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Rising above adversity:
The Bread Project teaches adults professional baking skills
- Janet Fletcher, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The aroma of warm, buttery pastry saturated the air one sunny June morning in
the crowded kitchen of the former Berkeley Adult School.

Ten students and two instructors raced like crazed caterers to complete their
dessert buffet, lining trays with jam-centered Danish and flaky pains au
chocolat, prying sticky rugelach from baking sheets, arranging platters of nut
bars and biscotti, and improvising risers for their trays from upended Bundt
pans.

By noon, the 12-foot butcher block table could not be seen under the sea of
pastry, while a nearby table displayed German chocolate cakes, raspberry
charlottes and linzer tortes.

"I can't believe it," said Alma Castellanos, a 35-year-old mother of three
from the Mexican state of Michoacan, who surveyed her fellow students'
handiwork with a grin. "We made a lot of stuff."

Not bad for 10 disadvantaged and struggling adults who didn't know one end of
a pastry bag from the other two months ago. But on this bright summer day,
they were the 24th graduating class of the Bread Project, a nine-week training
program in baking skills for low-income adults.

During the previous weeks, they had decorated cakes with marzipan roses,
rolled puff pastry, made pizza and devoured their own fresh English muffins.
They had learned how to write resumes, make cold calls and devise a personal
"30-second commercial" for interviews. In the brilliant sunlight outside this
grim and decaying Berkeley building was surely a world of good jobs and fresh
starts.

At least that's what Lucie Buchbinder envisioned when she launched the Bread
Project five years ago with colleague Susan Phillips. Former managers of
low-income housing in San Francisco, the two believed that appropriate job
training could lift many adults out of poverty. Their research pointed to the
baking industry as one that might provide good entry-level jobs after some
training.

The organization now conducts five sessions a year in Berkeley and two in
Oakland, accepting about 115 students a year -- many of them job-placement
challenges. A few are recent immigrants with limited English. Others are
parolees or recovering drug or alcohol addicts. Some have clean records, but
no marketable skills. Foundation grants, individual and corporate donations
and city support keep the program solvent.

Following one group of Berkeley participants through their course work this
spring illuminated the hurdles these students face.

Week Two, late April

Seated around a big table in a windowless meeting room at 8 a.m., they appear
listless and disengaged as Buchbinder talks about where to find job listings.
A tall, slender woman with close-cropped silver hair, an Austrian accent and a
gentle, nonjudgmental manner, Buchbinder had given each of them a different
newspaper the day before and asked them to report back on any entry- level
food jobs they found.

Few of the 13 students take notes as Buchbinder describes the Internet sites
that have good listings and how to apply online. The students look at
Buchbinder with blank faces as she presses on, describing Craigslist,
America's Job Bank and Google.

Princess Gullatt, a large young woman in an Oakland A's T-shirt and cap,
occasionally responds to Buchbinder's questions, but most of the others seem
bored to distraction. There are only two men at the table -- Chester Hobbs, a
neatly groomed 54-year-old with a prison record for drug possession; and 31-
year-old Thanh Tran, a recent Vietnamese immigrant with years of experience
making noodles in Saigon, but whose weak English limits his job prospects.

After an hour, the students shuffle into the kitchen, a two-room space
equipped with a butcher block and stainless steel counters, old commercial
mixers and decrepit professional ovens. Donning blue hairnets and plastic
aprons, they gather to review the day's recipes with instructor Judy Stein.

"Yesterday, we had problems with not following procedures, not measuring
properly and not working as a team," announces Stein, a petite woman with
short dark hair and a no-nonsense approach.

This day is hardly better. During the next several hours, they will make
banana bread and pumpkin spice bread, lemon curd and chocolate ganache, and
the mixing and measuring errors will mount like beaten egg whites.

Stein cracks the hard tip of one egg against the fragile midpoint of another,
then cradles the yolk in her palm while the white drips into a bowl below.

"You're making a face," she says to Angel Johnson a tall, angular woman with a
streetwise demeanor.

"Yuck," says Johnson. "I've never been that partial to eggs."

"You're a cook," replies Stein, brusquely. "You're going to have to touch
food."

Stein hands out the assignments and the teams assemble their equipment: scale
and weights, mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons. In their second week as
a team, Hobbs, Debra Jones and Hung Truong are rapidly approaching
dysfunction. Truong, a tiny, 52-year-old recent immigrant from Vietnam, seems
not to understand either her teammates or the recipe, and she studies the
measuring spoons as if they are cultural artifacts.

The banana bread recipe calls for mashing ripe bananas in the mixer, then
taking them out and creaming butter and sugar in the same mixer. Truong weighs
the flour, butter and sugar properly, then dumps the flour and butter into the
mixer. Jones, who has a short fuse, spots the error immediately.

"Why is flour in here?" she snaps at the frightened and silent Truong.
Out come the flour and butter; in goes the sugar. Then Jones remembers they
need to mash the bananas. Out comes the sugar; in go the peeled bananas. Then
Jones realizes she should have weighed the bananas first. Who knew there were
so many ways to screw up banana bread?

In many ways, the high-strung Jones is just the sort of participant that Bread
Project administrators are most confident of helping, an individual who has
made some bad choices but demonstrated a desire to turn her life around. A
48-year-old divorced mother of two from Santa Cruz, Jones entered the Bread
Project when she was in the last weeks of a six-month residential
rehabilitation program in Oakland for her alcohol abuse.

An attractive woman with strong cheekbones and wide-set eyes lined in black,
Jones has a husky smoker's voice and a lush head of tight ringlets that she
needs two hairnets to contain. She speaks matter-of-factly about her past as a
functioning alcoholic whose employers -- she spent 14 years as an assembler
with Lockheed, among other jobs -- never knew about her problem. But her
behavior -- she has numerous drunken-driving arrests -- has devastated her
family, and she is determined to start anew. On her Bread Project application,
filled out weeks before the class started, she noted that she had been sober
for 46 days.

Week Four, mid-May

The students have visibly warmed to one another. They share stories and laugh
more, bonding across the chasms of ethnicity, age and experience. The week
before, Castellanos brought homemade tamales for everyone, and the other
students are still talking about them. At lunchtime, Helen Tadeo, a soft-
spoken, 27-year-old former teacher, leans over a job application with Tran,
correcting his English.

Truong has dropped out, citing her language problem. The class sent her a
card, with each student asking her to come back, but she did not respond.
Johnson, too, is a casualty. Her family problems had become so acute and
disruptive that Buchbinder asked her to withdraw and re-enroll when life
settled down.

The students' movements in the kitchen are more natural now; they scrape down
the sides of the mixer bowl in brisk strokes, not tentative motions. They wash
their hands, clean their stations and monitor the ovens without being
reminded. And most have mastered the scale, with its confusing counterweights.

Tran is still grappling with ounces, pounds and the number of cups in a pint.
And a few math-deficient students are discovering the price of that handicap.
Irene Illan, a 19-year-old high school graduate, can't scale down a biscotti
recipe because she can't compute the number of teaspoons in three tablespoons.

One day, the Berkeley Adult School places an order for 200 assorted cookies.
The students pull several different batches of portioned but unbaked cookies
from the freezer and arrange the frozen cookies on baking sheets, some trays
in four rows of three cookies each, others in five rows of four each. When
they need to determine whether they have reached 200, only Tadeo can quickly
do the math.

A slender, long-faced woman with sad eyes, Tadeo is so obviously bright and
competent that it's hard to imagine why she needs the Bread Project. She had
abandoned teaching to try a baking career, but when a local bakery laid her
off, saying she was too slow, her confidence plummeted. Among these novice
students, she has floated to the top like cream, her quiet competence
commanding respect.

Week Six, late May

Jones has landed a job, the first in the group. Buchbinder had driven several
students to Mother's Cookies, the Oakland wholesale bakery, to apply for work,
but only Jones got the nod.

She will work in production, making $8.85 an hour, and after the 90-day
probation period, she will become a union member with benefits. When she
finishes rehab, in a month, she will move into a low-rent transitional
facility, which she can afford on her bakery wages. Once the job's health
benefits kick in, Jones should be in decent shape.

They are making pizza today with Mechiel Green, another part-time instructor
and former pastry chef at Kuleto's. Green shows them how to dice an onion, how
to cut basil into fine ribbons and how to smack and peel garlic for their
marinara sauce. Of all the pizzas that emerge from the ovens just before
lunch, the ones assembled by Gullatt are the handsomest, with thick, well-
risen golden rims.

A part-time guest-services representative for the Oakland A's, Gullatt spends
nights and weekends at the coliseum showing people to their seats and pointing
the way to the bathrooms. The career college where she got her pharmacy
technology degree lured her with the claim of 100 percent job placement. "But
nobody I know got placed," says Gullatt.

A career counselor steered her to the Bread Project after the young woman
admitted to two fantasies: singing the national anthem at the World Series,
and learning to bake. The instructors have noticed her competence, and Stein
says she is one of the more employable students.

Week Eight, June

At 8 a.m. on a Friday morning, the students face their final exam. The
hourlong quiz covers good health habits, sanitation and job-search skills as
well as baking fundamentals, like describing the procedural difference between
muffins and biscuits.

Gullatt finishes first. Illan spends most of the last 15 minutes frowning at
her pages and not writing; eventually she hands in her test and rests her head
on her arms. Tran, too, has nearly blank pages at the end of the hour, and
Jones is clearly having trouble.

"Can you believe I forgot the name of my favorite bread?" says Castellanos as
she passes in her exam. Buchbinder reminds her that it is challah.
They make chicken pot pie in class after the test, but talk about the
following week's graduation, when they will present many of the baked goods
they have made and frozen over the previous nine weeks. "People are going to
be sweeted out," predicts Thomas.

Jones' job at Mother's Cookies is history. The company had offered her a night
shift, and when she learned that public transportation would deposit her 12
blocks from the job, in a rough neighborhood, she declined the position.

The good news: Wilson has landed a job in the bakery at Pak 'n' Save; Tadeo
has an upcoming tryout at Berkeley's Cafe Cacao; and Castellanos has
interviewed for a private cook's job in Menlo Park. "When they asked me about
myself, I remembered my 30-second commercial," says Castellanos.

For Stein, a longtime Bay Area pastry chef who has taught at the Bread Project
for two years, shepherding these students to graduation day is the most
rewarding work imaginable.

"These are people no one has ever believed in," says the instructor. "For a
lot of people, it's the first thing they've ever actually stuck to and
completed."

During the Bread Project's five years of operation, 77 percent of its
graduates have found employment, and 84 percent of those workers are still
employed a year later. When they lose baking jobs, it's usually because they
do not work quickly enough.

"Here they are asked to be conscious of time, which is something not done in
school," says Maria Alejandro, the cake-decorating department manager at
Copenhagen Bakery in Burlingame, which has hired a couple of Bread Project
graduates.

Milton Ruiz, a 2004 graduate, is convinced that the program opened doors for
him. "I was either unemployed or marginally employed for about a year," says
Ruiz, who now holds two food-service jobs in Berkeley. "It was only after I
went to the Bread Project that people took me seriously."

Graduation Day

With the graduation buffet complete and guests beginning to arrive, the
students disappear to change into street clothes, apply makeup, doff the
hairnets and don the jewelry that has been forbidden for the past nine weeks.
They sit on folding chairs in a semicircle in the austere room, facing a small
audience of friends, family, city officials and Bread Project supporters.
Balloons brush the ceiling and a banner reads "Congrats Grad." Hobbs, in a
white shirt and black sport coat, clutches flowers he has brought for the
teachers.

Buchbinder salutes those who got A's on their final (Tadeo, Thomas and
Gullatt), those with perfect attendance, and those who have found jobs. The
latter list now includes Tran, who will work at Mother's Cookies; and Tadeo,
who has accepted a job as a Montessori teacher. Castellanos has multiple
prospects.

Now it is the students' turn to speak. Wilson, looking almost menacing in
low-slung pants with a wad of keys dangling from her belt loops, steps forward
first. She thanks her instructors, the donors, the other students. Then, as
she begins to recount her attempt to choose a better path in life, her tears
begin.

Hobbs rises and presents his modest bouquets. A gentle, good-natured man, he
has struggled with the course, and he and Buchbinder have agreed that he will
repeat it. "I know I'm a bit slow," he says in his brief speech, "but thank
you for putting up with me."

Finally, Tadeo stands to speak and immediately chokes up. "I know I have a lot
of strengths and good qualities," she begins, hesitantly, "but it's taken
these nine weeks and these individuals" -- she points to her fellow students
-- "to help me build up my confidence again." She has turned down Cafe Cacao
and taken the Montessori job, she explains later, in part because her Bread
Project experience has reminded her of her capacity to teach.

Postscript

Two weeks after the Bread Project ceremony, Jones graduated from her rehab
program in yet another tearful commencement. She had been sober for six
months, and was, in the estimation of the program's counselor, ready for the
real world. But the real world held no decent job for her. With a rent payment
looming, she had applied for food-service work at an Oakland hospital but had
not heard back.

"There aren't as many (baking) jobs as we anticipated when we did our
research," Buchbinder admits. Some graduates, like Ruiz, manage to get a
foothold in the Bay Area economy and start an upward climb. Others, like
Hobbs, face more daunting obstacles. "It's a seed," Buchbinder says of her
ambitious program, "and we never know what will grow."

To find out more

Bread Project applicants must complete an application in the Bread Project’s
Berkeley office (1701 San Pablo Ave., near Virginia) to demonstrate a command
of English. The application process includes an interview. To schedule an
interview, contact executive director Lily Divito at (510) 644-4575.
Successful applicants will be notified three weeks before class starts.

E-mail Janet Fletcher at jfletcher@sfchronicle.com.
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