Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
In Barb Walter's professional kitchen, there are huge containers of various kinds of flour, lined up to the right of the table, such as all-purpous, bread, cake, and pastry flour, all of which have their own uses. Walter applies frosting and nuts to freshly baked apricot-filled rolls as treats for us when we visited.
Barb Walter's Grannie BarBar baked goods business has graced these pages before, and since she was the first to respond, we are featuring her in this week's column.
The day we stopped in to see Barb, she was baking apricot-filled rolls and cinamon rolls to sell to make money for the people displaced by the Carlton Complex fire. This fits in with the generosity we see from her. She brings cookies in to The Record pretty much any time she has some left over from an event.
Barb (Bell) Walter grew up in Wilbur and her family ran several businesses including Ma's Cafe, a drive-in restaurant, a trailer court and a motel. She was surrounded by hard workers and lots of cooking, but she was not interested in cooking or baking at all in those days. Not until Dorothy Gies taught her how to make fail-proof bread did she take up baking.
Walter's husband, Jerry, besides helping her bake, also has a business at home, tying flies and selling them at Ramm Hardware. Walter says any time her husband mentions retiring, she tells him that she hasn't found the word "retire" in the bible. She says they have no long-range plans, but will continue with their business as long as their health allows it.
Walter is also helped by her daughter, Sheri Heidenreich, who makes the fancy, decorated cookies and lives in Vancouver, Wash. They get a lot of orders for their fancy cookies to be used at weddings. Every November, they fill a trailer and go down to Vancouver and Portland to sell at some bazaars. She said the customers are lined up and waiting for them to open when they get there.
At Christmas time, Grannie BarBar gets about 100 orders, always the same people, who order from New York, California and places in between. Walter said they don't have a website, because their business in seasonal and they already have all the business they can handle.
She started the business about 30 years ago and it has grown to having freezers in the barn, freezers in the house and freezers somewhere else to handle the quantity they make. They are baking in the original Walter farmhouse, so they had the house and barn rewired in order to keep from blowing fuses; and they had new wall coverings put on the walls in the house to satisfy the Washington State Department of Agriculture inspector.
She is required to list every ingredient she uses on her shipping boxes and on her labels, because of possible allergic reactions. Bev Scherr helps her with editing and printing her labels and Walter said, Judy Scrupps and Larissa Zeiler do her books and keep her out of jail.
The Record would like to thank Barb for calling so quickly and getting our new column started. We hope others with home-based businesses will email or call us soon.
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