Got a favorite artisan bakery in your area? Rave about it here.
I've had Manoucher www.manoucher.com a few times now and I must say that each bread I've tried is so thought provoking. Not just how to follow the recipe, but what Manoucher was thinking when it was created.
What impresses me as well is that they hand make all their breads and still sell 50000 loaves worldwide weekly!
Can someone tell me where I can buy baking supplies like yeast, special flour, thermometer, etc. in Westchester County NY. I live in Somers,NY in Northern Westchester.
Many thanks.
My favorite local-to-me bakery is Hungry Ghost Bread on State Street in Northampton, MA. All their bread is made by hand with sourdough culture, organic flour and filtered water, and baked in a huge wood-fired oven. Well, made mostly by hand: there is a large and noisy dough mixer to bring together each 75-lb. batch of dough. From time to time there are dynamite cookies and pastry goods in addition to a variety of excellent bread.
Some photos and a write-up from the fall of 2005 is available at http://www.boston.com/travel/explorene/massachusetts/articles/2005/09/21/it_takes_a_village_baker/ . Hungry Ghost is an interesting place to hang out briefly whole choosing which bread to buy. There's often John Coltrane of Bob Dylan music filling the space, and the weekly bread schedule usually has a poem by lead baker Jonathan Stevens printed on the back. Stevens and Cheryl Maffei are the proprietors, ever-ready to explain their wares or comment on the passing scene.
we love this place, especially the original location in the hip, little "artsy" area called Hillsboro Village.
http://www.provencebreads.com/
Greg
I've been wanting to try Poilane's bread since reading about it in Reinhart's BBA and have found that you can order it directly from Poilane (http://www.poilane.fr/index.php?index_module=listings&index_theme=english&index_template=en_produit_bdd.php&product_id=1).
I've been considering ordering a loaf for my family in Iowa for the upcoming holiday, but am a man of relatively modest means and balk at the $36 price for a 1.9 kG loaf. I've discovered that Zingerman's bakehouse in NYC offers a similar loaf, their 2kg pain de montagne (http://www.zingermans.com/Product.pasp?Category=&ProductID=B%2DMON) which they say "is the closest thing We've ever tasted to the much-loved loaves of Paris' premier baker, Lionel Poilane," for $20 (although I'm not sure how much shipping is, so there's that).
CNN is running an article on their website today about how bread makers in Paris have been improving their product. It also gives mini-reviews of several boulangeries. Here's a link to the article: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/ADVISOR/12/08/baguettes/index.html
PMcCool
When in Portland, Maine:
Standard Baking Co. 75 Commercial St (waterfront/Old Port area)
Portland, ME 04101
(207) 773-2112
When in Upstate New York/Hudson Valley/Catskill region:
Bread Alone Bakery and Cafe - main bakery in Boiceville, cafes in Woodstock, Kingston, and Rhinebeck
When in the San Francisco Bay Area:
Il Fornaio
http://www.ilfornaio.com/page17.htm (actually, they are now all over CA and in WA, CO, and NV as well: http://www.ilfornaio.com/page10.htm)
A well-written, funny and, sometimes, brutal article in New York Magazine in which Cornel Professor and French bread expert extraordinaire judges NYC baguettes.
A snippet:
You don’t invite Steven L. Kaplan, Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and the world’s preeminent French-bread scholar, to a blind tasting and not expect the crumbs to fly—which they did, all over the wall-to-wall carpeting. “Jesus!” exclaimed the professor, having barely crossed the threshold. “Some of these breads are ugly.” It is that brazen frankness, that instinctively critical faculty, that has improbably won this Brooklyn-born bon vivant legions of fans in France, where he lives part of the year, and where the government, in its chastened gratitude for his missionary baguette zeal, has twice dubbed him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. To test his mettle—and our town’s best baguette efforts—we assembled a baker’s dozen, all of approximate freshness, and subjected them to Kaplan’s rigorous system of evaluation.
While we were in Mammoth, California last year we stopped by the Erick Schat's Bakery & Café: What a treat.
I read about it on a website and they were absolutely right: The bakery offers great breads and woderful sweets. We ended up buying up $30 worth of bread to take home.
The bakery website is located here, but not much there to read, I am afraid: http://www.erickschatsbakery.com/
They have two locations:
Mammoth
3305 Main St., Mammoth Lakes, CA
760/934-6055 or 760/934-4203
Bishop
763 N. Main Street, Bishop, CA
A great bakery in Burbank, California (Los Angeles) is Porto's.
Porto's has been a staple in the city of Glendale for decades but parking there is a nightmare while the newly opened store in Burbank has plenty all the time. I love their sourdough bread loaf (crusty, nutty subtones) while my wife likes their cuban bread, however pretty much anything in the store is great, from breads to cakes and sweets.
Their website is located here: http://www.portosbakery.com/
