MEET: Tepper B.T., CIRCLES bagels, Hudson

Tepper, the baker behind Circles bagels talks pickle pricing, circular foods, and why his sourdough starter doesn’t have a name. 

Interview: Susie Davidson Powell
Art Direction: Susie Davidson Powell
Photos: Konrad Odhiambo/The Dishing

MEET YOUR MAKER
Tastemaker: Tepper B.T., baker | Circles : @x___circles___bagel___shop___x 
Circles, 502 Union St, Hudson |  xcirclesx.com/
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA 
Current city: Hudson, NY
Personal style: Oofos recovery footwear for the kitchen 
Currently listening to: Tierra Wack’s whole discography 
Favorite spirit (or non-alc): Ghia non-alcoholic spirit
Go-to fave cocktail/mocktail: Half seltzer/half ginger beer with a lot of fresh lime juice and mint.

After working at Marlow & Sons, Diner and Reynard in the Wythe Hotel (now Le Crocodile) in NYC, Tepper B.T. made the move to Hudson to join Lil Deb’s Oasis in 2018. But a personal quest to perfect the sourdough pizzas he loved in L.A. and N.Y.C. led to pop ups at Lil Deb’s where some less-than-round pies prompted the tongue-in-cheek business name. In 2020, he adjusted his sourdough starter for another circular food: sourdough bagels and the weekend bagel pop ups finally led to their new home inside the vibrant, colorful cafe space of Spark, Hudson. Tepper is continuously chasing flavor, so we stacked the bagels high and dug in.

SDP: Tepper, thanks for talking with The Dishing. Happy Pride month! 
You didn’t go to culinary school, but when you moved from LA to NYC, you found real community in restaurant kitchens. What has that community connection meant to you whether in the city, the inclusive space of Lil Deb’s or Hudson?

TBT: Working at Lil Deb’s Oasis was a kitchen where I felt like I could be completely myself.  I think the word “community” can be hard to define but Lil’ Debs Oasis is a really good example of a restaurant that enacts living care for the well being of people who live in Hudson and beyond.

SDP: Your bagels are dense with a crisp crust and wide crumb – perfect for loading with cream cheese. For your pizza dough, you used a gifted sourdough starter from Sparrowbush bakery. Can you describe what goes into your bagels that makes them unique? Is it the same sourdough starter?

TBT: Yes! Essentially the same sourdough starter but the bagel sourdough is a higher percentage of rye flour. We use a blend of locally milled high-nutrient flours and a more traditional organic flour. A lot of what goes into our bagels is essentially the same ingredients as that of any old  New York City bagel, with a few tweaks. One major difference is the naturally fermented levain and all the time and temperature monitoring and adjustments that go along with that. 

SDP: How did you land this colorful space inside Spark and did you have to fully transform the space into what it is today with all the funky artwork, clocks and merch?

TBT: The Spark of Hudson was looking for a vendor to take over a cafe space inside of their new building at the same time that I was looking for a more long-term place to make bagels. I brought my good friend and artist, Luka Carter into the picture to design the whole cafe space. We talked about what we wanted the space to look like and he basically did a big install and transformed it.

SDP:  During the pandemic so many people discovered fermentation and sourdough especially. What is it about sourdough that you love so much that it became a passion for pizzas or bagels?

TBT: I like to ferment things and reading some of Sandor Katz’s books like The Art of Fermentation and just learning more about how people ferment so many different kinds of foods and drinks all around the world, you start to realize it is actually not very “normal” to not-ferment things…if that makes sense. Using a sourdough starter can be kind of a pain in the butt though when you are making breads at scale and trying to be extremely consistent. But I think the flavor that develops over time in a bagel or pizza that has natural levain is just much better and you can’t really go back once you go sourdough.

SDP: You’re all about making things from scratch and sourcing ingredients from local farms. I’ve been lucky enough to try your house pickles, but do you really make your peanut butter and jelly from scratch? And what’s new on the menu this week?

TBT: Oh yeah big time. I’m obsessed with peanut butter (and jelly). Right now I think my peanut butter is the best it has even been because I’m really hitting a sweet spot roasting the peanuts. We make our own raspberry jelly in house with some sea salt and a little bit of lemon zest. Lately we have been running a Kinderhook Farm Bacon Egg and Cheese with a secret sauce. We’ve been making a Pickle Cream Cheese with the lactofermented pickles that we make in house. We just finished running a Rhubarb Cream Cheese and a Charred Garlic Scape Cream Cheese. I actually have no idea what next weekend’s cream cheeses will be. I need to figure that out asap.  

SDP: You have a nearly cult following for your cream cheese – especially your famed charred corn cream cheese, and a truly gorgeous Meyer lemon which I’ve had. Where do you get the cream cheese and can you describe some of the epic seasonal flavors you make in the course of the year? 

TBT: Yes, we use Ben’s Cheese Planet Cream Cheese made by a cheese family business in Spring Valley New York. It is old fashioned style and has no stabilizers or preservatives and it is the best cream cheese in the entire world. From there we use seasonal ingredients all year round so, like, a full year of cream cheese would probably look like this: scallion, charred garlic scape, ramp, nettle, zhug, strawberry, rhubarb, sweet pea (only made that once for a special event), charred corn, charred jalapeno, sweet potato thai chili, kabocha habanero, Szechuan carrot, meyer lemon, that sort of schedule.

SDP: Growing up in California, what are your childhood memories of cooking/eating at home or dining out ?

TBT: A lot of Trader Joe’s chicken nuggets at home. My uncle and I both love food and restaurants so when I was a kid he would pick me up and drive me to far out parts of the San Gabriel Valley to eat Vietnamese food or we would go to Korea Town and have lunches that would be like 3 hours long. We would also go to Jewish delis in Westwood a lot and get bagels that were served open face with lox and lemon and then we would get rugelach or go to Sawtelle and eat Japanese cream puffs. My grandpa lived in San Francisco which had or maybe still has a lot of old school donut shops and going to get donuts was a huge deal for me as a child. 

SDP: You worked in Manhattan kitchens with chefs willing to teach techniques to young chefs. Now you have a student mentoring component to your residency in Spark. Does it feel as if you’re paying it forward in some way?

TBT:  Sure. I really like teaching apprentices and my employees kitchen skills that I have learned in kitchens. It is especially gratifying to be able to pass on knowledge or instruct young people in a way that allows them to figure out what does and doesn’t interest them.

SDP: Why is it important to you to offer tiered pricing and how does that work?

TBT: At CIRCLES, we invented a pricing model called Pickle Pricing. It’s an opportunity for people to buy our food at two discounted levels. The point of this is that the products we use are expensive and our pricing reflects that. I should say that for the quality of ingredients we use, which are the best, our prices are actually very reasonable. But that is an aside. We want everyone to be able to eat at CIRCLES regardless of their income level. So Pickle Pricing offers this and we ask for a 25 cent donation from every purchase over $5 to help us provide it. People can also donate higher amounts directly to our Pickle Pricing fund if they wish.

SDP: Four words: Tepper’s white fish salad. Yours is untraditional. Can you share the scoop with us? 

TBT: [Laughs] Yeah. We make our own Whitefish Salad at CIRCLES that is unlike any you have ever had before…. I don’t want to give away any secrets but I will just say that it has a bit of a following, uses a ton of herbs, and veers in the “spicy tuna” direction…. 

SDP: Alright, let’s turn to other tastes. Where are 3 of your favorite spots anywhere in the 518 for breakfast, lunch or dinner?  

TBT: I love this question. For breakfast, it is unanimously The Yellow Deli in Coxsackie. It is owned by a cooperative Christian sect. I don’t remember the whole story but it just rules in every way. I love Afghan Kebab Express and Vans Vietnamese in Albany. And Angel’s Latin Restaurant in Catskill.

SDP: Think about your ideal day or night out whether kicking back or going out for drinks and dinner. If you could go anywhere with no limits on costs or reservations, where would it be?

TBT: I would be fine with just getting me and my friends flown from Hudson in a helicopter to Eleven Madison Park or Tatiana or Le Bernardin or one of those restaurants, none of which I have ever been able to afford to go to.  Not because I think it would be the best meal or experience of my life but just because of the all expenses paid aspect.

SDP: You’ve worked in the restaurant industry before, during, and after the pandemic and no doubt witnessed the many changes with people going out less and ordering in more. What do you see as the future of dining?

TBT: It isn’t necessarily the future that I want to see but I think maybe restaurants will become more like going to a broadway show and people will acclimate to paying larger sums of money for the type of labor and choreography that goes into it. And it will become more of a special occasion activity.

My opinion is that if this is happening, it should include all of the restaurants that people undervalue or think they don’t have to pay as much to eat at because of pervasive racist/colonial ideologies ingrained in the culture. Restaurants that a lot of people would not want to live without but assume they should not have to pay very much to eat at. I think that all food that is prepared for you by a person and served to you by a person should actually cost a lot more than it does. 

SDP: How do you think restaurants/cafes can foster healthy workplace culture? What’s your approach and how do you support your own well-being or relax?

TBT: I have had to un-learn / throw away the mentality that a lot of chefs perpetuate that, somehow, managing people in a kitchen means you are allowed to demean people or yell at them or reproach and reprimand them because that is just “a part of kitchen culture.” There is no level of quality/service excellence that is worth treating people badly. This is something that I think about a lot. I think some people who run kitchens think that they have to, like, rule with an iron first for lack of a better term, but I actually think if they challenged themselves to treat people (and for that matter any living thing) with gentleness and humility, they would be surprised by what is possible in terms of keeping things tight. You can instruct people and give them a lot of guidance and do it in a way that is not toxic. I’m also not perfect but I strive for this approach and at the end of the day, I would always prefer not to have to tell anyone to do anything. 

I try to put a pretty hard boundary on my work time and spend as much time as I possibly can thinking about and doing other things that interest me. I also try to make a clear mental distinction that being a business owner/chef is my job. It’s not who I am and it doesn’t define how I perceive the world. Other things do. 

SDP:  What’s next for you or Circles? Any more round foods?

TBT: I think just scaling up and making sure people know that they can always get a dozen or two dozen bagels from us whenever they need it. I would really like to make donuts at some point too, just for fun.