Courtesy Far Breton
Marie Young in the new bakery.
One of baker Marie Young’s favorite compliments to hear when someone tries her pastries is “This reminds me of something my grandma would make.”
She describes her business, Far Breton Bakery, as a “grandma-eque bakery — if your grandma was from rural Europe.” Young’s mother’s family is originally from Brittany, and Young spent time there in the summer. Much of her inspiration is drawn from those traditional French pastries.
Far Breton, which Young began as a mobile operation in 2019, launched as a brick-and-mortar storefront at 1924 Fordem Ave., formerly New Orleans Takeout, in late November. Initially, Young had planned to open Far Breton in the old Jacobson Bros. meat market in the Lakewood Plaza Shopping Center a few blocks away, but switched to the Fordem site because it was bigger, more affordable and needed fewer renovations.
Currently, the bakery counter is open limited hours, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Friday-Sunday, selling the rustic French pastries Young has always loved — an all-butter croissant, pain au chocolat, a Breton specialty bun called kouign-amann, and her spiced sugar morning bun. Those are the bestsellers, but there are also fruit-filled galettes and savory quiches.
Young’s love for baking goes way back. She says her mom coped with Madison winters by trying out new recipes from around the world. Young was so inspired by her mom’s creations, she baked her high school class a buttermilk pie with a sugar crumble coating.
Years later when out to dinner at Madison’s L'Etoile, Young met one of the chefs, who turned out to be one of her high school classmates who had been so inspired by the pie, he went to culinary school. In turn, he ended up getting Young a job at L'Etoile, which kick-started her pastry chef career. She ended up with a two-year degree in culinary arts from Madison College and moved to Eau Claire to start her own bakery, The French Confection, and later Marie's Original Bakery in Eau Claire.
She closed Marie’s in 2009 after the financial meltdown and moved back to Madison, where she got a more “corporate” job and started working on a degree in business management.
The pastries kept calling, though, and in 2019 she started Far Breton, selling from a trailer at farmers’ markets. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Young worried about the business, but “it turns out, [farmers’ markets] were one of the few places people could congregate,” Young says. By 2022, she needed to prepare at least 1,000 pastries for one day at the Northside Farmers’ Market.
Young and her team (she has a staff of 11) have been baking out of FEED Kitchens, the commercial kitchen/small food business incubator on North Sherman Avenue, which Young can’t praise enough, calling it “an incredible community asset.” But baking operations will eventually shift to the Fordem Avenue site; Young expects the move to take place in early March. This will help with increasing output. That’s important because Far Breton will continue to sell at farmers’ markets, including the Northside, and, new for her this year, the Dane County Farmers’ Market.
The bakery’s bestsellers are all made using a croissant dough, but Young takes different steps in the baking process, creating distinct products. She describes the kouign-amann, which translates to “butter cake” in Breton (French Gaelic), as a “caramelized, laminated pastry.” The sugar in the dough liquifies during the baking process, and then the bun is flipped upside down, causing the sugar to seep back to the top, creating the laminated effect.
Young also bakes her galettes with croissant dough. The sweet variety is piled high with seasonal fruits and sometimes a sweet cream cheese. Her most popular savory galette features roasted tomatoes with a spinach Asiago cream cheese, but she is always creating new recipes, striving for “seasonality and celebration of the seasons as they change.”
Eventually she hopes to expand the menu into cakes, éclairs, and other filled treats.
Whatever the baked good, Young prioritizes fresh ingredients: “Make it with butter, make it with love, make it with real ingredients.”
