~ Cultural Heritage & Immigration Museum in the National Bread Museum of Grain-Baking-Bread Culture ~
ETHNIC BAKERIES
Omaha, Nebraska, has a city population of around a half million (& continually growing). With a surrounding community area of some local towns, and including Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River, we're looking at around a million. With a list of over 100 bakeries throughout this area at this time (2024), we have a diversity that probably represents the mixed, cultural population of the country as well as anywhere else.
So one of the purposes of this Cultural Heritage & Immigration Museum is to help Americans with a multi-generational background in this country, to know something about the baking culture of their international neighbors. The reverse side of the coin is for the "old timers" to help the newcomers of the past half century to assimilate into our traditional way of life -- this actually applies not only to immigrants & others with a legal status to be here, but young Americans by generations of U.S.A.-birth lineage as well.
Food helps form a community, & to smell fresh baked goods is definitely a drawing card. So this page will provide a multi-national picture of diverse bakery foods around this home town of Omaha, Nebraska!
Alphabetical by Name
& displayed on this page:
Bagel Bin (Jewish: ethnicity* & a religion)
Historic - Old & Closed (Bohemian / Czech)
International Bakery (Mexican for Mexico, a country)
Kolache Factory (Czech + some other European ethnicities*)
Lithuanian Bakery (Lithuania - a country)
Rico Pan (Mexican for Mexico, a country)
Alphabetical by Ethnicity*
a cross reference:
Bohemian / Czech (Historic Old & Closed - Pleskać Bakery)
Czech (Kolache Factory)
Jewish (Bagel Bin)
Lithuanian (Lithuanian Bakery)
Mexican (International Bakery), (Rico Pan)
*ethnicity = culture, traditions, language, & such of a group of people; i.e. an ethnic group; (not a race)
https://helpfulprofessor.com/ethnicity-examples/
The Bagel Bin
1215 S 119th St, Omaha, NE
The bagel is associated with the Jewish culture today, but the beginnings?
Polish Jews? Germans?
Eastern European Immigrants?
https://historycooperative.org/origin-of-bagels/ (Aug. 23, 2023)
A Historic Omaha Bakery
At some point in the past years, someone mentioned there was a very old, closed-down bakery building somewhere in the South Omaha area. One day I happened upon it! It turns out to be the Bohemian / Czech Pleskać Bakery in the Brown Park neighborhood.
The only online source of info was at: https://dp.la/item/0afc8763045896d5dbb1d38a61007ae0 which is a University of Minnesota digital library.
Someday there might be some additional information on it🤔😉.
International Bakery
of Cakes & Doughnuts (Mexican)
Hanscom Park area: 1052 Park Ave Omaha, NE 68105
I was going north & almost missed the bakery, had I not turned to look back!
At the time I was visiting, around 4 p.m., racks of "hot out of the oven" pastries & all sorts of baked goods were being rolled into the customer area! It was just as if you were in your own, or /Mom's /Grandma's kitchen as hot bread was coming out of the oven - only this smelled a bit sweeter😉. And it's why the longer, cheese-filled pastry never even made it out of the parking lot! Oh, my😋. I figured they were preparing for what they knew was coming . . . a large after work crowd.
Kolache Factory
I grew up having kolaches, made by my grandmother who lived on a farm 3 miles from us in Wisconsin. She was of Dutch descent, & while growing up, I never had any knowledge of foods having an association with an ethnic group of people, but I knew I was half German, a fourth Norwegian, & a fourth Dutch. My mom believed it was important for everyone to know something of their family before them.
As to Grandma, she had more time for baking because she didn't have "farm chores" & no longer had kids to take care of. Besides bread, pies, cakes, & cookies, she made these pastries called "kolaches" (kō lah' cheese). It was hard to choose "the favorite" of the sweet cream/cottage cheese, poppy seed, prune, or a fruit such as apricot jam. Now coming here, it was my first time seeing a "kolache" (a bread vs. a pastry dough) with a "savory" filling!
To me what makes a kolache is its shape: the raised yeast dough as an outside ring with a center filling. When I drove to the former Czechoslovakia (1990), I saw a variation of an 8-9" round with maybe 3-4 inner pressed circles (vs. the entire center in the smaller, individual-sized kolaches). Each circle had a different flavor of fruit filling😄. So with a pie-shaped slice, there was no need to choose one flavor❣
Lithuanian Bakery
5217 S. 33rd Avenue & 7427 Pacific Street - Omaha
Lithuania is one of 3 countries "on top of each other" north of Poland. They're at the western edge of what used to be the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) which broke up into 15 countries in the 1990s. A good way to remember the north-to-south order of these 3 countries is that they are in alphabetical order: Estonia, LA/Latvia, & LI/Lithuania - simple👍❣
This bakery was established in 1962 by husband & wife, Vytautas & Stefanija Mackevicius with "old country" recipes👍😉❗
Rico Pan (Mexican)
The area of "South Omaha" has become a transformed ethnic center from the former Czech hub 40-100 years ago, to now the Mexican & maybe "mixed Spanish-speaking" people's "town center." Several bakeries are in this area, & the variety is pretty mind-boggling! But there are many similarities among them.
In time, more to come . . . . .
Italian, French, Czech, Dutch, etc.
& then other ethnic representations from around the country.
Please go up to the MENU, upper right, & choose where to go from here.