Two years ago, Jennifer Boye, a chef with thirty years of kitchen success at local restaurants and hotels, took the helm at Moriarty Café, replacing founding chef Andy Bauerschmidt, who’d helped launch the sister business adjacent to beloved whole animal butcher shop run by Tom Moriarty. To Bauerschmidt’s foundation of a fantastic menu and loyal following, Boye brought not only experience but a love of baking.
That loves stems from her first cooking job at a country club, where she “was thrown into baking and had to teach myself,” she says. “I ruined everything the first couple of months before it started to click. After that, it became an addiction. Once you get the perfect bread day where the humidity in the air is right, and the dough is the ideal texture, you’re chasing that [perfection] every time.”
Although the Café kitchen wasn’t set up for a baking program, Boye challenged herself to work within the available time and space. “The whole idea is to use cuts from our whole animal butchery that are harder for home cooks to use,” she says. “I noticed that our customers are really into sandwiches; many want to come in quickly and leave right away. When I realized that, I knew we needed to start making our own bread.”
Boye also felt that any bread baked and served by the Café needed to match the consistency and quality of the butchery’s meat. “I’ve been behind the line a very long time, but working alongside Tom opens up a whole new world,” she says. “There isn’t anyone else locally getting whole animals weekly, and the biggest piece of equipment he has is a hand saw. When I saw firsthand the amount of care and time it takes to break down an 845-pound cow, well, it’s easy to feel lucky to work with products like that.”…