Ready, set, start your ovens!

While you've been trying to figure out how long you need to cook a 15-pound turkey and whether you should make the cranberry sauce yourself or buy it from the store, local bakeries have been prepping for Thanksgiving in their own right, stocking inventory and getting orders straight.

Residents have been chomping at the bit for apple, pumpkin and pecan pies to finish off their meals, but it takes a lot of work to get those hundreds of pies onto your tables.

Here, we take a look at how two Skaneateles establishments coped with the Turkey Day rush.

Just the two of us

Over the past few weeks, Donna Parr's phone has been ringing nonstop, the requests for Thanksgiving pies pouring in.

She and husband Jim, the owners and only employees of Heart 'n Hand on State Street Road in Skaneateles, expect to bake a total of 300 pies for the Thanksgiving week, everything from the standard apple and pumpkin to the more adventuresome apple cranberry crumb and pumpkin pecan.

In many ways, “the Thanksgiving craziness,” as Donna calls it, is a mixed blessing, as the rush requires hours upon hours of preparation, not to mention baking that was scheduled to begin at 2 a.m. Tuesday and likely lasted an estimated 18 hours straight. “This is crunch time, and it's good, but it's hard,” Donna said between constant phone calls last week.

Donna, who opened the business with Jim in 2000, said that orders for Thanksgiving pies began coming in during late September, a few weeks earlier than usual.

This is the first year that Heart 'n Hand has streamlined its list, narrowing its Thanksgiving pie choices down to 10 options.

In years past, the Parrs had offered more than 20 varieties, but the different preparations - combined with the sheer quantity of orders - made things extremely difficult.

“Yeah, we were crazy,” Donna said with a laugh. Donna and Jim bake everything in a separate Heart 'n Hand kitchen in their house next door, and they've been prepping for the big day for weeks now - making boxes, ordering ingredients.

As of Thursday, they had eight 50-pound bags of flour in stock, six 25-pound bags of sugar and 45-dozen eggs.

“Hopefully, that will be enough,” Donna said, adding that she will also be baking breads and cookies for the holiday.

Unfortunately, not much of the baking itself can be done ahead of time, she said, so it all comes down to Tuesday (customers pick up their pies today).

Donna and her husband each have specific jobs in the kitchen, with Jim doing a lot of the prep work and Donna taking care of the rolling and crimping.

“He does all the apple peeling. I don't do any of that, and that's bushels and bushels and bushels,” she said with a smile. (The apples, a mixture of varieties, come from Freitag's Farm Market just down the road.)

Though the 20 or so hours of baking weren't too bad last year, Donna said, “to make those last two (or three) pies is a killer.”

Those pies, it turns out, are for the Parrs' own Thanksgiving dinner.

According to tradition

For Peter Lord, the managing partner of Patisserie, the Thanksgiving rush began weeks ago.

The bakery, located behind the Sherwood Inn on West Genesee Street, provides the pies not only for area residents but also for the inn. That adds up to about 250 to 300 pies the week of Thanksgiving, Lord said of the delicious desserts, which come in apple, tri-berry, pumpkin and Southern pecan.

“I want to say tri-berry is the most popular. Pumpkin, of course, is most traditional. People don't tend to vary too much on Thanksgiving,” Lord said.

On top of that, Patisserie also offers sweet breads, rolls, foccacia and fall-themed cupcakes and other holiday treats.

It supplies breads for both the Sherwood and Brewster Inn in Cazenovia.

The Patisserie staff worked on pies for the last two weeks, making the pies and freezing them (except for the pumpkin ones, which must have the filling poured fresh).

Employees were scheduled to turn the ovens on for the Big Bake early Tuesday, and the staff will come in again during the wee hours of Wednesday morning to finish things up.

“Nobody gets that day off, let's put it that way,” Lord said, noting that he and head pastry chef Mike Cheney will then come in early Thursday morning to bake rolls for the Sherwood.

Thanksgiving is a challenging holiday because it's so concentrated in terms of the time it's celebrated, Lord said.

“Christmas is more spread out. People start buying Christmas cookies at the beginning of December,” he added.

But even with all the stress, it's nice to know that what you're doing is making people happy, Lord said.

Lord, a graduate of The Culinary Institute of America's Hyde Park campus, is a former chef at the Sherwood and former manager of Phoebe's in Syracuse.

The only bad thing about the bakery business is that, despite the luscious, tantalizing smells that waft through the air, the employees no longer notice a thing.

“We've become immune to it, so we don't even know (it's there),” Lord said with a smile. “Is there any way you can battle that?”