Torrington’s Bread Doctor Has Delivered Hundreds Of Babies — And Baked Goods

TORRINGTON — In a small town about 80 miles northeast of Cheyenne is a little slice of Paris. It’s a bakery that draws regular customers from as far away as Billings, Montana, and beyond.

The bakery is The Bread Doctor in Torrington, but this is not just a story about a cool bakery with an old-world feel that serves delicious bread in the most unlikely of locations.

This is first and foremost a story about family, because that’s what inspired the creation of Torrington’s popular bakery at 2017 Main St.

“I started the bakery so that my daughter, Eleanor, could have a job,” Edzan Fluckiger told Cowboy State Daily. “She has Down syndrome. And there are better ways to say that than just saying it, but I’m just telling you that she has Down syndrome.”

As Eleanor grew, Fluckiger would often think about his daughter’s future — as any loving parent would. Those thoughts came more and more often the older she got.

Something else he started to think about along the way was his own retirement and what he wanted that to look like.

Wouldn’t it be cool, he thought, if he and his daughter could do something together? That could be something that could not only become his retirement, but his daughter’s own rock-solid place in the world.

For The Joy Of Baking

Fluckiger has always loved to bake as far back as he can recall.

He has lots of fond memories as a child watching his mom bake bread, and eventually helping her in the kitchen. He learned early on how to bake brownies and lemon meringue pie with fresh lemons from the backyard.

As an adult, he didn’t lose that childlike joy he gets from baking. Every birthday is an excellent excuse to bake a cake, and every party an excellent opportunity to bake a pie.

Off and on, he even thought about owning a bakery someday. But, as his wife would point out, it wasn’t the most practical of ideas.

Torrington had a bakery for 30 years, but then it closed, so Fluckiger could never quite let his bakery idea go. And, with his daughter’s high school graduation nearing, he was thinking more and more about it.

Was it really so far-fetched?

He recalled how his daughter, when she was young, loved to play at waitressing. At a bakery, she could play a role that wouldn’t be so far from that.

One day on a whim, he did a quick Google search.

He figured this search would tell him that learning to bake bread professionally was going to be too costly or that it would take far too long.

He couldn’t really quit his job as a medical doctor in Torrington just to open a bakery. Fluckiger had delivered more than 800 babies in the area, and he still loved that profession, too.

But it would be nice, he realized while crafting his Google search, to exercise his creativity a bit more. And baking had always brought him joy. Maybe it could also bring his daughter joy.

Fluckiger was surprised to see at the top of his list Marda Stoliar’s International School of Baking in Oregon. She claimed she could teach anyone all they need to know to open a bakery in a mere 20 days.

This was like the heavens opening up for him, Fluckiger thought.

Of course, he had to give it a try.

A Special School, And A Special Teacher

The classes with Stoliar proved to be life-changing for Fluckiger, and he believes he could not have picked a better teacher, or a better friend.

Stoliar visits the Fluckiger family a couple of times a year, and Fluckiger and his family often go back to learn new skills at her school in Oregon.

Stoliar is a rock star in the world of baking. She studied chocolates in Nice, France, and pastries at La Maree, a 3-star restaurant in Paris. She is a Gold Medal award winner in the National Chefs Association competition in the pastries and breads category, and there’s very little she doesn’t know how to do when it comes to baking.

When she moved to the United States with her husband in the early 1980s, she opened a European-style bakery, Breads of France, in Bend, Oregon. She believes she was likely the first to bring over a major French bread oven to the West Coast.

Since coming to America, she’s made more than 40 trips to Asia to teach bread baking for U.S. Wheat Associates, in addition to all the time she spent in Europe.

Suffice it to say, Stoliar knows bread like no one else knows bread.

“We did a lot in that first month,” Fluckiger said. “Brownies, lemon bars — everything that she felt like would be necessary to open a bakery.”

But Fluckiger wasn’t quite ready to dive right into owning a brick-and-mortar store when he got back. He wanted to wait and dip his toe into that pool slowly, to make sure this was really the right fit for not just him, but his family, and, most especially, his daughter.

So the Bread Doctor opened its doors at home first in 2013.

Serendipity Strikes

Fluckiger figured it would take three or four years to build up enough business to justify a shop.

But within less than a year, he had so many orders coming in, he was starting to rethink that. Maybe the garage could be transformed into a commercial kitchen?

And that’s when serendipity struck again.

Fluckiger went downtown to pay a bill, but when he arrived, the business he was trying to pay was long gone. It had packed up and moved away, leaving a vacant building right in the middle of Main Street.

Fluckiger had a feeling right then that this, not his garage, was the answer to his problem.

“So I talked to my wife and we looked at it,” he said.

And they called Stoliar to make sure it was going to be big enough, then hired her to come and design their new bakery space.

“We focused on kind of an old-world feel, a European feel,” Fluckiger said. “I wanted people to get the impression when they came in that this wasn’t just a cake place. This was a place to get delicious food.”

Fluckiger kept an old safe door for its ambiance. It was a relic left over from the old title company that used to be there. The building itself was built in 1925, so it is rapidly approaching its 100-year anniversary in Torrington.

Out front is a sculpture Fluckiger calls Granny, which is a woman who looks like a grandma with her arms spread wide. At her feat there are loaves of bread.

“That was a gift,” Fluckiger said. “A customer found it and brought it in and said, ‘We think this needs to be here.’”

Fluckiger loved it. It felt like it fit. And it felt like another sign that he was on the right path for both himself and his daughter.

Gifts Continue

Customers love The Bread Doctor so much, they rearrange their business schedules around the bakery’s schedule, which is 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays and 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays.

And Fluckiger loves the fact that his baking feels that essential to others.

One of best things about the bakery for Fluckiger and his family has been watching Eleanor grow into her role at the bakery.

“She does customer service, and we named the chocolate line after her,” Fluckiger said. “And she’s interested in that and helps me when she can with the decorations of some of the chocolates.”

In fact, during the last trip to Soltiar’s International School of Baking, Eleanor learned to make candy flowers.

“She often says we should do this to the bakery when we go to other bakeries,” Fluckiger said. “So, it’s a design opinion. And she spends a lot of time with her weekly prep work, helping everyone prep, and she also helps run the front.”

It reminds Fluckiger every day about the happy childhood moments she so often spent pretending to be a waitress.

“She really enjoys talking to people and learning where they’re from and about their families and when their birthday is,” Fluckiger said. “She’s very outgoing that way.”

And that’s really the greatest of all gifts for any parent, to see that their children are finding a place in the world.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.