The historic Hahn Bakery in Middle Amana closed its doors for good Sunday after more than 150 years of baking breads and coffee cakes. Doris Hahn and her husband Jack took over the bakery from Jack’s parents, Carl and Emilie Hahn, in 1968, and ran it with their friends and family.
Doris told KCRG TV there was a bit of a learning curve at first. “It was hard for me to learn how to make bread and coffee cakes, because I never did that before. And then Jack said to me, you’re gonna learn fast. And I did,” she says. They baked together for around 30 years, until Jack died, and Doris learned some more, and kept the baking going for more than 25 years. “I just felt that was my job, was to take care of my customers,” Hahn says.
She baking was something she really enjoyed. “I loved every day that I baked,” she says. Hahn says retirement will include seeing more of her family. The heart of the Hahn Bakery is its hearth oven- a ten feet by ten feet structure that can bake up to 100 loaves of bread at a time. Doris’ grandson, Grant Rozeboom, tells KCRG TV the customers are going to miss the bakery and the conversations they had there as his grandparents knew the vast majority of people that were coming in and out of the bakery. “Both people who would come in from the community just to say hi, but people through the sales room. Tourists, especially that they would see every year,” he says.
Rozeboom says among the millions of cinnamon rolls, loaves of bread and coffee cakes, the Hahn family has made millions of memories.