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Some of the country's most prominent artisan bakers shared that sentiment. Dan Leader, owner of up-
state New York's famed Bread Alone bakery, complained about La Brea to the New York Times , “With
all due respect, bread that's mixed, shaped, and baked in a factory, untouched by human hands, is not ar-
tisan bread.” 1 I was inclined to trust Leader because it was his cookbook that first introduced me to the
art of baking European loaves. But I was still resolved to head to L.A. with my question: Could bread
that's mixed in a sixty-thousand-square-foot factory owned by a Swiss multinational, shaped by high-
tech machinery mimicking the sensitive fingers of a village baker, partially baked in a seventy-foot-long
tunnel oven, and then flash frozen for shipment to stores and restaurants from Singapore to Walla Walla
be “good”?
Jon Davis, La Brea Bakeries' vice president for concept development—the company's idea man,
I was told—agreed to help answer that question by showing me around La Brea's operations. We
made two preliminary stops before heading out to the Van Nuys industrial park where Brasserie Four's
baguettes were born. First, we paused for coffee at the tiny La Brea Avenue storefront Nancy Silver-
ton opened in 1989. That space still has a neighborhood bakery feel, with a steady stream of regulars
ducking in for bread, coffee, and pastries, but no actual bread is baked there now. When it first opened
in 1989, Angelinos, accustomed to sterile supermarket bread, called Silverton's European hearth loaves
“dirty,” “too holey,” and “burnt,” but something clicked quickly. In less than two years La Brea had out-
grown its original space, and Silverton decided to open a larger bakery to fill skyrocketing orders from
L.A. grocery stores and restaurants. 2
That second bakery—the Direct Store Delivery plant producing fresh bread for the Greater Los
Angeles market—was the next stop on our tour. “The DSD” is the heart of La Brea Bakeries, and Jon
Davis's affection for this place was palpable. It is here where he “plays,” getting out of the office and
putting his hands in the dough to develop and refine new product lines. Although some of the work
here is automated, this is not an industrial bakery by any stretch; it's a small artisanal bakery that has
been “scaled up,” the way a cook might double or triple a recipe. Instead of the original bakery's one
worker scurrying around with one bucket of sourdough starter, the DSD has more workers and buck-
ets than I can count. Instead of a couple of plastic tubs of fermenting dough, the DSD has scores of
plastic tubs stacked in precarious towers. The overall effect is organized chaos, a precisely orchestrated
ballet of weaving carts, moving loaves, and flying hands. The place still looks and smells like a craft
bakery—even though it produces thousands of loaves a day.
Finally, after battling northbound traffic on the 405 expressway, we reached our third stop—the part
of the tour I had traveled twelve hundred miles to see: quite possibly the world's most innovative indus-
trial bakery. On the outside, La Brea's global production facility was a beige shell in a bland industrial
park. Nothing immediately screamed “bakery.” Inside, with its massive stainless steel tanks, circulatory
system of tubes and pipes, cool, clean air, and humming conveyor belts, the place might as well have
been a large milk bottler or apple-processing plant. But then I saw the baguettes.
La Brea's Van Nuys, plant is an M. C. Escher optical illusion come to life: impossibly long lines of
dough trailing into the visual vanishing point, becoming impossibly perfect squares, rolling themselves
into perfectly uniform baguettes, marching off in impossibly long lines again, rotating into towering Fer-
ris wheel contraptions, filing around corners, parading through tunnels, and spiraling up almost forty feet
in the air. When the 80 percent-baked baguettes finally descend to earth, it is through the machine that
makes La Brea's far-flung distribution possible: a massive blast freezer that inserts fresh, preservative-
free bread into the global food system. Human hands touch the loaves at exactly two points: each loaf
is hand straightened and hand slashed before baking. Is this an artisan bakery? “Yes,” Davis replied
without hesitation.
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