While most people’s work-from-home setup might include big monitors, ergonomic chairs and standing desks, Christine Liu’s consists of a wooden workbench, buckets of flour and an industrial mixer that holds 50 pounds of dough.
Liu’s workspace, the “microbakery” Christine’s at 2823 18th St., is soon to be open to the public, hosting a soft opening on Saturday, April 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tucked in an alleyway connecting Florida and Bryant streets near 18th Street, Christine’s is serving homemade cookies, and half of her menu is vegan. It includes classic chocolate chip, salted peanut butter, or more creative vegan flavors like black sesame Oreo, lemon Earl Grey and a new addition, the matcha shortbread.
“I want to show people that eating plant-based is still super delicious,” Liu said. “There’s still sugar in it. There’s still chocolate. All the good things, right? You just have to know how to do it.”
With a background in sustainability, Liu insists on sourcing as many ingredients as she can from local producers: Chocolate chips from Guittard Chocolate Company in Burlingame, walnuts from Old Dog Ranch in San Joaquin County, and organic butter from Sierra Nevada Cheese company in Willows, in the Sacramento Valley.
She is obsessed with the science behind cookies, experimenting with browning butter vs. not, letting dough rest overnight or baking it right away, and making vegan butter in-house.
Last year, after being a self-taught baker for years, Liu went to a full-time baking program for two months at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Besides the technical learning, the most important lesson for Liu, or more of a realization, was just how much she loves baking — even the physical labor of scraping 50 pounds of dough out of the mixer or lifting baking sheets up and out of cooling shelves all day.
Raised in an Asian-American family, Liu never imagined herself becoming a baker, even though she did write “when I grow up, I want to be a baker” in her pre-school yearbook. “Probably because I saw a Barney episode about it,” she laughed.
Four years ago, when many in quarantine tried their hand at baking, Liu and her husband took it a step further, and turned a running joke they shared — “sure, we can start a small business, too” — into reality.
So, she, too, was baking a lot of cookies. “I gave so many samples to a lot of friends,” she said. “Even though we give it to them from a distance with our masks on, I saw it as a way to build connection, especially in a time when we were all apart from each other.”
During the first three years, Christine’s was a pop-up bakery, and Liu ran it from two community kitchens in San Jose, shared with private chefs, caterers and food truck workers. But it was tough to share sometimes, Liu said, “We would go in, really early morning at 4 a.m., and all of a sudden we see, like, 20 other people.”
Being a pop-up also means traveling to different locations almost every single weekend. Liu and her team had to bring its canopy set-up and all the cookies to venues across the Bay Area, she said. “It’s just constantly moving.”
So when Liu saw people turning their garages into bakeries, she knew she wanted to do that, too.
Located next to a pan dulce baker, Christine’s is now a small storefront in an alleyway, which Liu calls “a baker alley.” The space, a “working loft” with high ceilings in a brick building, is both her baking kitchen and home, separately by a flight of stairs.
Liu is now saying farewell to the pop-up life ready for her physical storefront. The biggest excitement? “I want people to experience what it’s like to eat a cookie when it’s straight out of the oven,” she smiled, as if she already had a freshly-baked, warm cookie in hand.
Christine’s is located at 2823 18th St., Unit 107 (enter from Florida Street or Bryant Street). It is open on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pre-orders will be available in 1 to 2 weeks.