Peach & Pine Cafe in St. James excels with vegan pastries

Ashley Rowland makes it look easy, but there’s nothing about her Peach & Pine Cafe that doesn’t require time, effort and ingenuity.

The baker and husband, Brian Arthus, opened the St. James bakery a little over a year ago and recently added Fridays to its weekend-only hours. "We’d love to be open more," Rowland said, "but we are out of refrigeration and freezer space. We are there working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but we bake everything fresh the day of."

The entire kitchen is visible from the narrow space in front of the display cases but most customers’ eyes are on the baked goods: everything-spice or lemon-blueberry scones, individual brioche pizzas, cinnamon rolls, Biscoff cookie-butter brioche rolls, raspberry-cream-filled sweet-corn cookies, dark-chocolate-salted-caramel tarts, slices of rainbow-cookie and German chocolate cakes.

Almost half the pastries belong to the croissant family: traditional ones and their siblings almond and chocolate; they might be rolled around ham and cheese or contain birthday cake and cereal-milk custard or topped with bananas Foster. Croissants’ cousins, Danishes, are filled with baked ziti, spinach-artichoke dip or wherever Rowland’s fancy takes her.

Croissants and Danishes are among the most difficult items to produce since they are "laminated" pastries that rely on hundreds of discrete layers of butter and yeasted dough to bake up light and flaky. What makes Rowland’s offerings almost miraculous is that they are made without butter — Peach & Pine is a vegan establishment that uses neither dairy nor eggs. (It also has a small selection of gluten-free items, but the bakery is emphatically not a gluten-free space.)

"Both of us are vegan," Rowland said. "When we opened, we went back and forth on putting ‘vegan’ on our storefront but decided not to." Even though she knows that Long Island vegans "are desperate to find vegan food, we knew it was important to have non-vegan customers as well." It’s hard to imagine those customers missing the animal products; Peach & Pine’s plant-based alternatives are every bit as good.

For laminated doughs, Rowland sources a vegan butter sheet from Italy. When a traditional recipe calls for eggs, she might just skip them, or substitute "flax eggs" (made from ground flax seeds and water) or aquafaba (the milky, viscous liquid that most people drain away when they open a can of chickpeas).

The road to being an out-and-proud vegan has been a long one. A trained pastry chef, Rowland started with a custom-cake company, Sugar Lane, which offered both vegan and conventional wedding cakes. "I was always afraid to go fully vegan," she recalled. But after COVID gutted the event-cake business, she and Arthus pivoted to a pop-up at Better Man Distilling Co. in Patchogue. Now dubbed Peach & Pine, they started making Sunday brunch at the distillery and served featured sweets and savories — but everything was vegan. A year later, Peach & Pine was emblazoned on the side of a truck that spread the food vegan word at Better Man and assorted local breweries.

Since they opened the shop in St. James, the truck has been dormant. In the future, Rowland would love to expand the store and get the truck back on the road.

Peach & Pine Cafe, 454 Lake Ave., St. James, 631-686-5491, peachandpinecafe.com. Open Friday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.