Your Daily Bread
A Hutterite girl married to a city boy, Tabitha Langel has translated her love of whole foods into her livelihood. Together with a group of friends and neighbours this incidental baker helped turn a small local bread co-op into the very successful Tall Grass Prairie Bakery.
It’s the first real sweater day of the fall. Outside slate-coloured skies rumble ominously as ochre leaves skitter across damp sidewalks. On a morning like this there is no better place to hole up than within the woody warmth of the Tall Grass Prairie Bakery at The Forks. By 7:45 am the bakery’s industrial oven is already steaming, thanks to the early-bird baker who begins his shift at three. By
8:45 customers are lining up, seduced by the wafting aroma of freshly baked breads and muffins. Darting around the open kitchen is Tall Grass Bakery’s co-owner Tabitha Langel, dressed in a matching scarf and apron, the uniform of choice here. As both an owner and a baker, Tabitha is clearly a marvelous multi-tasker. As she loads pillowy baguettes into the floor-to-ceiling oven she sends out hearty greetings to her regular morning customers.
A compact, energetic woman, Langel chronicles the history of the 14-year-old bakery while rolling out a batch of famous Tall Grass cinnamon buns. “It all started with the farm crisis,” she remembers. It was the late 1980s and Langel, along with the other members of a Wolseley-based, grassroots church group were seeing the devastating effects that low grain prices were having on local farmers. Their response was to start a bread co-op that ordered grains directly from the farmers and paid them a fair wage. “Three of us were from Hutterite colonies. We baked together [there] and it was a lot of fun,” recounts Langel. So the group milled the flour and baked the bread while their kids delivered the goods around the neighbourhood in their wagons. “We grew very slowly,” she says, “None of us ever thought of starting a bakery.” But as their orders grew they reconsidered expansion, and in 1990 opened the original Tall Grass Prairie Bakery on Wolseley Avenue.
To prepare, the five then-owners took a short introduction-to-business course. But with no real training they braced themselves for an uphill battle. Instead the neighbourhood so embraced the new bakery that by 10 am on opening day they were completely sold out of bread. Even the dozen cinnamon buns they’d made on a lark were gone. “When it came time to bless the bakery we had to borrow back a loaf of bread from one of our customers for the ceremony,” says Langel, flashing her trademark grin.
With this unplanned success came an unexpected conflict. At that time all of the owners were working at other jobs. Langel, a mental health worker, suddenly found herself having to contemplate abandoning her career in social work to start full-time at the bakery. After two years of doing both jobs, while also managing to be a mother to her young daughter Suzanne, Langel knew it was time to choose. In the early 1990s she abandoned her computer for a rolling pin.
Fast forward more than a decade and the business has expanded further, into The Forks Market. Current owners are Langel, who along with her husband Paul manages The Forks location; Lyle Barkman, who bakes and co-manages the Wolseley location; and Sharon Lawrence who works in the office. They rely on a staff of nearly 50 to keep their ideas fresh.
It’s shortly before noon now as Nancy Hall, wearing a matching purple top and scarf, mixes homemade hummus in preparation for the lunchtime deli rush. A few feet away baker Vaughn Barkman offers his ideas for an upcoming line of Tall Grass jams. It is these young faces that Langel hopes will lead the business into the future. “We don’t hire along trained baking lines,” she says. Instead what’s most important here is a willingness to work within a cooperative model and respect the bakery’s philosophy. That philosophy, as outlined in the Tall Grass Bakery brochure, says that “good bread is made when we work with our Mother the Earth in a spirit of gratitude and with loving responsiveness to her needs and ours.”
Over the bakery’s largest mixer hangs a picture of a man and woman praying over their field. Its presence is symbolic of the attitude here. “Spirituality and food is a mish mash, they’re not separate,” Langel explains earnestly. This philosophy is baked right into the Tall Grass harvest bread. “Traditionally the farmers would put everything that they harvested that year into one loaf, giving thanks for the food and for everything that you made that year,” Langel explains as she answers the ever beeping oven. Because they try to keep in rhythm with the seasons, these loaves are baked only in the late summer and fall. “All bread is sacred,” Langel says with passion, “But that loaf is something wonderfully sacramental. When I’m eating it I find my body goes yes, yes.”
She believes that part of what makes it so special, is using flour that is milled right on site. On any given day, visitors to The Forks Market can watch the bakers milling the flour through the large glass windows. “People should see where their food is made,” says Langel. Soon they will also be able to see photos of the many local farmers who harvest the grains, vegetables, fruits, wild rice and eggs used at the bakery. “It brings the farm to the customer and makes it real,” she explains while zipping around the kitchen in her black Birkenstocks.
Always moving, Langel scuttles over to the back corner of the bakery to observe cake expert Olga Alvarez slather icing onto a cake headed for Suzanne Langel’s 17th birthday party. As one of those wagon-pulling kids who first helped deliver bread, Suzanne has also spent time working at Tall Grass. But, says her mom, “We’re clear with our kids that it’s our dream, not theirs.”
