When Fanny Perez arrived at Hot Bread Kitchen, she didn't know much about baking for customers.
But now, "I know everything," the Ecuadorian immigrant tells us in a new video from the NYC bakery.
At Hot Bread Kitchen, women of all origins -- from East Harlem to West Africa -- join the Bakers In Training program to learn how to make breads from around the world, like chewy Persian flatbread and fluffy braided challah. Many of the aspiring bakers are immigrants, and all come from low-income backgrounds. Hot Bread Kitchen recruits them, trains them in a 9-month program and sets them up with industry jobs that pay an average of 70 percent more than what they were making before, according to the bakery's website.
That's a lot of dough.
Hot Bread Kitchen's bread is sold in greenmarkets, restaurants and Whole Foods around New York City, as well as online. They ship overnight, spokesperson Allegra Ben-Amotz told HuffPost, so the bread always arrives fresh.
So far, the bakery has trained 116 women from 28 different countries, Ben-Amotz said. It's a powerful statement in a restaurant world controlled mostly by men.
Hot Bread Kitchen is similar to Greyston Bakery, another social enterprise famous for its fudgy brownies and chocolate-flecked blondie bars.
And both are more delicious, game-changing reasons to eat up.
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