Dana North grew up in a huge family with a mother who knew how to cook for a crowd. Her mom also was known to feel her way through a recipe, and by watching and experimenting Dana picked up her own culinary skills. These days, Dana Bakes Gluten Free can be found every week at the Richmond Farmers Market, a place that Dana calls “a community of people who care about each other.” In this episode of the WWN podcast, Kate talks with Dana about baking, community, how she realized she was gluten intolerant, her excitement for growth downtown, and her vision of a vibrant city with outdoor cafes and coffee shops. Enjoy!
Transcript
Dana North: I’m Dana North, owner of Dana Bakes Gluten Free.
Kate Jetmore: From Civic Spark Media, and the Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana, I’m Kate Jetmore. As a native of Richmond, Indiana, I’m excited to be sitting down with some of our neighbors and listening to the stories that define our community. My guest today is Dana North. As a native of the Whitewater Valley, growing up in Greenville, Ohio, she frequently traveled to Richmond, Indiana as a child. She’s excited to say she has now lived in Richmond for 20 years and loves seeing the changes that are happening to make the city more vibrant. A baker since she was a teenager, Dana started gluten-free baking in 2015 and joined the Richmond Farmers Market in 2016 as a home-based vendor. Welcome, Dana. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Dana North: Yes, I’m excited.
Kate Jetmore: Well, let’s start from the beginning, in Greenville, Ohio. Tell us a little bit about what your childhood was like and what role cooking and baking played in your younger years.
Dana North: Yeah, my mom was a person who was in the kitchen all the time. That was the center of our world. That’s where people gathered. It was a big, eat-in kitchen, so food was an important part of our gatherings. There was always food. There was always a lot of food. I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t know how to bake for less than 20 people most of my life. My father’s from a family of 10 kids. So any gathering with them, there was at least 75 people present.
Kate Jetmore: Oh my gosh.
Dana North: My maternal grandmother is from a family of 13. If we were with that side of the family, it was a large gathering, also. So my mom was the one who would usually say, “We’re having the gathering at our house.” And we just had a small, three bedroom ranch house, it was nothing special, from the late ’50s, early ’60s, a one car garage. And I can tell you that we could have the whole house ready in 30 minutes and set up tables in the garage because my mom was a fanatic cleaner. But we could gather folks quickly and we always did. There was always room for one more person, or two more people, or five more people at our table.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, I love that. It sounds like your mom really had it down to an art, and I have to say, well, first of all, I’m assuming that your mom passed some recipes down to you, and I’m wondering if they’re all in huge quantities.
Dana North: Most of them aren’t, but they’re pretty easy to double.
Kate Jetmore: Okay.
Dana North: But a of stuff was in her head. So when she passed away, all of my relatives would call and be like, “Hey, how did your mom make this?” And I’d be like, “I really don’t know. Let me think about it for a minute.”
Kate Jetmore: Were you able to rescue some of those recipes?
Dana North: Some of them. Some of them, I was in the kitchen when she would make them and she’d be like, “We put it on a cup of this, a cup of this, and we put two eggs in. And the consistency looks like this after you add milk.” And it’d be like, “Oh, okay.” So just to have some of those. Some of the things, she definitely had written down recipes, but she did a lot of stuff just because she knew what the consistency was or what it was supposed to look like when she was making it, to then move it forward. So meatloaf, there’s no recipe for meatloaf. You put stuff into it until it looks the right consistency and you move on.
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: So she always worked in grocery stores when I was a kid, so she knew produce, she knew meats, and she just knew her way around different kinds of food. A very Midwestern person though, as far as cooking and baker goes. So when I came home from college and was like, “I want to have Chinese, I want to have Thai.” She was like, “What is all that stuff?” That’s not the things that we made at home. So as I have grown up, I worked at colleges and universities, so I moved around the Midwest to different places, to bigger cities and would get exposed to a lot more foods.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah.
Dana North: It was just-
Kate Jetmore: It’s so interesting to hear you say that. I had the exact same experience. I grew up in Richmond and I went away to school in New York, and when I came back, it was like that was the first time in my life that I realized how Midwestern Richmond, Indiana is, for better or for worse. And at what point did you take the reins when it comes to cooking and baking? Were you interested in cooking and baking? Or do you trace it back to your mom?
Dana North: Yeah, I trace it back to my mom. She would let us do anything in the kitchen. The whole deal was, “If you made the mess, you cleaned up the mess.” So if my friends came over and we were like, “We want to try to make something different, and not have a recipe with it.” She’s like, “That’s okay. Just clean up what you do.” So she was real good about not holding us back and saying, “Nope, you’re not going to mess up my kitchen.” Or, “No, you’re not going to use all my supplies.” If it was in the house, it was free game, which was really nice to let us experiment and let us do different things. My mom, from my memory, I always heard that she did it different ways before I was born. From my memory, it was all box baking, so it was all box baking, or, you know, like Jiffy Corn Mix and-
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: … Duncan Hines cakes.
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: Not that she didn’t know how to make stuff from scratch, it’s just at that point in time, that was the more popular way to do it.
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: But there were always mixes and always those things. Cookies were probably the thing we made most often and from scratch. And at Christmastime, our house was insane. She had all kinds of, I mean, it wasn’t unusual for us to make 20 or 30 different kinds of cookies to give people, and make big trays to send to people. So the baking portion, I think, came naturally because that’s what we did a lot of. My brother was eight years older than me, and my mom would be like, “Well, we always made pies and we always made cakes from scratch.” And I was like, “Yeah, that was BD. That was before Dana.”
Kate Jetmore: Funny. That’s so funny.
Dana North: And-
Kate Jetmore: And you’re actually, it seems like-
Dana North: She’d always be like-
Kate Jetmore: It seems like you’re tracing a trend that a lot of us either remember or are aware of, which, because you and I are about the same age, I know our kids are about the same age. And like you said, “BD, everything was from scratch.” And then there was this trend where convenience came in. And then there has been a moment in our lives where people, if they’re able to, they appreciate returning to scratch whenever they’re able to. But it was definitely, everyone was like, “Oh, you can just buy a box and add three things to this? It goes so much quicker.”
Dana North: Right. I remember my grandmother used to have some kind of cake she bought, and it came with a cake pan, like a little paper foil cake pan, and she could mix everything up in the pan. And she was so excited about that. But she grew up, my grandmother was from the farm, so, you know, she probably-
Kate Jetmore: Yeah.
Dana North: … gathered the eggs and milked the cow to get whatever she needed to make stuff with.
Kate Jetmore: Right. I think we forget that as beautiful, as natural, I mean, we all appreciate that farm to table mentality, but it’s hard. It’s not easy to live that way. It’s really hard to be a person who’s doing all the things you’ve just described. Well, as we all know, you now bake exclusively gluten-free, and I’d love to hear about what happened. What was your journey that led you to bake gluten-free?
Dana North: I have a friend here in Richmond, and our children hung out together. And the first time she came to our house, she was like, “Well, I can’t eat that because it’s got gluten in it.” And I didn’t understand what that meant, obviously, at that point in time. And I was like, “Tell me what that means. Tell me what you can eat.” So she started discussing, “I can eat this or I can do this.” So she could eat nuts, so I could make things with different kinds of nuts, or she could eat corn, she could eat dairy, she could eat eggs. So I’m like, “Okay, if you can eat all those things, I can figure out a way to go with this.”
So she started coming to our house and I was like, “So tell me how you do this. Where do you get your baked goods? Where do you get your things?” Because even in, it was probably about 2015, 2014 when we started doing stuff together, there still wasn’t a lot of stuff out there that was gluten-free that was good. It was kind of yucky.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah.
Dana North: And-
Kate Jetmore: Just add more sugar, right?
Dana North: Yeah, just add more sugar. And everybody was like, “Put applesauce in it. That’ll make it better.” And I’m like, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.” So I started playing with stuff. I definitely found three or four recipes that were my go-to for desserts that I could do for her. So like a lemon almond ricotta cake, pavlovas, which are meringues, basically, chocolate meringue with whipped cream and fruit. And then I found one other one that I would do, just a simple flourless torte. So I found those and I could do those without having to buy special things or get special ingredients. So then I was like, “Okay, there’s got to be flours out there.” So I found some flours, and I didn’t like them. One of them, it was a Bob’s Red Mill, but it had garbanzo beans in it. And garbanzo beans when they’re dry, have, my husband calls it, “A green taste to them.” So I tried it and I was like, “Oh.”
Kate Jetmore: Oh.
Dana North: “This is awful.” I love garbanzo beans-
Kate Jetmore: Interesting.
Dana North: … normally, but when they’re dry, they have a whole different flavor to them. So my mother-in-law had heard we were trying to do this gluten-free stuff, according to her, stuff. So she shared a recipe for a flour mixture. So I started playing with that flour mixture and making it my own using different types of rice flowers, and potato starch, and tapioca starch, and came up with something that worked, that I could convert recipes that I knew, the recipes from my mom that I knew how to make, and could move forward from there. So I wasn’t-
Kate Jetmore: Oh, that’s so-
Dana North: … just adding extra applesauce.
Kate Jetmore: … so through this-
Dana North: Go ahead.
Kate Jetmore: … process of experimentation, you were developing your own signature flour that then you would use in each of these recipes?
Dana North: Mm-hmm.
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
Dana North: Yeah.
Kate Jetmore: Do you use that same hybrid mixture in each of your baked goods?
Dana North: I do. I have two different flour mixtures. I have one flour mixture that I use for yeast products because it has a whey protein in it. And Pinterest is a fabulous place. So I found a person who was like, “Here, try this.” So I was able to use some of my mixture that I use with some of her mixture, and make a good thing for yeasted products, so my cinnamon rolls, and my focaccia bread, and few other things we make with that. And then the other mixture is the one I developed back in 2015, and we just use that every week.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah. If it works, stick with it. So it all started with this friend and you began to bake for her because she didn’t have access to good quality baked goods that were gluten-free. And then at what point did it start to move more beyond that friend and more into the business realm?
Dana North: Yeah. I figured out while I was baking for this friend that I was also gluten intolerant. I get migraines if I eat too much of it.
Kate Jetmore: Oh. Okay.
Dana North: We had taken a trip out to the Pacific Northwest, which is where my husband is from, and we found this great little bakery. And I was so excited about it, and it had these fabulous pastries. So we of course bought a bunch of pastries to take them home to eat, and I ate six of them in one day. And the next morning I woke up with this horrendous headache and migraine. And I was like, “What did I do different yesterday that I haven’t done the whole time we were on this trip?” And it was that I had all of those pastries.
So then I started doing more research. “Okay, I am gluten intolerant.” If you have a little chicken skin on the back of your arms, that’s one of the things that tells you you’re gluten intolerant. For years it would be I could drink one sip of beer, and a whole bottle of beer, and I would have this horrible headache after I did it. So it was just like, “Okay, this stuff’s all adding up for me.” So I baked for her for about a year, moved to town, went to the farmers market, which I occasionally went to when we lived in Boston, Indiana at that time.
Kate Jetmore: Okay.
Dana North: So I’d come in maybe once or twice a month for the farmers market. But when we moved to town, it was like, “There’s no gluten-free baker in the farmers market. I wonder if we could do something with that.” One weekend our kids were at Grandma’s house, and I started talking to my husband more seriously about it, and he’s like, “Okay, we could do this.” So we sent in our application, we did all the stuff we were supposed to do, and then the kids went back to Grandma’s house again for the next weekend, the weekend that we finally figured out we were in the farmers market, and we started baking for farmers market.
Kate Jetmore: Oh.
Dana North: So that was in August of 2016. And I will tell you, the-
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
Dana North: … first market, there was one customer who’s still a customer today, thank goodness, who scared the death into me because she was like, “Does any of your equipment have gluten in it? Do you have any kind of gluten flour at your house? What do you have?” I was just like, “Oh my God, I’m going to kill somebody.”
Kate Jetmore: Oh, wow. Yeah, because she had really serious issues with gluten. Well, I want to actually take a step back, because I have to admit that I don’t actually really even know what gluten intolerance is, what celiac disease is. These terms, they’re not new to me. You see them, you hear them, but if someone asked me to define them, I wouldn’t be able to. But I’m guessing maybe you can. Would you be able to define them for us?
Dana North: I could give you a broad overview.
Kate Jetmore: Okay.
Dana North: What happens when people have celiac disease is basically their body can’t process the gluten, which is a protein. That’s a protein starch combination, and wheat flour, barleys, ryes, most of your grass grains, their body can’t process that. And when they have it, for lots of them, it presents as a flu symptom, a flu-like symptom. So people could be sick for a long period of time before, or used to be able to be sick for a long periods of time, and doctors would be like, “You’ve just caught a bug.”
Kate Jetmore: Oh.
Dana North: “Something’s going through your system, and it’ll just have to work its way out.” So they could be sick for six months, and no one ever would say, “Maybe this is gluten.” As it’s become more prominent, they’re able to do a blood test now, and they can tell people if they have a gluten sensitivity, which is really nice, but still takes, I still hear stories of parents with children, who, their child’s sick for such a long period of time, and finally the parent is like, “We’re going to Riley. We’re going somewhere where I know I can get you really tested or to Children’s and I’m going to make them do the test.” So I don’t think that’s as frequent now, but up to three years ago, people were still having to say, “No, it’s got to be something. She’s okay at this period. They’re not okay at this period.”
Kate Jetmore: Wow. As recently as three years ago? That’s really-
Dana North: Yeah.
Kate Jetmore: … surprising.
Dana North: Yeah. I had someone who told me that story just last December.
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
Dana North: And that’s with celiacs. The other thing I have found is lots of people have different reactions. Some folks have the migraines, some folks, skin, their skin will just peel off. So it’s like a psoriasis type or eczema type of reaction to it. Some folks, just, we have one person in our community who literally will go into anaphylactic shock, just literally totally allergic to gluten.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, wow.
Dana North: Yeah. So it’s different and different people, and most people are like, “I ate this for years.” And then something triggered it in their body or when they finally figured it out. So it’s interesting to hear it. And sometimes, for some folks, it’s an autoimmune disease, is what it comes down to. They don’t have one, they’ll have two. So they can’t have gluten and they can’t have eggs, or they can’t have gluten and they can’t have dairy.
Kate Jetmore: Okay.
Dana North: Lots of folks are like, “Can you make this?” I can do the dairy-free, gluten-free-
Kate Jetmore: Oh, wow.
Dana North: … egg-free. The hard one for me is the sugar-free. That’s just a tough one, to give up the sugar.
Kate Jetmore: Well, can’t you add applesauce, Dana?
Dana North: Yeah, exactly. I should be able to. And sometimes it’s just that’s cost prohibitive, after you’re using a flour that costs … My flour costs almost a dollar a cup, whereas normal flour that you buy at the grocery store is like 20 cents a cup, probably more than that right now. But the difference between the cost is then you add in Splenda or whatever, Stevia, or whatever sugar replacement you are, I’m like, “I won’t be able to make food that’s cost-effective for you to buy for me at some point.”
Kate Jetmore: Right. Well, I wanted to ask you if making the transition to eating in accordance with, eating as someone who has a gluten intolerance, if that was a difficult transition for you to make? But it sounds like you already were doing so much of this baking that maybe exactly what you needed, you know, were things that you were already producing for your clients.
Dana North: Yeah, I still crave a donut and I’ll still be like, “Oh, that’s worth it. I’ll pay for it tomorrow.” So it isn’t as difficult as it probably is for some folks. Some people feel like their world has ended when they’re told that they can’t eat gluten. And there’s so many options out there. I’m fortunate enough that just in the last six months that we have gotten into a friendship and a relationship with a gluten-free food truck. So it’s been fun.
Kate Jetmore: Ooh.
Dana North: Yeah, because they do stuff all the time and they’ll have pasta Week, and Reubens, and so they’re really making a good transition to do things that you won’t miss as much. So they use some of our products in their cooking, too, which is nice.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, I love that. I love hearing about collaborations like that and relationships that are formed, especially within the community. And actually, Dana, in your bio, you mentioned being excited about the many changes in Richmond that are making the city more vibrant, maybe these food trucks are among those changes that you’re noticing. What is your own role and the role of Dana Bakes in that context?
Dana North: So I think one of the fun things for us as being part of Richmond Farmers Market as it’s changed and went through some of its different reiterations of being an all year market. So it’s been an all year market for quite some time, but we struggled with a good location. And I don’t know if you’re ever here in the wintertime, but if you are, the Starr Gennett Building is wonderful. It’s a wonderful facility for us to be in, in the wintertime. It’s got heat, they’ve got covers the windows. So it just makes it this fabulous place and this wonderful community to be in, but just even to be at the farmers market at all, I noticed you talked to Henry, who is the nice guy.
Kate Jetmore: Yes, Henry Freeman, yes, nice guy. That’s right.
Dana North: And I saw your podcast with him, and he’s absolutely correct. And it’s this fabulous community of vendors and lots of things fall away. You’re not worried about political stuff while you’re there. You’re not worried about how much money someone has. It’s not a socioeconomic thing. It’s not any of those pieces. It’s just people who are coming to get quality things or vendors who are worried about each other and want to help each other. We were talking, somebody was talking about another farmers market at one point, and they were saying, “Your farmers market, when people, for example, if a storm comes up, we’re all trying to help each other. You get your stuff down, you’re trying to help your neighbor to get their stuff down, too.”
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: But at some farmers markets, it’s everybody for themselves. That’s not what our community is. So if somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, you don’t have this.” “Nope, but if you could eat gluten, the baker three stalls down from me has great stuff.” So I think we watch out for each other and we try to help each other, because it’s a true community. If one of us thrives, all of us thrive. So it’s, “How can we help everybody else thrive and make a good place?”
Kate Jetmore: Yes. One thing, and I felt this way when I talked to Henry as well, it’s so interesting to see your energy talking about the farmers market, which reminds me of Henry’s energy talking about the farmers market, and I have this bird’s eye view from my position as host of this podcast, which is, “Here’s this person, and they’re talking about their participation in this community, which is the Richmond’s farmers market.” And then it’s like, “Okay, and what role does the Richmond Farmers Market have in the broader community, which is Richmond, or which is Wayne County?” And then those ripples just go out. This podcast focuses on Wayne County, but we all live in Indiana, we all live in the Midwest, we all live in the United States. And so I’d love to hear you beyond the Richmond Farmers Market, if you’re able to talk about how you see Dana Bakes giving back to the community, and also what you think the future might hold for Dana Bakes.
Dana North: Yeah. One of the things we started doing in November, I think it was in November when we started doing them, I started doing baking classes. So we started doing some bread making classes and some scone making classes, so inviting people into our kitchen to do that. So that was fun to do. I have a commercial kitchen, it’s Downtown, so I’m right on Main Street right in where all the construction is right now. They poured our sidewalk today, I heard, which is very, very exciting. So one of the things we try to do also, that I’m trying to do more, is doing wholesale with folks. So like Downtown Deli has our stuff, Kehila Coffee and Liberty has our stuff, the food truck, Hot Dish MCF has our stuff. So trying to reach out farther and get our products in different people’s hands.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah.
Dana North: We’re trying to work right now to get frozen cinnamon rolls out to some different places. So that’s our new adventure that we’re trying to work through. So, you know, buying the vacuum packer, and buying the bags, and trying to figure out-
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: … labeling to make sure we’re doing all the stuff we have to do. So I think that’s part of it. When I look at Downtown, Downtown excites me. Some people are very negative about the bike paths, but I have to tell you every time I drive by, what I envision in my eye, and you will probably appreciate this more than some, is I see cafes, and coffee shops, and setting tables up where the sidewalk is. We have a path now people can walk and ride bikes on. It’s not just for bikes, it’s for walkers, too.
Kate Jetmore: That’s right.
Dana North: To do the very European piece of it, and have some tables and some chairs where people could sit, and just have umbrellas, and sit and chat for a while and hang out with their dogs if they want to. So I think there’s things that folks get so focused on this, “Nobody’s ever going to ride their bike down this bike path.” No, but they may walk down it. And if you can have tables out there to have community in it, that’s huge to me. Getting people to live Downtown is very exciting to me. Again, more cafes, more places to sell my stuff to. But we’ve talked about it because we are older. I’m 56, my husband’s 54. But we’re not ready to open a shop and have our shop someplace. That’s not necessarily the point of, we’re supposed to be getting ready for retirement, not getting ready to do a whole new adventure.
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dana North: But to have other people carry our stuff, that’s awesome. The more places I can help folks have gluten-free options that are tasty and good, and not taste like cardboard, I’m all about that. So the fun thing about having our friends with the food truck is that they tell people about our stuff. So there are occasions I get people who are coming in from Ohio. I have a couple people who live probably 40 minutes away, but they’re coming in to get out stuff at the farmers market. So then they’re walking the whole farmers market and seeing what we have and who we have there. And if we can get Downtown thriving, not only would they walk farmers market, they would walk Downtown and go to different shops there, too. So being from Greenville, when I graduated in the ’80s, our Downtown was on its downside at that point. So stores were moving out, things were moving away. But to walk Downtown now, which is, you know, 40 years later-
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm.
Dana North: The Downtown is thriving. And that’s what I want for Richmond. I want to thriving Downtown that people feel like they can go on a Friday night and just hang out, or go on a Saturday and just be there.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, I love that you’re sharing this vision and it is such a vibrant picture that you’re painting. So I join you in that hope and that vision, and I support your role in it. You are definitely walking the walk. So thank you so much, Dana, for coming on the show today. I loved learning more about you, learning more about your business, and I want to wish you and your family all the best.
Dana North: Thank you, Kate.