Rebelle artisan bagels12/7/2023 Melina has shown her perseverance and resilience in times of challenge. She has done an amazing job pursing a goal and has achieved great success. Milena Pagan earned a Entrepreneur of the Year Award New England recently and she deserved it. Her success with a Kickstarter campaign granted Rebelle Bagels to pursue a storefront in Providence and they were able to open their doors in the summer of 2017. She has found a way to put a twist on handmade, New York style bagels that differentiates herself from the rest of bagel makers in Providence, Rhode Island. Pagan held pop-up shops and promoted her bagels to everyone she could. She identified a problem, and found a way to profit and satisfy that need. Milena Pagan is an incredibly determined person. Pagan experimented for several months to create the perfect recipe, then quit her job at CVS and launched Rebelle Artisan Bagels. Milena Pagan graduated from MIT with a degree in chemical engineering, followed by a job with CVS Health as an Omnichannel Strategist, but after several years she needed to share her passion for homemade bagels after finding it hard to get New York style bagels that she really enjoyed. ![]() But I’m very ambitious and this isn’t going to be the last thing I do.Milena Pagan is a self-proclaimed “corporate-retail-strategist-turned-bagel-maker.” Pagan was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Massachusetts to get her degree at MIT. Just be happy and feel like I’m making a good contribution. You can go to sleep with a clean conscience, and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted from a career. It’s very fulfilling, it addresses that nurturing side of me. I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands, I like creating, I like the instant gratification of making something really good, selling it right away, seeing people enjoy it. I just taught myself how to bake because someone had to do the baking. I think of myself as a business person first. What’s the transition been like between working with your hands and being a business owner? Then the day after, we bring them out and boil them and then bake them. The yeast are producing alcohols, the bacteria are producing acids and that gives it the unique flavor and… the crust, so when you see a bagel and it has a blistery crust, that’s the sign of a cold-proof. Then we put it in the walk-in cooler to do a cold-proof, slows down the yeast, ramps up bacteria and other kinds of funky microorganisms that are in the dough, and gives it a more developed taste. We do that many, many, many hundreds of times. ![]() Then you roll it into a log and wrap it around your hand, and then you press on it to seal it. ![]() We let proof for a little while, then we a dough divider… splits it into equal-sized portions. Walk me through the process of how the bagels get made. Because we have exactly the kind of personality to be like, I’m going to take something very simple and unassuming and elevate it to its full potential. When I was trying to figure out how many bagels we could make per day, for example, I scheduled out each part of the process everything was timed, we figured out ways to do things faster, how to cut a few minutes off of this that.Ī lot of people are very confused by the fact that I would do this but when I talk to people from MIT, they get it, weirdly enough. We run the kitchen kind of like an engineering facility. Do you find that any of your chemical engineering skills come into play?
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