AURORA —In 1991, the Aurora Public School District asked one of its staff bakers who worked in the lunchroom kitchen at Columbia Middle School to bring her made-from-scratch bread and baked goods recipes inside district headquarters and head up an on-site bakery.
Today, that bakery is the last large-scale, on-site school district bakery in the state.
Barb Stembel, the district’s first and only bakery manager, is retiring at the end of this school year after 25 years of making all-natural, made-from-scratch bread products every day for 60 schools in Aurora.
“I’m going to be 70 years old, and if it were not for my age, I would not be retiring,” Stembel said as she sauntered between a wall of walk-in ovens emitting aromatic smells of near-ready hoagie buns in the district’s Nutritional Services Department at 15700 E. First Ave. “I love my job, I always have.”
Stembel started working for Aurora Public Schools as a lunch lady and baker in 1987.
“At first there were just five of us ladies who opened up the bakery,” she said. “We all worked in a kitchen here in the district.”
The district’s bakery started out with five schools. Stembel and the other bakers worked out of a 5,100-square-foot bakery and delivery loading dock space that was carved out of a vacant warehouse before it became the Aurora Public Schools Nutritional Services Department.
“Then, as we progressed, they would bring five more schools in, and we would get another person, until we built up to the entire district, which at the time was about 48 or 50 schools,” Stembel said. “We were doing about 13,000 lunches at the height then.”
Today, the bakery of eight full-time employees provides products for 40,000 students. Every day between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., the district bakers work on a variety of products that are shipped to the schools.
Bakers crank out thousands of preservative-free products all day, most of which were designed in Stembel’s home. Recipes for pizza crust, breadsticks, hamburger buns, garlic bread, French bread, blueberry muffins, kaiser rolls and banana bread are some of the staples.
“Recently, we started providing special subs for high schools,” said Mona Martinez-Brosh, director of Nutrition Services at Aurora Public Schools. “We have a sandwich bar in several of our high schools where students can actually say what kind of cheese, what kind of meat and what kind of bun.”
In the district, 74 percent of all students qualify for free and reduced lunch.
Martinez-Brosh said one of her goals with school lunches is to go above and beyond U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional quality standards. It takes 51 percent wheat to constitute a whole grain bread product, and Aurora Public Schools is always at 53 percent.
“Because we do so much scratch cooking, we are able to control the amount of sugar, the amount of sodium and the amount of preservatives,” said Martinez-Brosh. “We’ve reduced our fat levels and our sodium levels, and we’re always working on our recipes to see if the kids will accept them.”
began shortly after Martinez-Brosh came on as director in 2009. She said it was a hard transition at first because the students were used to a period of convenience and processed food in the school lunchrooms. The bread department has always been scratch cooking under Stembel’s watch.
“Knowing that these children are not going hungry and that they’re getting good, nutritional meals has been the most gratifying part of this job for me,” Stembel said. ” I coined a little phrase here, it’s ‘quality before speed.’ “
That credo was even written on the wall in the bakery, which for the most part is the same as it was when it opened in 1991, plus a few more machines and bigger equipment.
“Back when this started, there were district bakeries everywhere — Cherry Creek had a bakery, Jefferson County had a bakery, but Aurora Public Schools is the only one left at this scale,” Stembel said.
After her retirement May 26, Stembel is taking a part-time job at a cake shop in Southlands.
“We did hiring already … I have two managers working right now that Barb is teaching how to run this operation. She’s still on speed dial though,” Martinez-Brosh said. “She truly is an amazing baker, and so she will be missed.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or @Mmitchelldp
