If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished April 4, 2023 at 3:26 p.m. | Updated April 5, 2023 at 10:29 a.m.
Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and generations of mathematicians have spent their careers trying to approximate its value. For bakers and brothers Frank and Kevin Peters, pie necessitates plenty of calculations, too. No matter how much they increase their output each year, their customers still can't seem to get enough.
The week before Easter, at Sam Mazza's Farm Market in Colchester, bakery manager Frank was fine-tuning his usual preholiday pie calculations. Frank, whom Mazza hired in 1992 to create the bakery, keeps a running log of how many pies of each type — apple, cherry, lemon meringue, strawberry rhubarb and more — are sold each season. Then, about a month before each major holiday, the brothers check the numbers and start pumping out pies by the dozen.
The challenge, Frank explained, is to estimate how many pies their customers will order in advance, plus how many more they'll buy when they come into the store to pick up their orders.
"I'm in wonder," Frank said, shaking his head with a smile. "Every year, it's bigger than the year before."
Sam Mazza's gets busy before Easter, but the Peters brothers' most hectic season is fall. That's when they make cider doughnuts for the opening of the corn maze behind the market's greenhouses; sugar cookies and cupcakes for Halloween; and, naturally, sweet and savory pies for Thanksgiving.
The brothers typically spend most of November building up their inventory of pies and storing them in walk-in freezers. On the day before Thanksgiving last year, they sold 1,016 pies. It's just the two of them making pies by hand — as well as cookies, cakes, breads, rolls and quiches. None of that is sold wholesale.
"You're talking about guys who probably make 15,000 pies a year, and that's just the two-crust pies," said Mazza's daughter Laurie Bombard, who now owns and operates the business with her sisters Cheryl Patterson and Melissa Mazza. "Those guys just do a fantastic job."
Making pies might as well be baked into the Peterses' genetics. At 57, Frank is the oldest of three brothers. Their father, Frank Sr., learned to bake professionally in his early teens from German and French master bakers who moved to Burlington after World War II. Because their father was big for his age, Frank said, no one ever questioned him.
"By the time they found out how old he was," Frank added, "he was so good they just overlooked it."
Frank Sr. grew up in Burlington's Old North End, right around the corner from where the brothers would live as children. After working in several commercial kitchens, he opened his own full-line bakery on Church Street. In the 1970s, when the landlord wouldn't renew his lease, Frank Sr. moved his bakery to a new shopping center near Malletts Bay and sold the finished products out of a small storefront beside Woolworth's on Church Street.
The younger Frank started baking professionally when he was 13, just as his father did. "Everything we do here is a result of what I learned from my father," he said. "I got lucky. I couldn't go to school to learn [baking] back then."
Baking commercially was part of daily life for the young Peters brothers. As a teen, Frank worked as a baker during summers, weekends, school holidays and even on weekday mornings before leaving for school. While attending Burlington High School, he would deliver doughnuts he'd baked just that morning to the school cafeteria.
Frank Sr. kept a separate apartment just for old equipment and spare parts. Whenever a local kitchen or bakery sold off its used mixers, fryers and presses, he would buy them, strip them for parts, and then use them to repair the equipment in his own bakery or others in the area. "He never charged anybody," Frank said. "He just liked doing it as a hobby."
That communal mentality also extended to Frank Sr.'s recipes for cookies, cakes and pies. Rather than guarding the formulas for his baked goods, Frank said, his father traded them with other bakers in the community.
"So this is an accumulation of what the best of the best was," Frank said of the recipes he uses today. "Over all the years, we all got better because we shared."
Virtually all the ingredients the Peters brothers use are locally sourced, including the apples in their deep-dish pies, each of which weighs in at about three pounds. Until recently, they sourced all their eggs from Shadow Cross Farm, which is only a minute away by car. After learning last month that the decades-old egg distributor was closing, they cut a deal for eggs with Monument Farms Dairy, which already provides their heavy cream.
If it's not obvious already, Frank is by far the more garrulous of the two brothers. While Frank was being interviewed, standing over an industrial mixer blending a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough, Kevin waited quietly nearby. It was almost 10 minutes before Frank realized that his brother was waiting for him to hand over the dough so he could press it into cookies and pop them in the oven.
But Seven Days did learn that Kevin, 45, joined his brother at Sam Mazza's after graduating from high school in 1996. He learned many of his skills from Frank, not from their father, who died of heart disease at 42. Asked about his favorite part of the job, Kevin replied, "Always keeping busy, I guess. There's just two of us, and there's always something going on."
Indeed, both brothers have a work ethic that's rare these days. Kevin routinely puts in six days a week; his brother, seven. "If I took a day off," Frank said, "I'd be two days behind, so I just ended up working every day."
If the Peters brothers have any trepidations about the future, it's that neither has kids who want to carry on their baking tradition. Frank hopes eventually to find some younger people to whom he can teach the trade.
"I'm not rich, but I'm not poor," he said, "and I can go anywhere in the world and make a dime."
Asked about the best bakers in the area, Frank demurred.
"I don't believe in 'Who's the best?'" he said. "The customer who comes in determines that. If they think we're the best, fine. If they go somewhere else and think they're the best, who cares? As long as we're all happy and making money."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Life of Pie | For Sam Mazza's bakers, Frank and Kevin Peters, all they knead is love"
Comments are closed.
From 2014-2020, Seven Days allowed readers to comment on all stories posted on our website. While we've appreciated the suggestions and insights, right now Seven Days is prioritizing our core mission — producing high-quality, responsible local journalism — over moderating online debates between readers.
To criticize, correct or praise our reporting, please send us a letter to the editor or send us a tip. We’ll check it out and report the results.
Online comments may return when we have better tech tools for managing them. Thanks for reading.