JUAN SANCHEZ has taken some heat for his love of baking. Working at a San Jose bakery in 1962, he lit the pilot light as usual – unaware of a leak under the oven. The resulting explosion demolished the building and shook the neighborhood.
But some stalwart rolls and pastries remained undisturbed on the shelf. And although the blast seared one-fifth of Sanchez’s body, he went right back to baking after a three-week hospital stay.
Powerful stuff, this dough.
Standing at the cutting board in Lou’s Do-Nut Shop since 4:30am one recent morning, the 89-year-old baker works a chunk of the malleable dough, gliding his hand beneath it, lopping off the ends and intently kneading it back into the mass. After a sprinkling of flour, he plucks out tiny spheres with his donut-hole cutter. He slides the 36-donut tray into a steamer before passing it on to its happy fate in a vat of bubbling oil.
Sanchez endows the San Jose eatery – a Norman Rockwell fantasy – with energy culled from a 76-year career of creating Dutch bread, apple fritters and chocolate-covered treasures.
“All the bakeries have treated me very well, and I’ve returned their respect,” he says in Spanish.
Surrounded by strainers, scales and pictures of Pope John Paul II and La Virgen de Guadalupe, Sanchez answers questions, rhythmically stressing the beginnings of his phrases, like a Catholic priest praying the cyclical rosary to a congregation. Sanchez, who eats one donut each morning, punctuates many of his sentences with a hearty laugh or “estoy muy a gusto” (“I’m very satisfied”).
Born in 1904 in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, Sanchez journeyed with his grandmother to drowsy Marfa, Texas, when he was 6 months old. He snared his first job there at 14, earning $6 a week. The Mexican wife of the bakery’s German owner taught him the traditional baker’s craft – without amenities like donut-hole cutters and ovens that don’t eat shovel-fed coal.
Since work precluded school, he didn’t learn to read. But once he learns a pastry recipe, he ingrains it in his mind forever.
Eager to share his culinary wisdom with those genuinely interested in learning his art, Sanchez never tires out at work. That includes kitchen duty at his tranquil Blossom Hill mobile home where he still enjoys cooking rolls, bread, cakes and tortillas for his wife of 70 years, stuffing decades of experience into each masterpiece.
