My grandmother always wanted to have a bakery, but it never happened. This was due to make factors, not least Europe being a complete dumpster fire for the better part of her career-making years. Then, I guess, there was her being a non-English speaking migrant to Australia. This was in the days when folks around these parts wouldn’t have cottoned so well to Karelian hand-pies.
Nowadays, I can imagine them being all the rage if people only knew what they were. In fact, I’m thinking it might be time to introduce Melbourne to the Karelian pie. The concept is tight; all it needs is a bit of tweaking for contemporary tastes and it’s good to go. You know – add a touch of smoked something or other to the rye flour, a bit of streamlined minimalism to the shape, and you’ve got yourself a nourishing, hand-held treat that harks back to the artisanal ways of my forebears on the Russian-Finnish border.
In getting this off the ground, I could probably benefit from some career counselling. For Melbourne professionals, it’s relatively easy to move into the hospitality field because there’s a market for it. But I’m pretty sure there’d be some steep learning curves involved, given that I’d be coming at it from a career in furniture sales.
So, I’m looking for some career change advice. Melbourne bakery owners, can you help? Something to consider is that I plan to focus primarily on this one item – the Karelian pies. Maybe it would work as a food truck? I could just pump them out by the batch. What about Sharing is Kare-ing? No?
If she’d known I was doing this, my grandmother would probably have wanted me to call it something in Finnish, like ‘ ‘Karjalanpiirakka ovat parhaat’, but I don’t want to mess it up. Like, imagine if I tried to do a Finnish name and ended up as Grandma’s Disgusting Pies or something? I can’t be bringing shame on my ancestors like that.