Bierock and roll
Being a baker keeps her dancing
Staff writer
While she’s baked more than 125,000 bierocks in eight years, Rachel Collett, proprietor of CB Baked Goods in Marion, doesn’t find the work repetitive.
As Collett snipped bierock-sized globs of dough from a large mass, then rolled and weighed each glob with deft, vegetable-oiled hands, she spoke about her philosophy.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Oh, don’t you ever get bored with making bierocks every day?’ And I say, ‘Well, everybody has to go to work every day and do the same thing.’ It’s just what I do. I get up, I go to work, and I make bierocks,” she said.
Rachel and her husband, Randy Collett, came to Marion in August 2014 to tend to a farm outside town.
“Back in central Missouri, I was a school lunch lady, so I learned how to cook for big quantities,” she said. “Part of the reason we came back was to help with the farm. There’s no house on the farm, so we knew we needed a place to live.”
The couple purchased a two-story building on Main St. originally used as a hospital and moved in upstairs.
“It was in pretty bad shape,” she said. “Downstairs, there had been some retail businesses, but upstairs, there really hadn’t been anything since the 1970s.”
In addition to farm work, the Colletts planned to retire in Marion. But they quickly found out that wouldn’t be an option.
“We weren’t old enough for Medicare,” Rachel said. “The cost of insurance, as everyone knows, was astronomical.”
Randy Collett went back to work as economic development director for Marion, and Rachel began selling homemade bierocks and cinnamon buns at the Central Park farmers market.
Encouraged by their popularity — “I’d make 100 bierocks, and they’d be gone in like 15 minutes,” she said — she decided to start a bakery.
Opening the shop was a gamble. There were no other bakeries in Marion when she opened her store on the ground level of her home. To buy baking equipment, she took out a loan.
“I didn’t even know if I’d be able to pay the bills,” she said.
But the bakery proved a success, largely because of her dedication to her craft.
For “at least five days a week,” she worked from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the shop, baking, selling, and freezing pastries as a one-woman show.
After open heart surgery this February, she’s dialed her hours back a bit. The bakery is now open three days a days a week instead of four.
She’s also employing more part-time help throughout the year: currently, it’s retired middle-school principal Missy Steubenhofer who works as a cashier.
“I can’t afford to pay somebody 40 hours a week,” Collet said. “I just need somebody that can be here a couple hours a day…. By 10:30 or 11 some days, it gets crazy.”
Collet’s own schedule is still quite busy.
When the bakery is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, Collett is there baking “all day long.”
This means cinnamon buns, kolaches, sticky buns, and bolsos — bierocks with nontraditional fillings, named by Collett’s daughter using the Spanish for “purse.”
Baking at the start of the week helps Collett stay ahead of demand. Products from previous days are kept in the refrigerator or frozen and sold when she runs out of fresh material.
Collett bakes 60 bierocks fresh each day upon arriving at the bakery.
“I brown the beef, I cook the cabbage, and I start the dough,” she said.
She opened a freezer containing a variety of cookies — chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin — which emitted a cold, yeasty smell.
“People know they’re frozen,” she said. “I don’t make any bones about that. I try to bake these fresh every day, but I just don’t have time.”
After closing at 1:30, Collett remains in the bakery, kneading dough and rolling out sticky and cinnamon buns to bake the next morning.
She’s been trying to go home by 3 or 4 o’clock these days. Still, she says, “there’s literally never a day that I’m not doing something for the business.”
Collett frequently drives to Costco or Walmart to buy ingredients. She also handles all the paperwork of the business.
Certain times of year, she works overtime to bake seasonal items, such as dinner rolls for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
She often goes to unorthodox means to get customers their bierocks, meeting them in parking lots with styrofoam coolers full of order or leaving foil-wrapped bolsos outside her back door.
“I think how I’ve grown my business so much is by being flexible,” she said. “People know we live upstairs, so people say, ‘Well, I need some bierocks, but I can’t get this time off work. So can I come by at 5:30?’”
On her busy days, Collett gets around 35 customers. Often the crowd is sparser.
“A lot of days I don’t have a customer walk in the store till 10:30 in the morning,” she said.
While that doesn’t sound like much, she’s still selling bierocks consistently. A large part of that comes down to bulk orders made over the phone.
“Today, there’s some gal coming in getting four dozen cookies because her husband and some other guys are going deer hunting this weekend,” she said.
Another reason her business works is the loyalty of her customers.
“I’ve gotten to know my customers over the years, and I think that’s important,” Collett said. “The customers appreciate that. It’s always nice to walk in somewhere and have somebody feel like they remember you.”
A woman named Edith, in the shop to buy cinnamon buns, piped up.
“I think you’re amazing,” she said matter-of-factly.
A by-demand, phone-order bierock shop may be the future of CB’s Baked Goods, as Collett hinted she wants to retire sooner than later.
“I probably will never, just say, ‘OK, there’s going to be no more bakery,’” she said. “But what I might do is not have regular retail hours. If you want something, you have to call. And if I’m here and I have it, I’ll come down and meet you.”