Did you see the purple loaves of sourdough that were all over social media a few years ago? I missed them. In fact, I’m five years late to trying Karlo Evaristo’s heirloom blue corn masa sourdough bread, and I only discovered it by accident. Now, I can think of little else.
During a recent dinner at Le Hut Dinette, a new restaurant located in a Quonset hut in Santa Ana, my dinner companions ordered the sourdough bread. We wanted something to help sop up the peach vinegar and jalapeño oil in executive chef Ryan Garlitos’ excellent tomato salad.
What arrived at the table were slices of bread in a deep shade of violet. It was toasted on both sides, with umber splotches interrupting the purple, the entire surface shiny and shellacked with clarified butter.
I sniffed the bread in amazement, getting butter on my nose. It had the distinct aroma of blue corn tortillas cooking on a comal.
The crust cracked at the slightest provocation, and the middle was as fluffy and tender as a milk bread bun.
It was unlike any bread I’d tried, with the deep earthy flavor of blue corn balanced with a wonderfully sour tang.
Garlitos serves the bread with a side of compound butter made with beef tallow from sister restaurant Heritage Barbecue’s briskets, confit garlic and lemon. It’s the sort of thing that could hold its own on a cheese board. It’s stellar on the bread, but we found ourselves eating it plain, marveling at the blue corn flavor.
“I knew that after tasting it, we had to use it in some way,” says Garlitos.
When researching breads for the restaurant’s sandwiches, he wanted to source from a local baker. He was familiar with Evaristo’s breads, having tried them shortly after the baker started making breads out of a cottage bakery in his home in 2020. And when Le Hut Dinette opened earlier this year in Diesel Commons, the Quonset next door was already occupied by Evaristo’s bakery, 61 Hundred Bread.
“It’s become a staple, and I don’t think it’s something that will ever leave the menu unless Karl stops selling it to me,” says Garlitos. “Our guests love it. Every table gets an order.”
It’s the same bread three-Michelin star restaurant Somni uses in West Hollywood. It’s been featured in dozens of videos on TikTok and Instagram.
“I never expected it to be like this,” says Evaristo of his bakery’s success. 61 Hundred Bread, named for the ZIP Code of Bacolod, his hometown in the Philippines, draws daily lines and often sells out of his breads, croissants and cruffins by midday.
The former fine dining chef only started baking bread during the pandemic. He grew up in his parents’ restaurants on Negros Island in the Philippines, but never wanted to cook himself. After a nudge from his father, he attended culinary school in both the Philippines and Napa, Calif. He eventually landed in Orange County, cooking at the Montage hotel.
A couple of years before the pandemic, he quit his restaurant job and started hosting elaborate, 20-course pop-up dinners. It was during his time hosting dinners at Melody in Virgil Village that he was introduced to both the sourdough bread from Bub and Grandma’s Bakery, and the blue corn tortillas from Metztli Taqueria.
“It was the first time I’d ever tried really good sourdough bread before,” he says. “I was like, ‘I need to make this.’”
It was October 2019, months before the sourdough craze that accompanied the start of the pandemic. Evaristo taught himself how to make sourdough and started baking loaves out of his home. In March 2020, when everything shutdown, he already had a baking operation set up in his kitchen.
“I had no job, no source of income and bread was automatically what I was going to do,” he says. “I’ll make sourdough and see if anyone wants to buy it.”
He started with one to two loaves a day, posting on Craigslist, the Neighborhood app and Instagram. Restaurant critic Brad Johnson featured the bread in the OC Register, and soon, there was a two-week wait list for the sourdough boules.
Evaristo moved all of his dining room furniture into his living room, and replaced it with a prep table and a 50-quart mixer. He scaled up to 120 loaves per day. But with everyone making sourdough, he needed a way to set himself apart.
“The first thing I thought of was how good those blue corn tortillas were and I wondered how it would be in a sourdough,” he says.
It took Evaristo two years to develop the corn masa loaves, first experimenting with dried blue corn. He milled the corn and created a porridge, introducing butterfly pea flower tea to achieve a deeper blue color. But it wasn’t quite right. He thought about the nixtamalized corn in those blue corn tortillas and started incorporating blue corn masa into the dough.
“It was mind-blowing,” he says. “The corn flavor is so much more and it smells like a tortilla.”
I was equally floored when I tried it, and made a plan to visit the bakery to buy a boule of my own to take home.
There was a line when I arrived early on a Sunday morning, but it moved quickly. The loaves of bread are the first thing you notice when you open the door, the numbers 6100 written in flour on the surface. You can just see the violet peeking through the top of the loaf, where the bread is scored before baking.
The aroma of blue corn tortillas filled the car during the 51-minute trip back home.
I suggest you have a meal at Le Hut Dinette, and order the bread and butter. And visit the bakery to buy a loaf to take home. If you want that same crispy crust and super fluffy middle, both Garlitos and Evaristo suggest slathering a slice with butter and toasting it in a pan. However many slices you end up eating in one sitting, is up to you.
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