Early To Rise: Bakery Goods Go Fast At New Pixie Boulangerie

Pixie Boulangerie, the new European-style bakery in Great Barrington, is open “9 a.m. to 3 p.m. or until sold out.” And you can take it from me that the breads, pastries, quiches, tarts, cookies and more do indeed sell out. When I got there to interview the owner at close to three o’clock, there was almost nothing left but the heavenly aromas permeating from the open kitchen behind the counter. My bad timing, though, afforded me a different kind of pleasure: sitting at one of the large work tables, watching owner Patrizia Barbagallo shape the breads that would be baked the next day. It was mesmerizing.

Given the quality of edibles coming out of the kitchen — the croissants, scones, quiches, focaccia, savory and sweet hand pies, breads and baguettes, cheesecake, babkas, biscotti and more — it’s astonishing that Barbagallo isn’t a graduate of some fancy French culinary school. She did grow up in Switzerland, after all. But she had something maybe even better: a mother who was a chef and restaurateur. Baking everyday was just something Barbagallo did. She’d make quiches, flourless chocolate cakes and cheesecakes, and recalls bringing apple tarts to her teachers — quite fitting, since she herself became a French teacher. When COVID landed on our shores — she was teaching in Westchester — she decided to make a move, and fortunately, her “sweetheart,” Mark Tanen, had a house in Sheffield. A new home precipitated a new career.

Patrizia Barbagallo    Photo: Lisa Green

Now living in the Berkshires, “I was baking every day,” she says. Tanen suggested she start selling her goods at a farmers market, but Barbagallo wanted to go straight to bricks and mortar: “If I go, I go all the way in.”

The couple looked for a commercial space, and found one in the Flying Church, a multiuse venue inside the restored church at the north end of Main Street. Self funding the venture, she purchased the machines, the ovens, the pans, and ingredients that would support her vision. Pixie opened in October, and the pace at which her inventory goes tells the tale. In just a few months, a band of loyal customers has formed, and preferences have emerged among them.

“We have a scones lady and a quiche lady,” says Tanen. “We listen to our customers. We had someone who requested an opera cake for a special anniversary. It’s not on our menu, but the team got together and figured out how to make it.”

Which brings us to another factor in Pixie Boulangerie’s success: teamwork. Perhaps it’s her background as a teacher, but when so many other businesses are scrambling to hire and keep employees, Barbagallo seems to have a winning formula for gathering a group of “Pixies,” each of whom has certain strengths in the bakery’s production line. Like Barbagallo, they don’t necessarily have professional training in what they do — most important is that they have a love of baking. One excels at quiches, another at pastry cream; a third has just the right touch when it comes to bread. Barbagallo taught the counter person to make biscotti, and then she came up with the newest cookie, almond flour matcha amaretti. She's now Pixie’s “cookie lady.”  

Barbagallo considers the boulangerie a bake lab. When they try a new recipe, the team likes to participate in the tasting and adjusting. There’s a lot of knowledge transfer, a love of baking and alignment of the team, explains Tanen, a former healthcare IT professional who has become skilled in the care and feeding of the sourdough starter. “We share the knowledge as well as the work.”

Of course, all the camaraderie in the world is for naught if the proof weren’t in the pain. That’s where the choice of ingredients and making the extra effort comes in. Barbagallo uses Callebaut chocolate from Belgium, European butter (82% fat for better flavor), makes her own mix of seeds and roasts them before adding to the bread (it makes a difference, she insists), and uses pink salt instead of sea salt because, she says these days, fancy sea salt contains microplastics. She invested in blue steel pans (heavy as heck) because the bread bakes in them more evenly. Aesthetics are just as important; quiche in a rectangular shape with fluted edges are as beautiful to look at as they are to eat; babkas do their own thing when they’re baking and people are attracted to their idiosyncratic shapes and swirls.

Every day the boulangerie puts our small batches, but with a lot of variety. As a seasonal bakery, the lineup of items will change throughout the year, but sometimes something new makes its way to the front case in a serendipitous way. When Barbagallo found herself overstocked with buttermilk, she wanted to find a way to use it up and developed a buttermilk pie that was an instant hit. A reluctance to throw out excess sourdough starter culminated in her “no waste” sourdough chocolate chip cookies, which sound pretty scrumptious even before Barbagallo confides that it’s really the beurre noisette — the browned butter — that makes the difference.

Barbagallo and Tanen call Pixie a community bakery. They want it to be like the bake shops in Europe, an anchor bakery in town, a warm place that people like to come to. It appears they’ve accomplished that, all driven by Barbagallo’s passion for baking.

“I just put out what I like to eat,” she says. “It seems people like my taste.”