RESTAURANTS : L.A. Bread--A Stale Scene Perks Up

As ... an increasing percentage of us will accept tasteless and indeed worthless bread, ... the art of baking has been taken over by artists on the one hand, and crackpot health faddists on the other.

--M.F.K. Fisher

Los Angeles is famous for its crackpot faddists, but not, unfortunately, for the bread that comes with them. But a growing minority of chefs are rebelling.

“There’s too much inexpensive cruddy bread and lousy muffins out there,” says Tumbleweed chef Elka Gilmore.

“Bread is like flowers and fish--it must be sold the same day,” says Opera chef Claude Koeberle (see review above). “But L.A. is too large as far as delivery, and the bread stays in trucks longer.”

“Usually, you get stale, aerated French bread,” says pastry and bread expert Nancy Silverton.

These aren’t idle complaints; these are the complaints of chefs who are doing something about the bad state of bread in L.A. They’re baking their own. Opera and Pazzia are two new restaurants that have made commitments to full bread programs, including the free, pre-dinner loaves that in other restaurants are absently munched out of pure hunger.

In October, Silverton will open a bakery next to Campanile, the restaurant she and husband, Mark Peel, plan to open early next year. And just this week, Tumbleweed’s Elka Gilmore set up a new bread-baking operation in the kitchen of Catherine’s on La Brea. (Since it only serves dinner, the kitchen is empty early in the day.) Pastry chef Dana Farkas, who has been baking Tumbleweed’s bread for several months in the restaurant’s tiny kitchen, can now spread out and will supply other restaurants with her fresh baked bread, which includes hand-rolled hamburger buns, hearty seven-grain loaves, pumpkin madeleines, Strauss rye bread, and an amazingly moist sour cream coffee cake.

Even Spago, which probably could serve week-old pop-’n’-fresh rolls and still get an adoring crowd, started baking its own bread a year and a half ago. “Every three days or so, whenever he had nothing else to yell about, Wolf would yell about not getting good bread in L.A.,” said Silverton who, with David Gingrass, developed Spago’s bread for chef Wolfgang Puck.

“We were spending about $80 or $90 a day on bread,” Gingrass said. “Now it costs a lot more, but it’s worth it. We always had problems with the bakery we used to use. Big blobs of crust would flake off like a bad sunburn; the loaves were usually squashed, and a lot of times the bread wouldn’t be baked through--even when it was right it wouldn’t have flavor.”

“It takes a long time to develop a really good bread in bulk,” said Silverton, who plans to start her own bakery operation up slowly and stick to traditional breads. “I love tearing and ripping and chewing plain, crusty breads,” she says.

But it is the plain bread that is the most difficult to make. “When there’s melted cheese and herbs and nuts, it’s easier to camouflage mistakes,” Silverton says. “Baking is harder when bread is just what it is: flour, water and leavening.”

Baking is also more time-consuming for those who make slow-rising breads, instead of “quick breads,” which are becoming more common. “The slower the rise, the better the flavor,” Silverton says. “But a lot of these breads have a larger proportion of yeast so the dough rises quickly. The loaves are allowed to double in bulk, then are punched down and rise again in the pan. It’s done in four hours; some are even quicker. But you end up with a square or rectangular loaf, with an inside that either has no holes or tiny, even holes. Good bread should have irregular holes and a dense interior.”

“There are things you cannot get a short cut to,” says Opera chef Koeberle, who has his bread crew in at midnight to work an 8-hour shift every day. “We have a full team, just doing bread.”

But Koeberle says that some don’t appreciate fresh bread. “In France, good house bread is served at room temperature,” he says. “Here customers complain. They eat in restaurants that cheat by warming bread--it comes out warm and crusty but 3 minutes later it’s chewy and rubbery. So we heat the bread, even though it’s actually worse because it activates the sourness in the fermentation.”

Of course, you don’t automatically get good bread just because a restaurant bakes its own. “We know a very famous restaurant that makes its wheat bread from a mix but claims to bake its own,” says Gilmore. “And these ‘homemade’ muffin places are terrible.”

Adds Farkas: “I’d rather have a store-bought roll than a homemade rock.”