The Backdoor is open
Huntington resident goes local with home bakery

Mary Cate Connors | fact checker

Two years ago, Dean Menke was living in Tonga, a group of islands in the South Pacific, teaching a pastry course at a vocational school and running a pastry business.

Now, he and his wife are living in Huntington, Vt. where he wakes up at the crack of dawn to prepare pastry dough, milk a neighborhood cow once a week, and experiment with different croissants--- all part of his new business, The Backdoor Bakery, which is run out of his home three mornings a week.

Local everything and a cow named Spring

Dean Menke recently opened The Backdoor Bakery, which he runs from his home in Huntington, Vt. Mary Cate Connors, photo

The Backdoor Bakery, currently set up on the front porch of Menke’s home, is in its third week of operation. Because it’s brand new, the bakery is only open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 6 a.m. until 9 a.m.

“I don’t think that I can be open more than three days a week,” Menke says. “There just isn’t a demand yet.”

Menke prepares dough at night for his pastries, which include almond croissants and pineapple turnovers, and works in the kitchen before and after his full-time job as a staffer with Environmental Defense, an environmental advocacy and policy organization based in Washington, D.C.

As a trained environmental engineer, Menke tries to utilize as many environmentally friendly practices as possible, including buying local products as much as he can, he says.

Menke buys local apples when they’re available and local blueberries for his muffins. He also sells a Guatemalan dark roast coffee at the bakery, but refuses to give out disposable cups to patrons.

“I’ll certainly pour it into your hands if you want it, or loan you a travel mug,” he says. “But I won’t give you a disposable coffee cup.”

He wraps his pastries in cellulose, which is a compostable material made with corn. He buys cream from Butterworks Farm, butter from Cabot Creamery and two kinds of flour from King Arthur, all of which are companies based in Vermont.

One of Menke’s favorite local products comes from a neighborhood cow named Spring that is owned by Kelly Quenneville and her husband, who own the Double Q Ranch up the street from the bakery, Menke says.

Menke met Quenneville through the Front Porch Forum, an e-mail list server that connects local residents with one another. Quenneville had sent out an e-mail for a “relief milker” for their new dairy cow and Menke was quick to volunteer.  The Quennevilles try and keep Spring as organic as possible and only milk her by hand. Menke soon became acquainted with the cow and began to milk Spring. He now collects two gallons of her milk per week.

“The milk I use is 100 percent whole milk and unpasteurized,” he says. “Spring can’t be any more natural than she already is.”

The science of the pastry

Menke says he realized his love for all things food when he was in graduate school at Purdue University. He went on to attend a small culinary school in Maryland called L’Academie de Cuisine. He enrolled in its six month continuing education program and graduated with both culinary and pastry degrees.

Kelly and Randy Quenneville stand with their dairy cow, Spring. Menke uses two gallons of milk from Spring every week for his pastries. Photo courtesy of Kelly Quenneville

While culinary was Menke’s first love, he found that he had a knack for making pastries. Being an engineer, the precision involved in pastry-making was easy for Menke to pick up, he says.

“Instead of adding a pinch of this or a dab of that, pastry involves the same collection of ingredients--just a combination of textures and flavors,” Menke says.  

Menke worked at Galileo, a five-star restaurant in Washington, D.C. for 10 years. He also pursued the pastry business during the year he spent in Tonga.

“French pastries weren’t exactly what the Tongans wanted,” he says. “But it was good for the visitors.”

Menke moved to Vermont when his wife, Patricia Delaney, obtained a position at St. Michael’s College as a professor of anthropology and gender studies. His intention was to open a home-bakery and after a few months, they fell in love with the town of Huntington.

“I always had the idea formulating in my head of a small bakery that neighbors would go to, but that was also a destination thing,” Menke says.

The small-town atmosphere of Huntington fit nicely with Menke’s idea to bring the community together with a bakery, he says. It was also a place where people passing through on their way to Camel’s Hump or the Catamount trail could stop by for a cheese Danish.  

“I’d love to have that type of reputation, stop in on the way to doing something else,” he says.

The current pastry selection includes plain, chocolate and almond croissants, pineapple turnovers, and cheese and raspberry Danish. But Menke says he's still experimenting with the menu.

His favorite recipes include a chocolate tart with a warm raspberry sauce and a citrus sensation cake, which he invented while he was overseas. The exotic dessert includes lemon cake, lime sauce and oranges, Menke says.

Going with the flow

Before opening, Menke tried out different pastry recipes on his neighbors and anyone who would eat them, he says.

“We were his guinea pigs for a while," Quenneville says. "[The pastries] are very good. We told him that we are always available if he needs more testing.”

Mark Lubkowitz, associate professor of biology at St. Michael's, carpools to work with Delaney and has eaten at The Backdoor Bakery several times. His favorites are the apple and pineapple turnovers and the croissants, he says.

Pineapple turnovers, plain and chocolate croissants, and several types of Danish are currently on the menu at The Backdoor Bakery. Mary Cate Connors, photo

"I bought a bag of five the other day and ate them all before I got to campus," Lubkowitz says.

Even though the bakery is Menke’s second job, he has big plans for the future of his business.  To start, he wants to actually fulfill the bakery’s prophecy.

“See it’s called the Backdoor Bakery,” he says. “But right now I’m selling out of the front door because everything’s all iced out."

Menke hopes that when it gets nicer out, his customers can enjoy the three acres of his backyard and will come and pull up a chair. For now, however, he would be perfectly happy to have people come into the living room, he says. 

As far as long-term goals, Menke wants to build a barn in his backyard that could be turned into a certified kitchen. Then he could sell pastries to a bigger market, not just from his home, he says.

“I don’t want to get so big that I can’t do it myself,” Menke says. “I would have to be a part of everything that goes out the door.”

Right now, Menke is enjoying the Vermont lifestyle and taking his bakery plans as they come.

“Part of moving to Vermont was to enjoy the pace,” he says. “And while opening my own restaurant is appealing, I don’t want to have to do it 20 hours a day.”