fordem Far Breton going through the recent remodeling of the 1940's former New Orleans Takeout space that she's rented for the past two years. She's used the right side for selling bakery and now there are parquet floors throughout, and seating in the café side that includes a large cherrywood conference table that seats eight.
The bakery is also at the North Side Farmers Market on Sundays and the Dane County Farmers' Market on the Capitol Square on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Young said the bakery makes about 1,500 pieces of pastry for the Saturday market, all handmade. The bakery produces a total of about 2,500 pieces a week and has 10 employees.
Far Breton is known for its croissants and spiced sugar buns, loosely based on Piper's famous Ovens of Brittany morning buns.
Young's Kouign-amann, French caramelized butter cakes similar to puff pastries, but with fewer layers, is her bestseller. She said she sells about 450 of those alone at the market on the Square, plus scones, pan au chocolat and a seasonal quiche.
Young went through the long process of securing a $50,000 Building Improvement grant through Madison's tax incremental financing program, which helps independent businesses with capital costs for interior and exterior renovations.
She said she didn't think she'd be eligible because the building used to be in the town of Madison when she moved in two years ago, but it switched over to the city of Madison. She said she asked herself, "'What does the bakery need?' The bakery really needs seating. People are really clamoring, have been clamoring for it for some time."
Young has big rolling oven and four stack ovens, also called deck ovens because they can be stacked. Two of them are new through the Wisconsin Women's Business Initiative Corp., a statewide economic development corporation loan that allowed her to upgrade her equipment, electrical, heating and cooling systems and hire extra staff to prepare for the Dane County Farmers' Market on the Square.
"It's a big event where we're making as much pastry as we possibly can, and it runs out real fast."
The grant money also goes fast, she said. "I'm back at looking for grants."
She said she has three more stack ovens in storage and waiting so she can expand her baking operations into the garage, which her landlord is going to handle. That would double her current production space, she said.
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