What "From Scratch" Actually Means

How we make chocolate chip cookies..... with real ingredients!

There is no legal definition of "from scratch." None. No agency regulates it, nobody audits it, and any bakery in America can put it on a sign with no obligation to change a single thing about how they work.

So the phrase is worth exactly what the person saying it decides to make it worth. Here is what it means at The Lakehouse Bakery, including the parts most places would leave out.

"Baked fresh" is not "made fresh"

Before anything else, learn to hear and see the difference between those two phrases, because the food industry spent a lot of money making sure you would not. Baked fresh only tells you when something came out of the oven. It says nothing about when it was made, where it was made, or who made it. A cookie mixed in a plant six months ago, frozen, shipped across the country and baked this morning is, accurately, baked fresh. Subway advertises fresh baked cookies. Jimmy John's advertises fresh baked bread. Both of those statements are 100% true. Neither product was made in that store. Somewhere there is a factory that mixed the dough, and the store is an oven at the end of a supply chain. That is not an accusation, it is just how the model works, and both companies are fairly open about it. But it is why the phrase should not do the work most people let it do. Made fresh means somebody in that building combined ingredients. That is a different claim entirely, and almost nobody makes it, because almost nobody can.

We can. That is the whole reason this post exists.

We start with ingredients, not products

Flour, butter, sugar, eggs, salt, yeast, fruit, chocolate. That is the shelf. There is no bucket of muffin base in this kitchen, no cookie mix, no scone mix, no "just add oil and water" anything. When we make a pumpkin pie, somebody makes pumpkin pie filling. When we make sourdough, somebody (Matt or Ari) builds the dough. This is not a small distinction and it is where a lot of the industry actually lives. A base mix is flour, leavening, emulsifiers, stabilizers and flavor already blended for you. Add water and fat and you have a product. It is consistent, it is fast, and it lets one person run a bakery. It is not what we do. Everything we make is measured, mixed, shaped, proofed and baked bu hand in our own licensed commercial kitchen in Chelsea. MDARD Wholesale Food Processor license FFP 204938 if you feel like looking us up.

Now the part nobody puts on a sign: we have a freezer, and we use it

We bake to the freezer and pull as needed. That sounds like a confession and it is the opposite. Here's why. Nothing we make contains anything that extends shelf life. No preservatives, no dough conditioners, no mold inhibitors, no emulsifiers holding the crumb together three days later. That is the point of how we bake. It is also the consequence. Our food goes stale fast, and it molds. Both. A commercial loaf can and does sit soft on a shelf for a week and does not grow anything, because something in it is doing that job. Ours has nothing doing that job. Real bread with four or five ingredients in it will mold on your counter, and that is the correct behavior for actual food. So the choice is either bake batches and throw away what does not sell, or bake it at its best, freeze it right there, and pull what we need. Freezing does not add anything and it does not take anything away. It stops the clock. It is the only preservative we use and it is not an ingredient. That is how a small bakery can make everything by hand and still has something in the case on a Tuesday. We would rather freeze something we made ourselves than put a chemical in it so it can sit out.

And the croissants are not ours. We have never pretended otherwise

Real croissants are a three day process. Mix, laminate, rest, laminate, rest, shape, proof, bake, with expensive specalized equipment and controlled environment that a bakery our size does not have. So we buy them. We went looking for the best ones we could find and we tried several before we decided. What we buy is not a major brand with an ingredient list a mile long. Turn the bag over and you can read every ingredient on it and pronounce all of them. That was the entire search. And we pay a bit more for them becsue of the quality. If we could make them here at the quality and quantity we want, we would. We cannot, so we found the cleanest ones on the market instead of making a worse croissant or lying about where they come from. Ask us at the counter and we will tell you exactly what they are. That is the balance. Made by hand where we can, honest about it where we cannot.

If it is not in granny's pantry, we do not use it

This is the rule that governs the rest, and it is the one that costs us the most and not just in dollars, but also time and technique. Fruit pies get thickened with cornstarch. Not ClearJel, not modified starch, not gums. ClearJel is genuinely a better industrial product. It sets clearer, it survives freezing, it does not weep and it does not care how long the pie sits. We do not use it, because it is not something you could put in your own pie at home. That means our fruit pies are less forgiving and best the day they are made. We think it is the right trade and we are not going to pretend it is not a trade.

Real butter, and only butter

Not margarine ever. Not a butter / margarine blend. Butter costs multiples of what margarine costs and it is harder to work with because it melts lower and fights you when the kitchen is warm. It also tastes like something, which is the entire point. Of course there is an exception to this rule; vegan baking. We specalize in gluten free and vegan baking even though we are NOT certified. For all our vegan baking we use the best quality vegetable shortening as the butter substitute. It's still not margarine. There are a couple other fats we use regularly, olive oil and vegetable oil. Neither are compromised. We use extra virgin olive oil and non-GMO canola oil.

What all of this actually costs

It is slower. A dough that ferments overnight ties up both a cooler and a day. It is less consistent, because real ingredients vary and sourdough dough behaves differently in August than in January. It is more expensive per unit and it needs more skilled hands. And it means we run out. If a shelf is empty at two o'clock on a Saturday, it is because we made a number that morning and that number is gone.

Why we are telling you all this

Because "from scratch" is doing a lot of work on a lot of signs, and we would rather you judge us on specifics than on advertizing jargon. You can ask us anything about how something in our case was made. Where the flour comes from, what is in it, how long it fermented, whether we made it here or bought it. Nobody here will get cagey about it. There is no proprietary base mix to protect and no story to keep straight.

Come ask. That is genuinely the fun part.

—Chef Keegan and The Lakehouse Bakery Team