Flaky croissants to sourdough breads

 

Wilson Keenan places freshly baked chocolate croissants on a cooling tray at Bakery Suzanne in WIlton, N.Y. Keenan moved the bakery here from Delaware County at the beginning of the year. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By STACEY MORRIS
Contributing writer

WILTON, N.Y.

The truism to not judge a book by its cover is an apt one for Bakery Suzanne: Don’t be fooled by the warehouse-style exterior.

Inside, the aromatic contents are heavy on Parisian-style croissants and other pastries plus several styles of artisan sourdough breads.

Five miles northeast of downtown Saratoga Springs on Route 50, in a building that was once a motorcycle shop, Bakery Suzanne has been open since January, and a growing number of customers have been discovering it.

Although the bakery is known for its line of whole wheat and sourdough breads and baguettes, the crown jewels are the pastries: croissants (infused with slow-fermented butter from Normandy), pain au chocolat, cinnamon and orange zest-tinged morning buns, buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies, rhubarb pop-tarts, and pain aux raisins -- flaky giant vortexes of croissant dough with currants soaked in Haitian rum.

There are also savory croissants too, filled with hearty fare such as country ham and cheese. The bakery’s fruit-topped croissants are made with locally sourced fruit.

And then there are the whimsical combinations baker Wilson Keenan creates, inspired by local food and his imagination. One of his latest is a flaky round pastry whose center contains gooey brie and local honey, garnished with a thyme sprig and glistening, edible honeycomb from the nearby Saratoga Tea & Honey Co.

“We also source specialty items like sesame seeds grown in South Carolina and a country ham made in Kentucky,” Keenan said. “Finding the best ingredients takes time and relationship building. … Over time, I think that’s one of the things that will define this bakery and make it really special.”

Bakery Suzanne’s breads are made with flours sourced from the Hudson Valley and Maine.
“They’re not all organic, but we work with specific farmers and don’t buy any commodity grains so feel confident in the farming practices,” Keenan explained.

“The baguettes are our best sellers,” he continued with a smile. “The fresh-milled flour gives the bread a sweet, earthy taste.”

Although much of the bread flour is milled on site, Keenan said he plans to begin using area milling partners, with wheat from the same sources, who can handle the bran-sifting more efficiently.

 

Finding inspiration in food
Although he happily bakes bread for a living now, Keenan’s culinary experience began well over a decade ago in his post-college days in California.

A native of Columbia, S.C., he followed a colorful and circuitous path from line cook to baker, with stints working in high-tech and finance. After graduating from Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 2008, he headed west to San Francisco.

Having “little professional kitchen experience” in one of the country’s greatest culinary destinations didn’t deter Keenan. He soon found work as a line cook, which led to his first experience of baking bread. But he wasn’t instantly drawn to baking.

“I didn’t pick it up in earnest until 2018,” Keenan recalled. “I eventually fell out of love with being a chef.”

But during his time on the West Coast, he did discover some of San Francisco’s many good bakeries — as well as its abundance of fresh markets and food purveyors.

“Until San Francisco, I hadn’t been around any kind of city that had a whole working ecosystem around restaurants and fresh ingredients,” Keenan remembered. “San Francisco was far ahead of any other place in the country. Part of my job was making market trips for the restaurant; I loved being that close to high-quality foods and ingredients.”

After moving back east, Keenan spent most of a decade in New York City working in the tech world and then felt a pull to embrace baking again.

“The hobby of bread baking crept in, and I began baking for co-workers at the venture capital office I worked in, and they loved it,” Keenan recalled. “Once I began thinking of opening a bakery and what a different atmosphere it is from a restaurant, I began treating the idea very seriously.”

So seriously that he moved upstate, to the western Catskills town of Andes, to make his dream a reality — and to take a break from the intensity of urban living.

“When I decided baking was what I would do, I brought the culinary side to it and saw a lot of possibilities,” he recalled.

Keenan moved upstate in 2018, a time when many New Yorkers were buying up weekend getaways even in the far-flung edges of the Catskills. The region offered a laid-back, non-intimidating atmosphere where Keenan felt at ease spreading his wings and introducing his baking to the community.

By the summer of 2019, he had found a wholesale restaurant account that would buy whatever he baked.

“That’s when I said, ‘I’m a baker now,’” Keenan recalled.

As the pandemic brought an even greater influx of people from metropolitan New York City to the region, Keenan expanded into pastries. With the help of a local economic development group, he was able to buy his first commercial deck oven.

“Essentially it’s a bread-baking hearth that’s not wood-fired,” he explained. “With four decks, you can bake 40 loaves at a time.”

 

North to Saratoga
Although Keenan’s bakery in the Catskills enjoyed a successful blend of walk-in customers and wholesale buyers, he said he ultimately decided a move farther upstate would be in his best interest.

“I began to question whether we wanted to live full time in a community of mostly weekenders,” he said. “I also wanted to be able to employ a team and not close down when I go out of town. … All of those things come from being in a more robust and densely populated area.”

So after one final bake in Christmas week of 2023, Keenan closed his Delaware County bakery and moved its operations 100 miles northeast to Saratoga County. The next month, Bakery Suzanne’s ovens were moved to what he describes as an ideal structure — a spacious building big enough to provide retail space as well as a cavernous back area for baking and milling flour for his breads. (Flour for the pastries, Keenan says, requires a specific type of grinding to get the proper level of fineness and is milled offsite.)

In an affectionate homage to his roots, Keenan named the bakery after his mother, whom he describes as an “artist, great storyteller, and talented cook.

“I’ve always appreciated her humor and ambitious projects that she would lose herself in; I’m much the same way,” he said.

In addition to the just-baked breads and pastries, Bakery Suzanne’s retail space includes shelves of cookbooks, teapots and cooking accents such as Maldon sea salt flakes, olive oils, vinegars and anchovies.

“Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect or what to compare it to, but it’s going well,” he said of the relocation. “We’re not downtown, but word is getting out, and we have a few wholesale accounts.”

His bread is sold at Four Seasons Natural Foods in Saratoga Springs and is also on the menu at Hamlet & Ghost, the Caroline Street restaurant.

“Fresh breads can be tricky, especially sourdoughs, because they sometimes don’t keep well after the first day home,” said Rich Frank, owner of Four Seasons. “But Bakery Suzanne’s sourdough loaf has a great shelf life. … They seem to use the right amount of moisture. We often sell out in the first few hours. We hope to be selling their baguettes soon as well.”

Keenan said he hopes to add more wholesale accounts in the near future and added that Bakery Suzanne’s growth has been aided lately by television publicity, social media exposure, his growing e-mail list and by sharing space with the quirky X-Files Preservation Collection next door.

Now staffed with an additional four employees, the bakery is running at a rhythmic pace that Keenan hopes will allow for workdays that don’t stretch beyond the 12-hour mark.
“I have two other bakers on the team, so I’m trying to cut back my hours to 10-12 per day,” said Keenan, who usually rises at 3:30 a.m. to begin the day’s baking.

Bakery Suzanne’s fan base is slowly growing thanks to word of mouth, tourists who happen by, and from a recent atelevision spot on an Albany news station.

On a late summer day, a woman walked through the door and eagerly began pointing to croissants and pastries to be boxed up.

“I saw this place on TV and drove an hour to get here,” she said with a smile as she hoisted her haul and headed for the door. “I’ll be back.”