By Joshua Rosenstein, Assistant Editor, JTNews
After Stanley Lukoff died in 1992, his wife, Elliott Bay Baking Company owner and CEO Nadine Lukoff, came across a little black notebook. Their daughter Paula, company president and vice president of sales and marketing, remembers that notebook from her childhood.
“Every so often, my father would make bagels and say, ‘Here’s a recipe from the notebook’,” she said. He had filled the notebook with recipes when he worked with his mother Ruthie at Brenners’ Bakery, one of the three local, Kosher bakeries of the 1940s. That bakery closed down in 1966 when Paula’s grandmother retired. Now, Nadine and Paula are using their traditional family recipes to launch new lines of Kosher-baked goods. “The chicken scrawl in the book will say 50 pounds of ‘clear’ or ‘old soak.’ We had to employ a baking expert to help us in translating the recipes to modern terminology,” Paula said. As it turns out, ‘clear’ was a name brand for flour, and ‘old soak’ was the fermentation mixture used to make rye bread.
But before they started offering breads, braided or otherwise, Elliott Bay Baking Company had been baking cookies for four years and distributing them to local supermarkets. They offer a line of Kosher-for-Passover cookies as well.
The Lukoffs’ production bakery, located across from Boeing Field, takes up around 11,000 square feet. Within that area, they have a smaller production space which serves as the Passover kitchen during the months of Passover production. They kasher the kitchen every September, unwrap the entire set of Passover dishes which have been sealed and signed by a mashgiach—they keep their own rabbinical supervisor on-site—and commence baking their Kosher-for-Passover cookies—from October to December. The cookies must be in the distributors’ warehouses by January in order to be purchased in time for the April holiday.
From Paula’s point of view, however, the Passover preparations begin soon after the holiday ends. She has to do all her ordering months before production. Most companies only manufacture a limited amount of Kosher-for-Passover ingredients, so she has to make a bid for how much they will need almost a year in advance. She even has to send a mashgiach up to Arlington to kasher their egg production line to run a full day of Kosher-for-Passover eggs.
When Nadine opened Elliott Bay Bakery in 1997, she opened with two products: a line of biscotti and a line of My Bubby’s gourmet cookies. They recently started their bread production and are now supplying local supermarkets and the Jewish Day School with challah every Friday.
“There really aren’t any honest-to-goodness Kosher challahs in stores,” says Nadine. “There was Leah’s, but you could only get it in select locations. We wanted a quality bread that was made from a family recipe, that was Kosher, and that you could get in most stores.”
Leah’s challahs, incidentally, are co-packed and baked at Elliott Bay using a recipe from the catering company’s owner Leah Jaffee. Co-packing refers to an arrangement wherein one manufacturer produces goods to specification to be sold under another company’s name.
As president and VP of marketing and sales, Paula spends a lot of time prospecting for new business.
“Because we are not a store-front bakery, we constantly need to be looking for ways to expand the business,” she said.
One way she accomplished this was through a partnership with Kedem, in which Kedem acts as their distributor. Elliott Bay sends trucks full of My Bubbies Kosher-for- Passover cookies in a variety of flavors to the East Coast, where Kedem distributes them.
They also co-packed 10,000 cases of meringues for Manischewitz last year, sold under the Manischewitz label. Elliott Bay won’t be making them this year, however.
“It was a logistical quagmire,” said Paula. “Meringues are temperature- and humidity-sensitive. Basically, you need to dry them, and production is during the months of October, November and December—not the driest time in Seattle.”
While baking has always been a part of the Lukoff heritage, neither child started out in baking. Paula’s brother Aaron is an attorney in Bellingham. When not practicing law however, he drives down to Seattle to visit his mother and sister and returns with fresh Elliott Bay challahs and bobkas for grocery stores in Bellingham.
Paula came to the baking business from the technology sector. She says her strengths are in marketing and sales. “At two in the morning, I’ll suddenly get an idea,” she said. Recently she woke to the realization that she needed to offer a cr’me brulee cookie.
The newest addition to the Elliott Bay family is head chef Peter Marriott. Marriott has worked around the world and on cruise boats, even serving as one of the pastry chefs for the King and Queen of Jordan for a while. “Now he’s working for a Kosher bakery,” said Paula. “It’s been a great fit, he loves challenge, and I am always challenging him.”
The Lukoffs bake all manner of Yiddish-style delectables: rugelach, mandelbrot, hamentaschen on Purim and round challahs on holidays. They also have the ability to make big ceremonial challahs for special events.
Paula said the vast majority of their products are parve, all-natural and trans-fat free but that this becomes more difficult to achieve with the Kosher-for-Passover varieties. They hope eventually to have their entire product line carried by stores like Whole Foods Market, which requires a detailed description of where every ingredient comes from. They eventually plan to offer a line of par-baked frozen goods, so people in places without a Kosher bakery can get fresh, Kosher bread.
Though there are many challenges inherent in running a Kosher business, Paula says her chief concern is in changing the image of Kosher products.
“Younger people are becoming more aware of Kosher,” she said. Because of that, the Lukoffs’ bakery is working to offer products that not only taste good, but come priced right. “Even young people that don’t necessarily keep a Kosher house will have fond memories of Bubbie’s kitchen,” she said.