Elena has roasted more nuts than anyone else in Winnipeg. We sat down with her to talk about two decades of early mornings, burnt fingers, and the pursuit of the perfect batch.
The first morning
Elena started at the roastery twenty years ago, back when it was still a cramped shop on Church Avenue with one secondhand drum roaster and a perpetually broken exhaust fan.
"I didn't know anything about roasting," she says. "I came in to pack bags. But the roaster quit in my second week, and the owner handed me the apron and said, 'You're it.'"
She laughs. "I burnt a lot of almonds that first month."
Learning to read a roast
Twenty years later, Elena doesn't use a thermometer. She can tell where a roast is by the color of the beans against the drum, the smell of the oils, and — her word — the "feel" of the heat coming off the batch.
"People ask me how I know when it's done. I don't know how I know. My hands know. My nose knows. After twenty years, the rest of me has stopped asking."
Why she still does it
Elena turns sixty next year. She could retire. When we ask why she hasn't, she shrugs.
"What else would I do? This is what I know. And every batch is still a little different — that's the thing. It never gets boring, because the nuts never cooperate. You have to pay attention every single time."
She pauses, watching a fresh batch tumble in the drum.
"Besides," she adds, "I like feeding people. That's really what this is."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.