By Deb Peterson
The comforting aroma of bread baking takes me back to childhood days at the kitchen table, kneading my own small mound of dough as I watched my mother knead hers, flour on our aprons, bowls of promise rising in a sunbeam, golden loaves cooling on racks. She baked for our family of seven every week—a morning’s project involving several batches. I can still taste the first warm slices Mom spread with homemade currant jam or a bit of butter and honey.
Those memories came flooding back a few Sunday afternoons ago as I stepped into Daksha Thomas’s kitchen in Yellville. She had been baking all morning and was still at it, calmly lifting bagels from a boiling pot to a tray, sprinkling them with “everything” seasoning, and slipping them into the oven. With a great big smile and a hug she took time to greet me and went right back to the next waiting tray.
Her table overflowed with French bread and baguettes, cinnamon rolls, English muffins, sourdough and pumpernickel breads, and her famous cream cheese danish—a very large cream cheese danish.
“This is my signature,” Daksha says of the coffee cake. She gave me a small slice to taste and I could see why.
Daksha has been cooking and baking since she was a young girl growing up in India, watching her mother in the kitchen. She was 13 when her family moved to Chicago, and there, because her mother worked the evening shift in a nursing home, Daksha was responsible for cooking the family’s vegetarian dinner when she got home from school.
“I have always loved being in the kitchen,” she says.
When Daksha married Ron Thomas in 1974, the couple decided the following year, when their daughter, Heidi, was born, to visit Ron’s uncle in Mountain Home with the intention of finding a place of their own in the area.
“We wanted to get out of the city and raise our daughter in nature,” Daksha says.
They found a place outside of Yellville, where they started organic gardening, canning tomatoes and green beans, grinding their own flour, making their own yogurt. Daksha went to work as the main baker in the kitchen at Yellville-Summit School District when Heidi started school, and there she learned to make French bread from Bobbi Gilley.
“She was a short little German lady,” Daksha says. “I learned from her and from my mother, and then I developed my own techniques.”
Twenty-nine years later, Daksha is still at Yellville-Summit School, although she’s in the elementary library now, and she’s famous for sharing her baking, especially with teachers.
“People started asking me, ‘Can you make this for me?’” Daksha says. And she does. Every week. If she has orders by Thursday, she bakes on Sunday and delivers on Monday. “This is what I want to do when I retire. This is my passion.”
“It’s an art,” she says, when I ask her whether or not she measures (she doesn’t always). “You can just feel how it’s supposed to be.”
In a perfect world, Daksha dreams of having her own coffee shop. “With just a few things,” she says. “Lots of breads. Maybe one soup. A couple of pies. I’m not too keen on cakes.”
In the meantime, she’s sharing her talent with the kids at Y-S, not in the school kitchen, but to help them raise money.
The kids sell orders for baked goods—French bread, dinner rolls, four kinds of pies, lots of cinnamon rolls, and her signature danish—and then help her with the baking in the school kitchen, although she does all the hands-on work herself. Together, they raised $3,000 for prom last year.
And every couple of weeks she sends a care package of her homemade English muffins to Heidi’s family in Pennsylvania.
“We were visiting them when I found store-bought English muffins in the cupboard,” Daksha remembers. “Why are you eating these, and why are they in the cupboard?”
Daksha’s baked goods are all organic, with no preservatives, and she keeps them in the refrigerator, where Heidi and her husband, Justin, now keep theirs, shipped from Arkansas.
“It’s the cutest thing,” Daksha says, “to see Justin and Benjamin sit down side by side and have my English muffins together every morning.”
Benjamin is 2, and he likes mango jam or peanut butter on his muffins. He has a baby brother due near Mother’s Day.
“I’m getting hungry,” Ron said the afternoon I visited the Thomases. “It smells so good.”
Daksha had baked pumperknickel that day for the first time. The loaf was beautiful, inside and out. She cut a few slices for the three of us.
“Oh, this is good,” Daksha said. “I made my own recipe for this. I’ll be making this again.” M! April/May 2014
If you’d like Daksha to bake for you, call her at 870-404-5200.
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