NEVIS, Minn. — Although it was dark and freezing cold, the air outside Flour Chicks Bakery in Nevis smelled like warm doughnuts.
Inside this bakery in Minnesota’s lake country, the staff were working late into the night to churn out a steady supply of fresh breads and pastries. In the winter, the bakery’s calmest season, owner Sara Halik said they work until about midnight or 1 a.m., then start baking again at 5 a.m.
Halik bought the bakery two years ago with her sister-in-law, Tina Smith. She also owns Red River Bar and Grill in Akeley and splits her time between the two Hubbard County businesses.
She said she was in charge of making the cakes at her restaurant.
“I just fell in love with it and decided I wanted more work to do,” she said. “So, I bought a bakery.”
Flour Chicks re-opened under Halik’s ownership in October 2023, she said. So far, business has been booming, although the bakery only recently hired a full staff.
Behind the scenes
Flour Chicks Bakery owner Sara Halik of Nevis, Minn., said her favorite things about the bakery are her great staff and customers. (Alex Haddon / Park Rapids Enterprise / Forum News Service)
All of the recipes are kept in a thick binder, where they’re laminated and covered with notes. Some of them are “very touchy,” Halik said. As the seasons, temperature and humidity change, amounts of water and yeast have to be carefully adjusted by the gram.
Nikki Kramer starts her shift at 5 p.m., right after the store closes to customers, and gets to work making “all the pastries for the morning,” Halik said. Those include turnovers, scones, croissants, muffins and cinnamon rolls.
“You’ll see her cinnamon twists come out perfect,” Halik said.
To make cinnamon twists, a large sheet of dough is coated with an egg wash and sprinkled with cinnamon. Then, Kramer folds it over, cuts it into strips, twists them and sets them aside to rise.
Kramer and the other night staff go through dozens of sheets of dough, pressing out air bubbles and cutting out rings for doughnuts.
The centers of the doughnuts are saved to become doughnut holes. Cutter Serena Krotzer chops up any spare scraps of dough with cinnamon to be made into apple fritters.
Nothing goes to waste.
Neil Selseth, the fryer and “muscle” of the team, arrives at 6:30 p.m. and starts on the battered doughnuts.
“These girls make the magic happen, I just take care of the heavy stuff,” Selseth said, referring to the 50-pound bags of ingredients he lifts.
By 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, much of the next day’s doughnuts were rising in a warming box called a proofer.
Selseth was frying croissants in hot oil. Each small batch took about two minutes to finish. Selseth monitored them carefully and flipped them with a pair of sticks when they turned golden brown, then transferred them to a rack to glaze.
The business of baking
Neil Selseth of Flour Chicks Bakery in Nevis, Minn., maneuvers with a tray of freshly fried and glazed croissants ready for the doughnut case. (Alex Haddon / Park Rapids Enterprise / Forum News Service)
Halik knew cakes, but not doughnuts or bread when she bought Flour Chicks, she said, so the previous owner gave her and Smith a crash course in baking.
Once a week or so, they would come in and help him bake goods for the farmers’ markets.
“That’s how we learned to do what he was doing,” she said. “So, that really helped. It helped him too, because we were making the product for him to take and sell.”
Opening the doors was “overwhelming” at first, Halik said. Customers poured in, but the bakery was drastically understaffed.
“I was cutting, frying, I mean doing everything, every night, myself,” Halik said. “We were working 15-, 16-hour days. We were running the counter and running the back.”
Summer is their busiest season. Halik said she worked for 24 hours straight during one holiday, although she doesn’t remember which.
“I believe she had like 15 or 18 dozen croissants she had to fry, and additionally, another 30 pounds worth of cake doughnuts that she fried up,” Selseth said about one particularly busy summer day. “And they still ran out of doughnuts before 11 a.m.”
Soon, Halik said she developed a process for the bakery and hired people into specific positions. There were moments of hilarity, like when Halik got to know “Big Bertha,” her giant mixer.
“When we first started, we did not know what speeds they were,” she said. “So, we filled it up with powdered sugar. We thought three was low and it was not.”
The sugar went “everywhere,” leaving her and Smith laughing hysterically.
Now, Halik said she has about nine great employees and the bakery is running smoothly. She stops by in the mornings and evenings to check in.
She also makes all the pies. Over Thanksgiving, she said she fulfilled about 100 orders ranging from pumpkin to coconut cream.
Bright and early
It was about 7 below outside when the morning shift started with prepping bread and frosting doughnuts.
There’s a special technique to folding bread dough so it rises in neat spheres, Maya Deshayes said. The dough is tucked into itself and flipped over, leaving a perfectly smooth, domed top.
Keelin Irish was frosting and filling doughnuts. Despite “not being a morning person,” she works at Flour Chicks before heading to class at Nevis Public School. Halik was cutting cheesecake into tiny squares she would later dunk in melted candy to make 2,000 cheesecake bites.
Halik said Kathy Plumley is her “main person,” taking care of the cookie and cake decorating and overseeing general operations. Many of the vibrant designs in the cake counter are her work. Earlier that week, she’d frosted about 1,000 intricate Christmas cookies for the Akeley Veterans and Community Outreach Christmas party.
Plumley, a self-taught froster, helped teach Halik how to “do cakes.”
“(Plumley) always said, ‘Well, if I was younger, I’d buy that bakery,’” Halik said. “So when I bought the bakery, I reached out to her.’”
At 5:30 a.m., Plumley was dunking tiny, round pieces of cookie in icing and red sugar sprinkles to make Rudolph noses. Then, she decorated doughnuts to look like melted snowmen.
Doors open to customers at 6 a.m., except for a special group of customers known as “the coffee guys.” The group of retirees have been meeting for years to chat in the mornings. They’re greeted by Candy Pike, who works the front counter.
Pike said she loves working somewhere where everyone’s happy to visit.
“Here, I just get to be me and have fun and greet customers,” she said. “I get people to buy a lot of doughnuts.”
Pike said she’s worked in a lot of commercial bakeries, many of which just order their pastries frozen, “warm them up and put a little icing on them.” Flour Chicks is old school, she said. Baking is an art and they do it well.
Pike said her favorite good at the bakery, the fried cinnamon roll topped with buttercream and pecans, is so heavenly it “gives you a buzz.”
Related Articles
OG Zaza pizza moving into former Big E space on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue
Business People: Minnesota Farm Bureau honors Donavon Stromberg from Mora
St. Paul’s Grand Meander is Saturday. Here’s what to do, see and sample
Maison Rose, cafe and bakery from Rose Street Patisserie team, coming to former I Nonni spot in Lilydale
Business People: Moorhead correspondent Dan Gunderson to retire from MPR
Leave a Reply