MARKETS : The Gates of Leaven

Los Angeles restaurants used to treat bread as a second-class citizen, but over the last few years we’ve been experiencing a bread renaissance. Chefs who wanted to avoid the generic “French” loaf in favor of breads better suited to the character of their food have started baking their own. Gustaf Anders, for example, offers an interesting collection of Scandinavian bread to accompany its gravad lax and Nordic-style marinated herrings. The homey American-style breads at Old Town Bakery in Pasadena fit its comfort food theme. And the rustic sourdough-based loaves baked at Campanile’s La Brea Bakery match the strong flavors of the restaurant’s Italian-style cooking.

It was inevitable that chefs would begin to sell the bread they baked for their restaurants. Whether they baked for themselves or brought in talented bakers, they found an enthusiastic audience that included caterers and other restaurateurs. Now, as several expand into much larger wholesale bakeries, their pampered loaves are even showing up in supermarkets.

Chef Ulf Anders Strandberg got his interest in bread making from his mother, a well-known Swedish cookbook author. “She always had some kind of dough rising in the family kitchen,” he says. He insists he’s still experimenting with his pumpernickel, a good dense loaf freckled with whole rye berries that almost resemble nuts, but although he tinkers with recipes in a quest for perfection, the Swedish breads he sells at Gustaf Anders, his innovative nouveau-Scandinavian restaurant, seem almost flawless.

Arranged in a huge dramatic still life on a table in the center of the room are stout country-style loaves, long batons, plump rolls--the only art the room needs. I’m partial to his Swedish country bread with its marvelously chewy, long-keeping crumb. The secret, says Strandberg, is the slack, almost liquid dough that rises under refrigeration overnight and the long baking at two temperatures.

Tunnbrot , his up-to-date take on knackebrot , is a thin sheet of anise-perfumed rye cracker rolled out with a pasta machine. His seed bread is a rye with buckwheat flour and seven types of seeds. There are fresh onion-walnut rolls, whole-wheat-rye-cranberry rolls with crushed berries in the dough and, of course, a dark fragrant limpa.

* Gustaf Anders, 1651 Sunflower Ave. (South Coast Plaza Village, Bear Street Side), Santa Ana, (714) 668-1737. Open Monday to Thursday 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5:30 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday to 11 p.m.; Sunday 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.

The best time to walk into Rockenwagner is at breakfast. The fresh loaves of bread heaped up behind the counters of the restaurant’s bakery fill the room with a warm, yeasty aroma.

Rockenwagner’s breads run the gamut of European styles from slightly sweet anise bread to heavy, slowly fermented sourdough ryes. To make them, owner Hans Rockenwagner has imported a young baker, Dietmar Eilbacher, from his home region of Bavaria. (Rockenwagner says it’s not that he’s biased: “Bavaria has the best breads.”)

Eilbacher apprenticed in his father’s bakery and also earned master baker status at a technical school in Munich.

“In this country,” Eilbacher says, “one of the hardest tasks was finding the right flour. European flour is so different. In fact I’m still trying out new batches.”

Each of his classic loaves develops its particular character from the way he manipulates the same sourdough sponge. For the Rudolph Steiner health bread (a dense, hefty rectangle of whole-grain flours, nuts and seeds), he mixes a stiff dough that ferments about 20 hours at a cool temperature. The bread, named for a famous philosopher and natural-foods theorist, has a mild sourdough taste.

* Rockenwagner, 2435 Main St. (in the Edgemar Building), Santa Monica, (310) 399-6504. Open daily 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

La Brea Bakery’s Nancy Silverton was one of the first retail bakers in the city to develop breads leavened exclusively with wild-yeast starters. She says she was inspired by the earthy loaves of Poilane in Paris and the sourdough breads of Berkeley’s Acme bakery. But it was her months of experimental baking (and coddling the wild-yeast starter) that paid off. The breads are terrific.

Her crisp-crusted, resilient loaves are hand-shaped and need a cool temperature for their 24-hour rise. They’re baked in German stone-floor ovens heated with a pool of oil instead of a flame beneath the stone. “The breads cook evenly this way, without having to be moved around,” says Silverton, who can talk for hours about the subtleties that affect the character of the dough.

All this attention to detail does, of course, add to the cost, but for bread fanatics, the complex, well-developed flavors of her loaves, while not usually sweet, seem as good as cake.

When La Brea Bakery first opened, people lined up for the huge fougasse (the hefty dinner rolls served at DC 3), the robust multi-grain bread and the unorthodox baguettes. The bakery also started the rage for olive bread, herb-flavored breads and really crusty ficelles.

* La Brea Bakery, 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 939-6813. Open daily 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Pastry chef Takis Markoutsis, co-owner of the stylish Mi Piace in Pasadena, has an eye for baking talent. He met baker Jean Paul Scudellaro just about the time he was toying with the idea of adding breads to the pastries at the Pasadena Baking Co. next door to the restaurant.

Scudellaro, a young man who looks as if he would be as much at home on a surfboard as overseeing the intricate workings of a bakery, says he grew up surrounded by the aroma of bread. When he began training as a baker at the age of 10, he lived close to the town bakery in Montereau, just outside Paris. “That old baker used to wake me up by pounding on the bedroom window with his oven paddle,” he remembers.

As his skill confirms, he didn’t take his training lightly. As I size up the bakery’s varied line-up of breads, Scudellaro passionately explains the virtues of his 55-year old sourdough starter and his French Guyon ovens, with their hand-cut volcanic stone floors.

It is the bakery’s organic breads that set the bakery apart. Made with certified flours and purified water, they have no commercial yeast. Put through multiple slow risings, the breads have a slightly chewy crumb. Their hearty crusts give the breads a long-keeping quality.

The sourdough rolls with shiny blistered crusts and the seed-sprinkled sourdough baguettes have the same intricate flavor and bouncy crumb.

* Pasadena Baking Co . , 29 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 796-9966 or (818) 796-9698. Open Monday to Thursday 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday 7 a.m. to midnight; Saturday 8 a.m. to midnight; Sunday 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

While many of the breads sold at the Broadway Deli are made by other bakers, there are several that are made at the restaurant according to Citrus chef Michel Richard’s recipes.

Everyone knows Richard, who co-owns the deli, made his name as one oA.’s top pastry chefs, but he grew up as a baker’s son in Brittany and later in the Ardennes. “My father would sleep on the sacks of flour while the bread rose through the night,” he remembers. Understandably he says he’s always been in love with good bread.

The deli’s bakers turn out dense, rectangular whole-wheat-herb bread made with a touch of olive oil; the “squaw bread”; pumpernickel bread and hamburger buns. The fastest-selling bread is walnut-raisin, crammed with fruit and nuts nearly edge to edge in a slightly chewy crumb. The secret flavoring is a trace of walnut oil.

* Broadway Deli, 1457 Third Street Promenade (Broadway at Santa Monica), (310) 451-0616. Open Monday to Thursday 7 a.m. to midnight, Friday to 1 a.m.; Saturday 8 a.m. to 1 a.m.; Sunday 8 a.m. to midnight.

“Most of the restaurants where I worked in Europe--especially in Italy--made their own bread,” says Tony Di Lembo, chef and co-owner of Indigo restaurant and Breadworks bakery. “It’s part of the personality of the restaurant.”

When he couldn’t buy the kind of bread he wanted for Indigo, Di Lembo experimented, baking loaves in the restaurant’s pizza oven. He tried different varieties--mostly baking the kind of bread his Italian grandmother made, using dough from the day before as a leaven for the new batches.

One day, on a whim, he pureed a little garlic and onion to flavor rosemary bread. “From then on,” he says, “every restaurant review spent about two paragraphs raving about that bread.” Customers and caterers were soon clamoring for his loaves, but it was impossible to fill the demand from the restaurant’s small kitchen.

Two and a half years later, Di Lembo opened Breadworks, about two blocks east of the restaurant. Using the same dough as the one he uses for his lightly soured country white bread, he made ficelles , rolls and onion bread with a slice of onion baked into its crown. The most decadent of these is a bread with pureed onion and sour cream mounded into the center of its split top.

Now he makes almost 30 breads, including a dark beer pumpernickel with coarse rye meal and molasses; a loaf with Cheddar, fresh red jalapeno chiles and cilantro; and a whole-wheat-apple cider bread (weekends only).

* Breadworks, 7961 West 3rd St., Los Angeles, (213) 930-0047. Open daily 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

When he worked for Michel Richard, chef Robert Quintana was the pastry chef at Citrus. But when he teamed up with baker Chris Seymour at the now-closed Pomegranate, bread became a major interest. The pair have opened Q Bakery in Pacific Palisades at a small homey shop that used to be Aussie Oven.

“Ours is a real neighborhood bakery,” says Quintana. “We gear our baking to what customers request.”

Requests include the refined vegetarian mini-pizzas and turkey-fennel empanadas . Wheatless blueberry-oat muffins made without eggs are on the list, as are the oil-free banana-bran muffins. For these, a woman comes in several times a week to grind specialty flours on an Alsatian stone mill.

The multi-grain bread, made from buckwheat, rice and whole-wheat flours with crushed wheat and rye berries, has an outstanding crust capped by a crown of steel-cut oats. The olive bread is chewy and moist inside; the savory jalapeno- Cheddar has cornmeal in its dough.

* Q Bakery, 16605 Sunset Blvd. (at Marquez), Pacific Palisades, (310) 459-3564. Open Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Amy Pressman, the woman who brought us Milky Way cake, makes French toast at her Old Town Bakery with a homey cinnamon-swirl bread. She uses her potato-onion bread for Toad in the Hole (with eggs-over-medium in the hole).

Pressman’s long baguettes--made in potato-rosemary, six-grain, sourdough-rye and good old white--are French in name only. The crumb is nicely firm, though, like a bread from a good home baker. Her pastry-chef background shows in the perfectly balanced Cheddar-black pepper bread and her seasonal loaves, such as the pear-with-roasted-hazelnut bread, which makes outrageously good toast. This month there’s a hearth bread with roasted pumpkin, just in time for Halloween.

Some of Pressman’s breads--for instance, her wheat-walnut-raisin bread, sage ciabatta and rosemary baguettes--are now being served (and sold) by the Louise’s Trattoria restaurant chain.

* Old Town Bakery, 166 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 792-7943. Open Sunday to Thursday 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday 7:30 a.m. to midnight.

Brio Bakery was born the day the restaurant’s regular order of dinner rolls went awry. “They weren’t nearly as good as usual,” remembers owner Andre Guerrero. It turned out the supplier had fired his baker, Sergio Casillas, while Casillas was visiting in Mexico. Casillas knew Guerrero liked his breads, so when he came back, he applied for a job.

Casillas got his first bread-baking lessons from his mother, who always made her bread with a sourdough sponge, as he does today. “His starter has a definite personality,” Guerrero says. If it’s not fed regularly--like a child--it changes the character of the breads. The bakery’s customers favor a light, crackly crust, so these breads don’t spend a long time in the oven. But they are allowed to rise overnight.

The sour-cream-dill-onion loaf is one of the best-sellers. A similar version is baked with rosemary and garlic, another with flecks of sun-dried tomato. Walnut-raisin is a whole-wheat round, a country-style French bread contains four cheeses, and Brio makes fine scones that aren’t overly sweet.

* Brio Bakery, 18553 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, (818) 609-7701. Open Tuesday to Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Breads are also available at the restaurant after these hours.)

Tucked away in a South Bay shopping center at Misto Bakery, pastry chef Kelly Keightley bakes an assortment of loaves and rolls for Fino and Caffe Misto, two members of the restaurant empire owned by Robert Bell and Michael Franks. Like the California-eclectic restaurants, the breads are an international mixed bag, from egg-y challah to pan tipo altamura , an Italian-style country bread.

The scones (whole-wheat, oat-currant and blueberry) are delicious, the bread sticks crackle and the sticky buns have lots of pecans. Seven-grain, the most serious loaf in the house, contains linseed as well as millet, barley and other grains. And there’s a wonderful fruit-and-nut bread strewn with bits of dried apricots, golden raisins and walnuts.

* Misto Bakery, 24558 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, (310) 375-2852. Open daily 9 a.m to 9 p.m.

At I Cugini, a basket generously heaped with assorted fresh breads and a little pot of faintly herby olive paste is set before you almost as soon as you sit down. It’s easy for bread enthusiasts to forget about dinner while exploring the moist slices of onion bread flecked with sesame seeds, the mild sourdough textured with a smattering of crushed whole wheat, the tomato or olive loaves and shoelace-thin, pastry-like bread sticks.

The restaurant has baked its own Italian-style bread since its opening in June 1990. But it wasn’t until pastry chef Kim Welch joined the staff at the beginning of this year that the flavorful new line evolved.

“We’re still experimenting,” Welch says. “Our bread made with red, yellow and green bell peppers, basil and a touch of olive oil is one of the current favorites.” A flat semolina bread, as yet baked only once a week, gets its earthy quality from a bit of six-grain cereal and anchovy as seasoning. And the whole-wheat loaves include superior Guisto’s multi-grain flour and wheat germ.

* I Cugini, 1501 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 451-4595. Open daily 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.