CENTURY OF BAKING
Valarie Blak-Gill, owner of Blak’s Bakery, stands next to a rack of freshly baked bread Thursday. The Windsor bakery started by her grandfather in 1918 will celebrate 100 years of being a family business with an open house Saturday.
As they’ve done for the last 100 years, the Blak family saved some of the rye sour Thursday morning. It’s the original sour dough starter for the rye breads that have been a mainstay for Blak’s Bakery, which will celebrate a century of baking Saturday.
“The sour is, as far as we know, the original sour from my grandfather because what we do every day is we save some to remake it for the next day,” said owner Valerie BlakGill of the fermented mixture of flour and water that gets refreshed with more flour before it is put in the refrigerator at night to rise. “We mix it by hand so I mean you think the same sour he mixed by hand, we’re mixing by hand.” Her grandfather, Peter Blak Sr., a Polish immigrant who opened the bakery on Langlois Avenue in October 1918, would be proud the bakery is now on its fourth generation of family members in the mix, she said. She hopes her daughter Julie will take over some day. For now, it’s still 60-year-old Blak- Gill who arrives at 2 a.m. to start mixing the dough with her husband, Douglas Gill, following an hour later to begin baking.
“I think my grandfather would be thrilled to see that his legacy lasted this long.”
Blak came from Poland to New York in 1905. He learned his trade at the Bristol Hotel, which still operates in Warsaw.
He worked for about a decade in bakeries in Rochester, N.Y., where his brother lived, before moving to Detroit and then Windsor. He was in his early 30s when he started the bakery.
While some Windsorites might know the spot for the more than 30,000 paczki it makes every Shrove Tuesday before Lent, Blak’s is all about its rye.
There are at least 13 rye breads, including the Seinfeld marble, the rye that comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his wife raved about after the Blaks sent 10 loaves to his Windsor show in 2015.
And all their bread has a unique taste and texture from being baked in the original brick oven. It takes 12-foot-long wooden paddles to reach back inside the oven, which holds about 240 loaves. “I’d be here early enough it would still be too hot to slice,” second generation customer Shelley Dancel said Thursday. She grew up nearby, and even though she lives in Kingsville now, she returns to get that brick-oven-baked bread. Blak started his bread delivery on a bicycle. Later, there were horsedrawn carriages with a stable behind the bakery and then trucks. Drivers delivered bread to homes into the early 1980s, Blak- Gill said. Her father, Peter Jr., and his older brother Victor ran the Langlois Avenue bakery and for a time a second bakery at Wyandotte and Gladstone.
Victor didn’t have any children so Blak- Gill, who has been working at the bakery 40 years, and her brother Anthony got into the business. Her brother is no longer involved.
She said her father, who died in 2015, and his wife, Elsie, who died in July at age 91, helped out at the bakery until they died.
The family-run business is the kind of place where the staff get to know what the regulars like and where no one minds if you take your time looking over the baked treats. The store has its original wood floors and tin ceiling. “I come in here and I feel the history,” said John McKendrick, who quit going to other bakeries once he discovered Blak’s more than 15 years ago.
Customers will be able to see the original brick oven at the open house Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. There will be free coffee and cupcakes and a barbecue outside for charity.