MEITUS: Kosher bakeries are in full flour

By Marty Meitus, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 5, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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When I was a kid, I went with my Girl Scout troop on a tour of a bakery. I can still remember watching the cookies come off the line and eating a warm, fresh cookie at the end of the tour.

This was about 100 years ago, and the fact that I remember it so vividly speaks to me about why I should have owned a bakery - except for that getting up at 4 a.m. thing.

I was reminded of this when the folks at King Soopers invited me to tour their bakery operation. I watched as crullers and long johns and cookies and bread rolled off the line, marveling at the sight of pink cookies advancing by the hundreds down the conveyor belt, loaf after loaf of bread taking a ride in baking pans. The plant produces 100 to 120 loaves of bread a minute.

There is a reason for the tour, beyond making me gooey-eyed with nostalgia. Way back in 1998, King Soopers made its central bakery facility all kosher for producing breads and sweet goods. Dave Higgins, the longtime plant manager, remembers making the change.

"It seemed that more and more people - not just Jewish - wanted this," he said. "They felt there was a lot of need."

What this meant for the factory were things like making sure all ingredients were certified kosher and that the pans were "koshered" - re-glazed with a new finish. The rabbi drops by every few weeks unannounced to check the ingredients and facility.

Now King Soopers has taken it a step further by introducing an all-kosher bakery within the store at South Monaco Boulevard and Leetsdale Drive, just in time for the eight days of Hanukkah, which began Tuesday night. They chose a store where it would be easiest to retrofit the bakery - and where they wanted to boost sales.

One of the first moves was to eliminate dairy products from the breads, because, says supervising Rabbi Yisroel Rosskamm, bread is likely to be served with meat. (The other baked goods, however, may contain dairy products.) The ingredients have become easier and easier to get, says Higgins, because many major manufacturers "want a piece of the pie."

Besides a growing interest in kosher foods, Higgins says there's a perception of higher quality associated with kosher products that makes them desirable. You can identify the products by a "K" or a "U" inside an "O" to denote kosher; "DE" indicates no dairy in the product but that it was processed on dairy equipment.

At the Monaco and Leetsdale King Soopers, the sign over the bakery door in the back announces a kosher facility. The in-house bakery allows employees to "finish" any of the goods - for instance, ice a cake - with kosher-certified ingredients and equipment. If the in-house bakery is successful, other stores may follow, likely starting in Boulder.

As I'm leaving, I'm handed a freshly made black- and-white cookie, where the icing is half chocolate and half vanilla, overlaid with a blue-icing Star of David. I eat all of it in the car on my way home.

OK, I get it, it's kosher, not low-cal, but one wasn't enough for this cookie monster. Inspired to do some baking myself, I find a recipe (15) and bake a batch at home.

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