Interview with NuFlours Bakery:

With Phebe Rossi, Founder + Head Bakery Queen at NuFlours Bakery; and Amanda Beddell, Co-owner

Setting: In their shared commercial kitchen space in lower Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle. It’s 3pm on a Tuesday and Phebe is just wrapping up her daily bake-a-thon session, which started at 8am that morning. Amanda, is taking care of some calls in the background and Phebe is almost jogging around the kitchen as I enter, and keeps going as I sit on a stool– carrying huge HUGE trays of cookies, wrapping them and adding them to the fridge to cool. Before we even start, she unwraps a few and hands me cookies– oatmeal almond butter, their famous chocolate chip, and an extreme chocolate brownie. “Here, here. Have these. But be careful– they’re hot!”

Sarah: So, Miss Phebe, this looks like a huge production! Has it always been like this? Or how did NuFlours get started?

Phebe: Well. It’s been about 6 years in the making to get to this point. I used to be a pastry chef and mostly did wedding cakes and other special orders for big events. So very much the catering scene. After years of trying and testing and being around so many baked goods all day long,  I started not feeling so good myself. I was run down and tired all the time. My few people in my family had had celiac disease, and then I became diagnosed as well. But I wasn’t going to let that stop my love of baking, so I started experimenting in my own kitchen with the art of gluten-free baking. It was a a bit of a complicated process. Back then, there weren’t as many options for alternative ingredients that didn’t taste like dirt. I would test recipes out on everyone I knew—gluten free or not. Pretty soon, I got some good formulas down, and decided that I was ready for a bigger production scale. That’s how I came across this kitchen space.

Sarah: So that was, how long ago?

Phebe: That was 2 years ago. So that was really the start of NuFlours officially.

Sarah:  [Eating the chocolate chip cookie, still warm and gooey from the oven. Chocolate all over my notes. Oops. Um.. so good, if you must know. There was an entire layer of chocolate all the way through the middle of the cookie. Had to stop because I was being a mess]. So why start a business instead of just sharing it with your friends and taking special orders on the side? Why the full scale?

Phebe: Well, truly, deep down I am like an Italian grandmother. I love to feed people. I love to treat people, to see their eyes light up. In the case my fellow gluten-free people, I wanted them to still be able to have that experience—to participate in the fun and pleasurable part of eating, without feeling horrible afterwards. That, just because someone has  a food allergy, they don’t always have to be “separate” when it comes to eating and sharing food with their loved ones. It’s the ability to tell a bride that she can eat cake on her wedding (that all the guests will like) and all the joy that is associated with that– that it’s not an option or not off-limits. Or to have a cookie for a kid who is gluten-free that tastes like what he used to be able to eat, like other normal kids. That is what I live for.

Sarah: I love that. I feel the same way. Just because food is healthy doesn’t mean that it can’t taste good too. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Phebe: Exactly.

Sarah: On that note, I noticed that “gluten-free” isn’t specifically in your tagline or slogan. Is that on purpose?

Phebe: Yes, actually. My first priority is making baked goods that taste good, for anyone’s palette. The fact that they all happen to be gluten-free is like an extra bonus. There are a lot of bakeries popping up that that do the whole enchilada: vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free thing, and I admire them– it’s a hard thing to do. But for me, it’s about the taste, number one. My philosophy is that I AM making cookies, brownies and cakes afterall, not a vegetable, so it should taste like one.  I’m not going to go past the point to “healthy” if it compromised the taste. I use some dairy and eggs in my products, but also have some that are without. It all depends on the need.

Sarah: What about the other ingredients? What are the staples you use in your baking? Any tricks for at-home gluten-free baking?

Phebe:  Well, we make our own gluten-free whole grain flour blend from Bob’s Red Mill grains [based in Portland], which is the key to gluten-free and healthy baking.  I get it locally and it makes such a difference. If you’ve even seen a gluten-free baking recipe written, you know that there are a lot of different flours used in certain measurements, to keep the textures and chemical profiles more similar to that of wheat flour.  My biggest tip for at home gluten-free baking is to make or find a flour mix that is blended already, and you should keep it all mixed together, so that each time you’re ready to bake, you don’t have to go rooting through the pantry, measuring and mixing. I also use butter, coconut oil, eggs, and brown sugar—the classics. I use Guittard chocolate in the brownies and chocolate chip cookies – it’s just the best. It’s much more of a deep chocolate flavor that you get instead of an overpowering sweetness. And for anything with fruit, we get it from our friends at the farmer’s market. In the summer I buy flats and flats of fresh raspberries and peaches to make our own preserves for the raspberry bars.  It’s very much a community based business-   I try to keep things local, fresh and supporting others in the food community. What goes around comes around.

Sarah: Very cool, I love it. You can never go wrong with the basics and classics in cooking.  So, is there a brick and mortar bakery planned in the fear future?

Phebe: Maybe! That’s the idea right now. But right now, we’re at a lot of the farmer’s markets, and distribute to a lot of restaurants and coffee shops in the area {see the full list here}. It’s like getting to delivery presents when we go on our route.

Sarah: {Now sampling the less messy almond butter oatmeal cookie, made with coconut oil instead of butter. Delish, too. These ladies know what they’re doing.} So do you ever give away your recipes? Like one for my readers?

Phebe: {smiling} Remember I told you I was an Italian grandma? An Italian grandma never gives away her secret sauce. But ingredients, yes. Which one?

Sarah: The chocolate chip cookie, please. I can try to recreate it, but I have a feeling I’ll never top this!

Phebe: Maybe that’s a challenge! It’s made our flour blend, the gittard chocolate, eggs, a little bit of brown sugar, vanilla, baking soda,  and sea salt. Simple.

Sarah: And so good. I’ll let you know how it goes.. although I might just be finding you at the Ballard Market when I need one.

Phebe: {laughs} Well, that works great too! Thank you.

[update: I’m still working on it people. That Phebe is a gluten-free baking magician].

Do you like cookies? It’s your lucky day! For those that live in the Seattle area and are around this coming weekend– if you visit the Nuflour ladies  at their booth and tell them that you’re a Simply Real Health blog reader at the University District Farmer’s Market– Sat 9am-2pm or the Ballard Farmer’s Market– Sun 10am-2pm; you’ll get a free coconut-oatmeal cookie coming your way. What’s not to love about that?!]

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Sarah Adler is the owner of Simply Real Health, Inc, a healthy lifestyle company on a mission to teach people a fresh, modern and simplified approach to healthy eating. See more about her or her healthy lifestyle programs here.