introduced to California in the Spanish missions in the 1790s. California is the No. 1 producer of apricots in the U.S., with Golden State farmers accounting for 95% of total U.S. apricot production. There are about a dozen commercial varieties and Bremmer grows five of them, ranging in size, taste and color from deep orange to blush to yellow. Bremmer’s Farm also dries apricots, smoking them with sulfur overnight to maintain the color, then laying them out on wooden trays in the sun for three to four days to dry. The majority of the apricots are sold at the fruit stand. The rest are sold at farmers markets, to a Sacramento school district for its lunch program and to wholesalers that buy 40 to 60 boxes at a time. Pies aplenty While crews pick the fruit, Sanchez and Bremmer’s wife, Claudia, are busy in the kitchen, baking pies and apricot-filled brownies. “I’ll wake up at six in the morning and I usually work eight to sometimes 12 hours on the weekends, but we have two ovens, so we have to bake four pies at a time, two in each oven. And while those are baking, I’m still preparing more pies and more pies. We usually go through about 60 to 80 pounds of apricots a day. It gets really hectic,” Sanchez said, adding that slicing all those apricots is the hardest part of the baking process. She said there’s a secret ingredient in the pies, passed down from the Bremmer family, but she’s always looking for new ways to bake the pies. Sanchez and her mother experiment with different crust designs and scour the internet each year to seek ways to improve or add innovation to their double-crust pies. If the harvest extends into early July, they’ll carve stars and stripes into the crust for the Fourth of July. Teaching customer service Bremmer introduced his offspring to the business when they were young. His two other adult children, Cyrus and Kira, started working harvest when they were 5 years old. They took dried apricots off trays and brought bowls to the crews to place the apricots in. Now, two more of the Bremmers’ children, Darius Bremmer, 16, and Francisco Orozco, 14, run the cash register, hand out samples, carry crates to cars and
Customer Neesha Edge, left, shops for fresh apricots at the fruit stand. The Bremmers grow five varieties of apricots, which are ready for harvest in May and June. Areli Cruz, below, handpicks the fruit.
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