If heaven has a smell, the aromas might be something like the kitchen at WildFlour Pastry in West Ashley. Chocolate, buttery crust and cake batter waft out of ovens during the course of a single day.
Two of the bakers have been here since the early morning hours, and at 8 a.m., owner Lauren Mitterer gets her baking day started. A few customers have beaten her in, ordering coffee and a pastry to go.
Mitterer, a three-time James Beard Award semi-finalist, opened the West Ashley bakery in 2016.
“My role has changed here as we grow,” she said on a recent day when a reporter spent the day observing the behind-the-scenes at WildFlour. “Now, I’m more like a conductor in an orchestra.”
If the cakes are the flamboyant brass section of the orchestra, the flaky pastries are the quiet string section, binding the whole baked goods operation together. From pies like maple pumpkin or caramelized apple, to turnovers, Danish and croissants, the pastries are assembled by a small team of ever-moving bakers under Mitterer’s watchful eye.
Ashlyn Shinnick pours water into an industrial-sized mixer, hauling out the resulting pile of pie dough, the size of a toaster oven.
Bits of the pile are pinched off by gloved bakers for hand pies, tarts and quiches. The dough is portioned onto a large baking sheet, labeled and dated before being chilled. Dough already chilled is formed into small quiches filled with spinach and feta or red pepper and sausage, the creamy custard poured over the fillings from a large pitcher.
Shinnick is wearing black yoga pants with floury white handprints on her hips where she’s rested her hands.
“All my clothes are covered in flour, every day,” she said with a laugh. “You just get used to it.”
At another station, Jenna Monico, her purple-tinged black hair pinned up, has poured a potful of blueberries, putting the pot onto a portable burner that will move between stations throughout the day.
“Siri, set timer for seven minutes,” Monico said.
Neither Shinnick nor Monico had extensive baking experience when they joined WildFlour. They credit Mitterer with patiently teaching them the craft.
Mitterer said the team was the “secret sauce” behind the bakery’s success: “I can teach them to make pastry, but I can not teach someone to care. They have to care to work here.”
Thriving on a little chaos
By 9:30 a.m., the pace has picked up, bakers darting past each other in a choreography polished with daily practice. Oven doors open, fragrant pans slide out while others slide in.
“A large percentage of chefs thrive on a little bit of chaos,” Mitterer said, observing the bakery dance with satisfaction and answering questions on the fly as her staff follows her schedule to keep the baked goods fresh and to meet demand.
“Hand me that loaf of banana bread,” Mitterer tells Monico.
“The whole loaf?”
The whole loaf. The customer who asked for a slice of the bread was told it had just come out of the oven and was still too hot to slice. After seeing the steaming loaf, he decided to just take the whole thing.
Before the West Ashley location opened, the bakery had a 700-square-foot location downtown on Spring Street, but that closed in 2019. Part of the move was a desire to stay closer to her children, Keira, 8, and Henry, 3. Although her hours at the bakery fit in around school pickups, Sundays are long days dedicated to WildFlour’s popular sticky buns.
“Our menu has some seasonal things as well as standards, but we will always have those sticky buns,” Mitterer said.
The sticky buns are just one reason that Mitterer said that a good portion of her customers are repeat buyers.
“I get to know them and they become friends,” she said. “I know their names and their stories. I’m like a daytime bartender. This is a community.”
On this day, Mitterer is mentoring a student from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), from which Mitterer graduated in 2004. The intern is on the second day of a multiple-week internship, and Mitterer hands her off to Shinnick to learn how to pipe frosting onto row after row of chocolate cupcakes. Later, Mitterer shows the intern the boot-sized plastic containers of thick cake batter, scooping the batter into cake pans and smoothing them.
Finally, the intern is tasked with frosting a Confetti Cake. The cake is put on a turntable and frosting is heaped onto the cake, then smoothed with an offset spatula. A metal scraper with saw-like teeth is dragged around the cake’s sides to smooth the frosting texture. Mitterer demonstrates using a small blowtorch to heat the spatula and run it along the cake top to remove frosting bubbles. Finally, the intern sees how to take handfuls of sprinkles and press them into the cake sides.
Mitterer moves along, leaving the intern to finish the job, and checks lists to make sure the baking is on schedule. She returns a bit later to gently critique the intern’s final product.
Shinnick, meanwhile, has moved on from pie dough to beating butter, then shaping the butter into briefcase-sized slabs. A strip of pre-chilled dough is draped onto a laminating machine (laminating is the process of folding butter between layers of dough to create the airy creations of puff pastry). The butter is massaged onto one section of the dough and then the dough is folded into thirds over the butter and run through the machine to flatten it, much like a laundry press. The process is repeated several times with new butter slabs until the resulting dough is ready to be made into croissants.
On the savory side of WildFlour, Mitterer’s husband and business partner, Kevin Hutchison, is turning out breakfast sandwiches and savory hand pies.
“Kevin does everything from the savory work to cabinetry,” Mitterer said. “He did these shelves here. I can’t imagine not having a partner who can do so much!”
They married in 2015 and she said having him as a partner “gives a predictable rhythm to everything.”
Despite being surrounded by heavenly smells all day — or maybe because of it — Mitterer said she doesn’t really have a sweet tooth at home.
“I’d kill if someone would make me a good steak,” she said.
As the afternoon edges toward lunch, customers form a short line, deliberating in front of the glass display case before placing an order. No one looks sad or stressed.
That doesn’t surprise Mitterer.
“If you’re not happy in here, then I don’t know what to say…we put joy in people’s souls!”
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