Zoë Kanan Is Working on Her Pletzels

Kanan, inside the kitchen at her new bakery, Elbow Bread. Photo: Paola Chapdelaine

It’s 1 p.m on a Friday and Zoë Kanan is testing five different yeasted doughs inside
Elbow Bread. Although the new bakery’s arrival was first announced way back in January, Kanan’s only been able to work in the kitchen for about a week. A temporarily broken fridge at the edge of the downstairs kitchen has become an ersatz pantry displaying her most indispensable flavorings: vanilla, caraway, roasted barley, and poppy seeds. There’s also a container of lye for poaching pretzels made with chicken fat, one of the doughs she’s testing on this day. “I’m looking at our menu and seeing what items benefit from the addition of schmaltz,” she says, mentioning a low-hydration challah she’s laminating with a blend of butter and chicken fat and shaping like a croissant. The eggy, honey-sweetened dough puffs up into something resembling an extra-flaky Pillsbury Crescent Roll, which Kanan likes a lot. She’s calling these challah croissants “elbows” for the moment, and they’re looking like candidates to become something of a signature item. “The goal,” Kanan says, “is to have those coming out throughout the day.”

If you’ve eaten any baked goods in New York in the last 15 years, you’ve likely had something made by Kanan. She moved to New York from Houston in 2009 to study pastry at what was then the French Culinary Institute, during which time she became one of the first-ever interns at Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar, working her way up to a pastry cook position after graduation and later coming back to launch a wedding-cake department. There were stints at Four & Twenty Blackbirds and a 4 a.m. baking shift at the NoMad (“I got fired because I couldn’t come on time,” Kanan says), plus a position in the Mile End commissary bakery with Dianna Daoheung, her “first foray into professional Jewish baking.” She baked bagels at Sadelle’s under Melissa Weller and ran the bread and pastry programs for Gabriel Stulman’s Freehand Hotel restaurants until the pandemic came along, at which point her Zoë’s Doughies pop-up — “sometimes doughnuts, sometimes bagels” — transformed her from a behind-the-scenes industry star to a name-brand baker.

“Her pastries more generally are that ideal combo of nostalgic whimsy and traditional technique,” says Cake Zine co-founder and Little Egg pastry chef Tanya Bush. “She is incredibly knowledgeable and super generous with her advice,” Bush adds, saying Kanan has helped her troubleshoot vegan and gluten-free recipes in the past.

Kanan, working one of her many doughs. Photo: Paola Chapdelaine

Elbow, which Kanan is running with partners Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross of Court Street Grocers and S&P in the former Mel the Bakery space, is the first project she’ll open with the anticipation and pressure that comes with a certain level of renown in this suddenly pastry-crazed city.

Is Elbow Bread a hype bakery? A video of the shop’s sign being painted currently possesses more than a million likes on Instagram, so the answer is yes. But when it opens — the current timeline is August — it’s one that will be rooted in Kanan’s technical know-how, not necessarily in another Instagram-worthy croissant.

It also won’t have bagels, despite Kanan’s professional history: “We don’t have the ventilation here for boiling,” she says. Instead, she’s turned her attention to bialys, which are not boiled. It’s partly an ode to Mel’s, which had been making them in the same space, as well as the neighborhood, where the flat oniony bread used to be a more common sight. “Now we’re basically down to Kossar’s,” Kanan says, “I think they deserve to be a regular bakery item.”

The item she really wants to perfect is her “pletzel,” a focaccia-like dough topped with a scattering of the same sautéed onion-and-poppy mixture at the center of each bialy, intended for sandwiches like a “Jewish muffuletta” with beef salami. “My business partners,” she jokes, “are very sandwich oriented.” In keeping with S&P’s embrace of ye olde New York, Kanan has been working on an anise-and-caraway-spiced black bread with cream cheese, dates, and crispy walnut butter that is “guided by the defunct Chock full o’Nuts coffee shops’ “nutted cheese” sandwiches. And for the breakfast menu, she’s testing an eggy spinach kugel inspired by her grandmother, served on a challah bun.

Another long-forgotten treat she’ll revive at Elbow Bread is the Charlotte Russe, better known to pastry lovers as a ladyfinger-lined cream cake. Kanan’s version references the small cups of cake and whipped cream sold in every Brooklyn bakery at the turn of the 20th century, as captured in the scene from Once Upon a Time in America where a boy buys one for 5 cents. Kanan’s involves a buttery layer of cake topped with lemon curd underneath a swirl of black raspberry jam and whipped cream that you eat by pushing up the bottom of the polka-dotted paper cup sourced from the one company in New Jersey that still makes it. Kanan has never had another Charlotte Russe before, but her discovery, at least, occurred in the most authentically New York fashion possible: “I learned about them for the first time from my therapist.”

Waiting … Photo: Paola Chapdelaine