Five Alarm Success

It’s not often that you’ll find a 6-foot-2, burly man covered in tattoos croon over pie, but that’s exactly what Derek Kaplan does each and every day.

“Oh yeah — Key lime pie, I tell everyone, is my first love,” Kaplan says.

It’s a relationship that began in his teenage years, when the, now 39-year-old, was squeezing limes by hand in his father’s Miami apartment with the goal to master South Florida’s legendary dessert.

“I liked to cook and liked to eat. I was like, ‘Man, I gotta make dessert, it’s only natural, especially a guy like myself, a big guy — food has always been a big part of…[my life] — my dad was kind of a foodie long before the term existed.”

And while he did end up selling miniature pies of that perfected recipe in his late teens, Kaplan did not consider baking to be a career choice and went on to become a firefighter instead.

“I always had an interest in the fire department, I think all children do, to a certain degree, especially boys,” he says.

An avid athlete at Palmetto High School and former Division 1 college football player at Grambling State University in Louisiana, Kaplan enjoyed the rigorous training and exercise component of the job. He also found the structure necessary in a firefighting career, something he flourished in. Still, throughout his ten years as a Miami firefighter, his love for pie-making never waned. On the contrary, Kaplan juggled working as a firefighter and growing his pie business — an endeavor that translated to a grueling schedule where he used his down time to bake 25 to 30 pies a week.

His passion for pies came as no surprise to his firefighting colleagues. After all, they had already been privy to his love of cooking, designating him as the chef of the firehouse.

“Out of the ten years I was with the City of Miami, I probably cooked like 7½ or 8 of those years.”

In July 2014 he opened his first store: a tidy 600-square-foot pie shop in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighborhood. By 2016, he retired from firefighting, fully committing to his first love.

“[The business] needed my full-time attention to really become what it has become today and continue to grow forward. And that’s just kind of one of those things, I think every person has to come to that realization on their own — when it’s time to make that leap, and if it’s worth making that leap. For me, I didn’t have any children, I wasn’t married, so it was pretty easy, in the sense of pulling the trigger,” he explains.

Today, Fireman Derek’s Bake Shop has two other locations in addition to his original spot: one in Coconut Grove and the most recent addition in Fort Lauderdale, which opened this past November. He credits his years as a firefighter to much of his entrepreneurial success.

“There’s a lot of firefighter skills that make for a good leader. I like to lead by example, not just boss around. I think that a lot of those skills, a lot of the structural stuff, like a chain of command, what type of information is handled at what level and what everybody’s job function is within their department has definitely been very beneficial to me understanding the way that a company has to work, and a business needs to work and how things need to be structured,” he says.

And while there are no immediate plans to open further north, Kaplan, who went to Verde Elementary and Boca Middle in Boca Raton, does not rule anything out.

“I do like the Mizner Park area and Town Center, but I’d need to refamiliarize myself with Boca if I were ever to open a store there,” he says.

He’s also evolved since his early days baking only one flavor of pie, now serving 14 flavors of pies, six different cakes, along with cookies, brownies and savory items like empanadas and pot pies. His wife Jeanine, whom he met when she began working for him in 2015, is the vice president of the company, keeping, as he explains, everything organized and in check.

“Growth can be messy. [It] can be all kinds of things in terms of organization. You grow and you gotta organize and then you grow and you gotta reorganize. She helps us hammer down systems, putting in the finishing touches. I am definitely the builder and the one that does the front and center type of work, but she’s the one that puts the finishing touches on the product, the store look — the foundational stuff and the systemized stuff of the staff,” Kaplan says.

Throughout the expansion, his original key lime pie remains a top seller. Others include carrot cake, cookies and cream cheesecake and chocolate chip cookies which are colossal discs of goodness loaded with dark chocolate chips. When asked what makes them so good, he emphasizes making sure you nail the technique.

“When you cream the butter and the sugar together properly and you mix in your eggs properly and have the right ratio of butter to flour to sugar to chocolate chips, that is what really makes it good.” 

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yields 24 cookies

IGREDIENTS:

3 cups flour

½ lb. butter

1¼ cup sugar

¼ cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

2 cups chocolate chips

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

PROCESS:

• Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

• Using an electric mixer, cream room temperature butter with both sugars until nice and fluffy and beige in color, then add eggs and vanilla and cream until fluffy again. This process usually takes about 2 minutes each time on medium-high speed. Start with medium and then gradually raise the speed as it begins to combine.

• Add the flour, baking soda and to the batter. Mix on low speed until you don’t see any bits of unmixed flour.

• Fold in the chocolate chips. You don’t want to overmix once the chocolate chips have been added — the cocoa flakes will fall off and will change the color and consistency of your dough.

• Once dough is mixed, roll into 2 oz. portions and freeze for about an hour. Dough can be kept overnight in refrigerator too, depending on how quickly you need to bake it.

• Bake cookies for 16-17 mins or until golden brown. If you like extra chocolatey cookies, add more chips to outside of the dough before baking.