Chesapeake bakery serves up sweet taste of the season

CHESAPEAKE

The first thud sounded shortly after sunrise. A scant second later, another followed. Then another.

And then another as Mary Yoder angled a rolling pin this way and that to form circles of dough on the kitchen counter at Bergey’s Breadbasket.

Foodies and market researchers have proclaimed 2011 the year of the pie. Some even call pie the new cupcake. Pie restaurants and pie happy hours have popped up in Los Angeles and New York City, and bakers are dreaming up weird twists on the classics.

Pie shooters, anyone?

In rural Chesapeake, in the crumb-sized kitchen of this dairy turned bakery, the ever-changing pie menu has long provided locals with the next big thing.

The 2011 “season,” the Bergey family’s 24th for making pies, started in May with the first blush of the strawberry crop.

A month later, when the fields were picked clean, the bakers at Bergey’s had turned out a record 1,025 strawberry pies and had moved seamlessly into blackberry pie season with fruit picked in Pungo.

Saturday morning, as blackberry pie season morphed into peach, the crew of four braced itself for the holiday weekend, some of their biggest days of the year.

By 10 a.m., the convection oven that occupies much of the kitchen had been emptied of cinnamon rolls and cheese Danish. A batch of late-season blackberry pies was bubbling and browning.

Meanwhile, Yoder, a baker at Bergey’s since 2007, faced an oversized stainless steel colander heaped with fresh peaches. Maria Overholt, who punched in five hours earlier to make 90 cinnamon rolls from scratch, picked up a paring knife.

They started peeling and slicing, peeling and slicing.

Since peaches are just beginning to ripen, Joy Bergey Morris, who runs the kitchen and is committed to locally-grown ingredients, said almost apologetically that the Flamin’ Fury and Lucky 13 peaches they’d get from the orchard next door had to be supplemented with fruit from South Carolina.

“But just a little bit,” she said.

Meanwhile, peeled and chunked peaches piled up in measuring cups, two-and-a-half pounds for each pie. And timing was critical.

The longer the peaches sit, the more juices they release, and too much juice makes for a soggy pie.

Then, there was the heat, which spiked every time the oven door opened. Heat melts butter, and if the butter in the crust goes soft, the dough is difficult to shape.

Morris, who has been using her mother’s recipe to make pies in the family business for 21 years, has a system that seems as natural to her as breathing.

In a sort of baking ballet, she measures sugar and butter into a pair of stainless steel bowls on the counter near the peaches. She blends the mess with a spatula and mixes in the peaches. Then she takes took two quick steps to a desk-sized counter to her left, places the bowls on top and separates two pie crusts from the stack she made from scratch the night before.

She piles them with sweetened peaches, presses a circle of dough on the top, seals it with her thumbs and then pinches a perfect series of waves into the rim.

A few random stabs with the knife and she slides the pies onto a baking tray, opens the French doors to the oven, and slips them in.

The whole process takes less than five minutes.

Soon, 20 pies filled the oven. At 11:03, Morris interrupted her dance to place a warm peach pie in the service window between the kitchen and the dining room. “Bye-bye, first peach pie,” Morris said.

Not two breaths later, Marilyn Hicks, a long-time Bergey’s customer from Chesapeake, claimed it.

“I must be lucky,” she said, and paid the cashier $16.95.

At 11:10, Morris put seven blackberry pies on the counter. Ken and Pam Corona appeared at the window with a slight sense of urgency.

“Our daughter drove by and saw the sign and called,” said Ken Corona, who lives in Chesapeake. “We ran right by here because we know they go quick.”

Missing in the kitchen on Saturday was Mary Bergey, 83, Morris’ mother. The family estimates that she rolled out 10,000 pie crusts by hand, until she got sidelined this spring by knee surgery.

“That number’s probably not even high enough,” said Morris, who was about halfway into her goal of 50 pies for the day.

Sometime during peach pie season, blueberry pie season will begin. Then apple pie season – overlayed with a short period of pumpkin pie, then back to apple and a few winter months filled in with coconut and key lime until the strawberries blush once more.

“When the season stops, we stop,” Morris said.

No market research, no publicist, no fanfare. Just homemade pies that taste like the season.

Check out Lorraine Eaton’s blog at http://hamptonroads.com/blogs/lorraine-eaton