Rise and Pies is Greeley’s newest downtown bakery

GREELEY —  Greeley’s newest bakery is here courtesy of passion and family. 

Rise and Pies owner Denise Schieffer, a former vice president and operations manager of brokerage firms, took a bread-making class in culinary school years ago in California. There, she found her passion. 

“My dad exposed me to really good food and always good bread,” she said. “After he passed, I got a chance to go to culinary school in California. I took a bread class and absolutely fell in love with sourdough.”

Bread-making became her hobby, and soon, she was selling it to people from her home.

In recent years, she and her husband moved from California to Wyoming, where she began selling at farmer’s markets, which brought customers back to buy bread at her house in the off-season. Then she moved to her husband’s home state of Oklahoma, where she opened her first shop. But five years ago, she and her husband opted to move to Greeley.

“I wanted to see my grandkids grow up; twice a year just wasn’t enough,” she said.

They moved to Greeley, and she began baking for the farmer’s market, expanding to the Larimer County Farmers’ Market, and now she easily goes through 350 loaves a week.

She’s had her storefront at 920 Ninth Ave. in downtown Greeley only for a month and a half, and her shop is open three days a week. 

She makes and sells sourdough bread, a specialty bread, which she “starts” with organic grapes. Compared with traditional bread, sourdough does not require yeast to rise. Schieffer uses the grapes to start the sourdough, which she feeds for hours before it is ready to be put in a refrigerator.

“It’s like my daily science experiment,” she said. “I like to do what they call a cold fermentation so the flavor develops even more during that time, plus you can get it in the fridge and move on to something else, so the next day it’s real easy to bring it out as I need it.”

Her breads come in several varieties as well — along with the stalwart cheddar and jalapeno and cranberry and walnut — and she does many seasonal varieties of her goodies, such as pumpkin-flavored bread for the fall.

She also is a pie enthusiast; customers may appreciate her 20 different varieties in  small and large.

“I was raised on apple pies,” Schieffer said. “My mom and grandmother made them, and my dad loved it. We could have any pie we wanted as long as it was apple. I love cherry pie. Mom would ask, ‘What pie do you want? And I’d say cherry and I’d get an apple.”

Thus was born the apple-cherry pie. “I couldn’t decide which one I loved to do more, so I was like, let’s just do both.” 

She makes cinnamon rolls, sticky buns, pastries and croissants. On Thursdays, she makes sourdough bagels, and Fridays are now called sticky-bun Fridays.
She’ll also make German stollens during the holidays. 

“The menu is always changing,” she said. “Now that it’s cooling off, I can get back to my croissants and doing pastries because it’s not so hot in here.”

She’s already feeling the love from the locals.

“The courthouse has found me, so there are groups that come over,” she said. “They come over in batches.”

While she’s putting in 12-15-hour days, she does make time for the grandchildren who brought her here. In fact, her granddaughter, 10, helps her at the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. Her grandson still loves to wander the market for the adventure, while her granddaughter folds right in to mix.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get her in the shop. She wants to learn to make the brioche dough for cinnamon rolls, which she loves,” Schieffer said. “She comes and helps me at the market. That’s something that is really special to me, because she is learning not only customer service but the product, and how to talk to people and that’s one thing that is not taught. While she’s helping me, she’s standing up, greeting people, and she’s adding up their orders as the people are picking things out, and she’s having to think on the fly.”

While she loves to see her granddaughter’s interest and growth, Schieffer is not ready to start teaching others the craft. She’s still on her own growth chart. She’s planning to return to California later this month to take another bread class.

“You have to keep getting better, improving and learning and you can’t stop,” she said. “Once you think you’ve got it, then the bread tells you ‘no.’ Most of the bad batches I’ve ever had is if I try to hurry it. You have to be patient with it. If you try to hurry bread, it’ll tell on you in a heartbeat. You just have to just pull back and go OK, I’m on your timeline.”

Rise and Pies is open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays. You can also find Denise Schieffer at the Greeley Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. Schieffer’s family also sells her bread at the Larimer County Farmers’ Market. She typically sells out of her breads, but she will open her shop on Saturday after the markets, during which time she sells her remaining inventory.

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