The Upper Crust

Byline: Heather Newman
Walk into Achatz Handmade Pie Co. in a converted pole barn in Armada and you know immediately where the name comes from.

Look over the cool glass of the display cases spotlighting today's selection of mouthwatering pies, and you see Hillary Yammen, 23. The dark-haired, pretty girl is smoothly rolling out crusts for tiny pie shells for a special order of mini chicken potpies on a giant wood table. She presses each crust into a pie tin with her fingers, crimping off the extra dough around the edges with quick, practiced motions. She's been working at the pie company since she was 14. You can feel the heat touch your face from the giant ovens behind her.

In the room next door, baker Krista Shoobridge, 24, and her boyfriend -- pressed into temporary service for the holiday -- fill pies with Achatz's mellow pumpkin pie filling, working quickly to finish a huge order.

But if you assume the bakers in white tell the whole story, you'll be missing out. In order to keep hand-making the parts that count the thousands of Michigan four-berry pies, decadent caramel-nut-apple pies and holiday favorites ranging from pumpkin to pecan they'll prepare over this month and next, Achatz workers use a blend of old-fashioned finger work and new technology that attempts to replicate, speed up and enhance what those fingers can do.

The company has come a long way since Wendy and Dave Achatz started the business, making a hundred pies a week for flea markets in their kitchen. The two ran Achatz Family Restaurant in downtown Armada for 14 years, and when they closed it 14 years ago, they kept making the pies it was famous for.

They moved into the barn 10 years ago, and now more than 10,000 pies roll out each week. They've placed first in the National Pie Championships, held by the American Pie Council.

Flotsam and jetsam of tried and failed devices still float around the barn, standing as quiet monuments to the company's drive to keep the flavor at its peak even when it's not the most efficient way to make pies.

Eight bakers arrive at midnight on baking nights, usually Sundays and Thursdays. They trundle giant wheelbarrows of Michigan-grown Montmorency cherries, vats of pumpkin pie filling and carts stacked high with piecrusts from walk-in coolers in the back room, four heading for the ovens in the front of the building, four for the ovens in the back room itself.

Others get to work in the dough room, kept at a steamy 80 degrees for mixing cold ingredients (that are chilled again immediately afterwards). There, a giant mixer -- it cost $30,000 used -- stands on the floor, mute testament to the compromises Achatz is and isn't willing to make to get the pies made on time. Yes, it's a machine mixer with a giant bowl that can hold 350 pounds of ingredients, enough for 700 piecrusts, a departure from the old-fashioned by-hand techniques that Achatz has been using since the beginning to get that perfect, flaky, lightly crispy, to-die-for crust that's on every pie.

But look closely and you'll see why she was willing to make the investment. The mixer's giant arms are hinged like elbows and at the ends are stubby metal fingers. It's designed specifically for pastry makers making piecrust. Turn it on, and it exactly -- almost eerily -- replicates the motion that Wendy Achatz, 42, uses to mix her pies in the pie classes she sometimes holds at Whole Foods Markets.

Before the mixer arrived five years ago, a baker might spend six hours making the dough this mixer can make in a single batch, scooping ingredients into a large stainless steel bowl and plunging his or her fingers into the flour and the shortening and the water and gently kneading the crusts to the perfect consistency, over and over again -- 80 times to match the output of one mixer bowl today.

At the end of that shift, Dave Achatz says, your fingers ached, your arms ached, your back ached from spending the day hunched over the bowls. The family has never regretted buying the mixer.

Nearby, pie presses help workers speed through the lower crusts, which are individually pressed into pans with the help of the machines, which ran about $7,000 complete for each piecrust size. Before the machines arrived eight years ago, bakers made all the pies like Yammen was making the special order: one crust at a time, patted into place by hand and trimmed with the edges of their fingers. Even today, however, the tops are always added by hand, and Wendy Achatz dismisses the idea of using sheeters to roll them out.

She's enthusiastic about the depositer-filler, however, which arrived just three weeks ago. The $18,000 foot-pedal-operated machine plops the perfect amount of filling into pies, giving bakers a break from scooping the ingredients with 4-cup measures, which is what they did for 14 years. They're spared the aching wrists from the big scoops they took from the vats of berries or pumpkin puree, and there's no need to weigh and adjust each pie afterward. All the little scoops -- taking a little away, adding a little -- are gone.

Wendy Achatz says that despite the new machines, the company has a long way to go to be truly efficient for its employees.

"You have to move something six times instead of once," Achatz says, gesturing helplessly at her bakers, who somehow remain cheerful. She jokes: "We don't charge them for the gym. You get the sauna in the winter."

Soon -- in the next six months -- Wendy Achatz dreams of moving out of the crowded barn with its many tiny carved-off rooms and into a warehouse somewhere nearby that can be renovated. The family is looking at property now.

She describes what it will be like: a smoothly moving production line that starts with the doors where the ingredients are delivered by the tub and the pallet and the vat, and ends at the ovens -- which will, she muses happily, finally all be in one room. She's bargaining with Dave Achatz and Joann Austin, her chief of operations, over a $200,000 tunnel oven.

The new building will be much more efficient, and will keep her employees from constantly tripping over one another as they move from one step to another during the baking process -- especially at this time of year, when 40% of the company's pies are made.

She's looking forward to the changes in the new building.

"The technology is using equipment to save people's backs, to speed up production and to save labor," she says.

But at the end of the day, the important thing is still what's between the crusts: from silky-smooth chocolate to the mouthwatering key lime fresh from Florida (the company pays more for expressing the juice it uses than the juice itself costs), the pie's the thing.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.