Delicious conclusion
Folks who frequent the Spokane Public Library’s downtown parking garage know lot attendant Art Gallant for his electrifying smile, raspy laugh and his goody trays. Those trays overflow with baked goods he hands out to drivers as they leave the lot.
What patrons may not know is that Gallant is a retired professional baker who makes all the treats himself. Although he officially hung his apron up years ago, he still bakes almost every day at home.
Chewy chocolate chip cookies; cherry coconut bars; thick peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips; slabs of chocolate walnut fudge and chocolate Kahlua cake with buttercream frosting popped from his apartment oven a couple of weeks ago.
“I’m a bachelor. So how much can I eat?” he said in his native New England accent.
Gallant mans the library’s parking booth 10 to 12 hours a week. And he brings goodies every shift.
“I enjoy people saying: ‘Wow, I’ve never had anything like that,’ ” he said, taking a break from baking to catch a golf tournament on TV.
A devoted golfer himself, he takes treats to the golf course, too.
“The guys fight to play with me because I always bring care packages,” he said with a grin.
He shells out at least $100 a week for the best in baking ingredients.
“I bet I use 5 pounds of butter a week, at least 10 pounds of sugar and I’ll use 5 dozen eggs. Now this stuff’s expensive,” he said.
His hall closet serves as a pantry stocked with chocolates, cake flour, cookie sheets and cake pans. He’s on his fourth Kitchen Aid mixer in four years.
It was during the Christmas holidays when Cheryl Fleming, the Spokane Public Library’s newest trustee, discovered Gallant’s gift.
“I was coming out of the garage and stopped to talk to him a moment. He offered me the most awesome fudge and I loved every bite of it,” she said.
She remembered thinking Gallant must have stocked his booth with store-bought holiday sweets.
When the library board met the following month, she made it a point to talk to Gallant, who happened to be on duty again in the Diamond Parking booth. They shared baking tips and he told her about some of his hotel and kitchen experiences, she said.
“It explains why his candies and cookies are the very, very best,” she said. “He’s almost a competitor for Mrs. Fields.”
As a teenager in York, Maine, Gallant hung out at the local bakery so much they put him to work washing pots and pans. Before long, he’d moved up to bench boy, rolling and cutting dough, and later he fried donuts in the wee hours of the morning before school.
A high school graduate at 17, he enrolled in a six-week cake-decorating course at the venerable Fanny Farmer School of Cookery in Boston. Then he set out to find a job.
Boston’s swanky Somerset Hotel caught his eye. But security guards wouldn’t let him in. No jobs, they told him.
Gutsy and street smart, Gallant scaled a 10-foot-tall fence, slipped into the five-star hotel and got a maid to show him to the kitchen. There, he met head pastry chef, Larry Dow, who said if Gallant could get along with two crusty old bakers who worked nights, he’d put him on the payroll.
Gallant spent two years baking bread there and often showed up early to see how fine pastries were made.
“I worked for some really good pastry chefs,” he said. “Now I don’t care if they were French, Swedish or what have you. If they learned the business in Europe, they were the best bakers I’d ever seen – but the worst stiffs you ever want to work for. They wouldn’t teach you anything.
“Everything I got from those guys I had to steal it. To me, that’s insecurity. Any kids I had working for me, if I saw they were interested in the business, I’d teach them everything I knew.”
When he’d finally had enough of New England winters, he hopped a plane to Miami. It only took a season for him to morph into a snowbird, working restaurants, hotels and bakeries up and down the Florida coast in winters; working summers in New England establishments.
Along the way he rubbed shoulders with Boston Red Sox power hitter Ted Williams, a regular at the Somerset Hotel; the Philadelphia Phillies’ Ted Kazanski, also a Miami restaurant owner; and the then-aspiring young basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, who worked a summer at Kutshers Country Club in the Catskills.
Gallant did his share of arduous work, baking bread overnight, frying donuts before sunrise, mastering wood-fired baking ovens at an exclusive Connecticut kid’s camp without electricity and rescuing brides who hired him to bake their wedding cakes but were too tight to pay for delivery.
“They’d come, get the cake and it’s apart because you can’t travel with a big tiered cake. I give them the butter cream and the pastry bags and show them how to put it together,” he said of the soon-to-be brides.
“I bet seven out of 10 would call me crying and whining,” he said. By then, they were willing to pay a premium to have Gallant hurriedly assemble their cakes in reception halls.
Early on, he made one giant baking faux pas that he was afraid for years to ‘fess up to.
When he just 20, he worked in the bakery of the popular Hollywood Beach Hotel restaurant. He clocked in about 1 a.m. and mixed enough bread dough to feed 8,000 guests who dined three times a day.
His formula called for 100 pounds of flour and 5 pounds of yeast. But one morning he realized he’d forgotten to add the yeast to the sticky, humongous mixture.
“So I crumbled some up and threw it in and of course, it didn’t work,” he said. “Then I scooped the dough up and put in the flour bags – I had to get rid of it and make another.
“I throw it in the trunk of the car but I can’t leave it there, it’ll blow my trunk off,” he said. “So I threw it in an inland canal. A couple of days later, this dough started (rising) and hanging up in shrubs (at the edge of homeowners’ canal properties) and started to stink.”
News headlines and photos pondered the source of the sticky blobs.
“I knew right now what it was,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I was so scared it was five years before I would tell that story to anybody.”
Now, he comes up with new recipes about once a week. And he’s the first to admit that not everything turns out, for one reason or another. Like his lemon pistachio fudge, which refused to set on a humid spring day.
Yet the best way to learn is by doing, he tells budding bakers.
“Don’t be afraid to fail. If you do fail, what’s it going to cost you, $10?” he asked rhetorically.
During his career, he also created some delicious legacies, like the dinner-plate sized donuts cut from a No. 10 can and still popular at Down East Donuts in Eliot, Maine.
Gallant is enjoying his new-found culinary freedom.
“I was in the business 48 years,” he said. “They told me what to make and when to make it. I don’t do that anymore. I make what I feel like making – when I feel like making it.”
Gallant shared some of his favorite recipes that he makes for others.
Molasses Sugar Cookies
From Art Gallant
3/4 cup shortening, melted and cooled
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
Pinch of black pepper
Mix shortening, sugar, molasses and egg together well. Sift together flour, salt, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, allspice and black pepper. Add to shortening mixture and stir well. Drop on a greased cookie sheet. A No. 40 scoop (small ice cream or melon scoop which holds 2 scant tablespoons) is ideal for scooping out dough. Bake at 375 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes.
Yield: About 3 dozen cookies
Approximate nutrition per serving: 93 calories, 4.5 grams fat (1 gram saturated, 43 percent fat calories), 1 gram protein, 12 grams carbohydrate, 6 milligrams cholesterol, less than 1 gram dietary fiber, 35 milligrams sodium.
Chocolate Peanut Squares
From Art Gallant
2 cups powdered sugar
3/4 cup peanut butter plus 2 tablespoons, creamy or chunky, divided
2/3 cup graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup melted butter
2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 tablespoon butter
Mix together powdered sugar, 3/4 cup peanut butter, graham cracker crumbs and 1/2 cup melted butter. Line 9-inch square pan with foil and press crumbs onto bottom.
In microwave, slowly heat the chocolate, remaining 2 tablespoons peanut butter and 1 tablespoon butter. Mix until smooth. Spread on top of crust. Let set a few hours and cut into squares.
Yield: 24 servings
Approximate nutrition per serving: 149 calories, 9.5 grams fat (4 grams saturated, 55 percent fat calories), 2.4 grams protein, 15 grams carbohydrate, 11 milligrams cholesterol, 1 gram dietary fiber, 98 milligrams sodium.
Whoopie Pies
From Art Gallant
1 cup shortening
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups cake flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
For the filling:
3/4 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
8 ounces marshmallow cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
Combine shortening, egg, milk and vanilla and beat well. Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, sugar and cocoa. Add to the shortening mixture and mix well. Using a small scoop, (Gallant recommends a No. 40 scoop, which holds 2 scant tablespoons) drop on pans. It will spread during baking. Bake 7 to 8 minutes in a preheated 475-degree oven. Cool.
Beat together the filling ingredients until creamy. Fill 2 cakes with cream filling.
Yield: 18 whoopie pies
Approximate nutrition per serving: 367 calories, 21 grams fat (5 grams saturated, 50 percent fat calories), 2.5 grams protein, 44 grams carbohydrate, 13 milligrams cholesterol, 1 gram dietary fiber, 69 milligrams sodium.
Root Beer Cookies
From Art Gallant
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup crushed root beer barrel candy (see note)
2 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon allspice
For the frosting:
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon root beer extract
Milk
Crushed root beer barrel candy
Beat brown sugar and butter together until fluffy. Stir in 1/3 cup crushed root beer barrels. Add two eggs to sugar and butter mixture. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, soda, salt, cinnamon and allspice. Stir dry ingredients into butter mixture. Mix well. Drop on a greased cookie sheet.
Bake 8-10 minutes in a 350-degree oven.
Cool at least 30 minutes before frosting.
To make the frosting, beat together flour, root beer extract and enough milk to make a thin paste. (Be careful not to make it too runny.) Spread frosting on cookies
Then sprinkle on crushed root beer barrel candy.
Note: Gallant says it takes about 20 root beer barrel candies crushed rather fine for this recipe. He finds his at the Bargain Giant at Crestline and Empire.
Yield: About 3 dozen cookies
Approximate nutrition per serving: Unable to calculate.