Clémence de Lutz begins shaping her famous croissants between midnight and 1 a.m., and sells between 600 and 900 every day at her lauded Santa Monica bakery Petitgrain Boulangerie. But in early September she’s added even more baking to her schedule with a nearby sibling bakery: Petitpain … et Chocolat, building bread and chocolate menus, and baking new pastries.
“Bread is the best expression of whole grains,” she said from the new 500-square-foot bakery with a walk-up window. “The croissant is great because it’s got rye and spelt and hard red [flour] in it, and that’s what differentiates it from all the other croissants wherever you buy them, but bread is really where you get to be like, ‘This is spelt,’ and taste it.”
De Lutz, who is also a co-founder of the Gourmandise cooking school and a former L.A. Times contributor, now bounces back and forth between her two bakeries, which sit eight blocks apart. Her newest bakes the loaves of bread for both, as well as unique whole-grain pastries and a new chocolate menu developed by her friend. They culminate in a childhood-favorite of De Lutz, one that’s difficult to find in L.A.
“I grew up in France, and around 4 o’clock every day the last thing that comes out of the oven is milk bread, these rectangular loaves,” she said. “They split them in half, and they sell chocolate bars that you just put inside. There’s nothing better.” At Petitpain, she’s toasting her bread with olive oil, adding her house-made chocolate and sprinkling it with sea salt.
Her loaves are nearly all 50% whole-grain and sourdough, and she and her small team churn out boules, sesame loaves, baguettes and brioche. While her Wilshire Boulevard bakery’s pastries utilize 20% to 50% whole-grain flour, here they range from 50% to 100%, including a toothsome but still-tender entirely whole-grain croissant that took years to develop.
“I’m a flavor nerd,” De Lutz said. “I care zero about nutrition. I really love the flavor of whole grains, and it takes a long time to make something that’s reminiscent and palatable.”
Other new items include a buttery, flaky whole-grain spelt shortbread; farmers-market-fruit bostock; a twice-baked almond and honey croissant in ode to her grandmother’s signature dessert from her own restaurant in the South of France; and a nostalgic cinnamon-butter-glazed cinnamon bun.
The new bakery is dedicated not only to De Lutz’s love of bread and whole grains but two loves recently lost: Little Flower Cafe owner and confectioner Christine Moore and De Lutz’s foster daughter, Pepper, both of whom died within weeks of each other earlier this year. Their names are painted in cursive on an exterior wall of Petitpain.
“I think people who go through s— and stay busy will just pay for it later or channel it in another way,” De Lutz said. “I think I’m trying to channel it and honor.”
De Lutz always hoped to offer bread in her first bakery, though she learned that installing a bread oven would require an overhaul of her building’s electrical system and could take years. She was looking for a space already outfitted with a bread oven when her friend and fellow baker Laurel Gallucci said she would soon be vacating her own Santa Monica location.
The compact bakery is also near De Lutz’s home. It was a perfect fit. She took over the space in January and began transporting whole loaves of bread to her first bakery while planning a separate pastry menu — and an all-new chocolate program — for her second.
Highland Park’s Civil Coffee, which was already sold at Petitgrain, offered De Lutz the espresso machine they began their company with, and now Petitpain offers its own coffee menu featuring lattes and other concoctions featuring house-made nut milks and house-made horchata.
Behind the bakery is a 100-year-old home repurposed into a temperature-controlled workshop for De Lutz and her team, including her longtime friend Ruth Kennison, who oversees the new chocolate program. Kennison, a former Gourmandise cooking instructor who taught alongside De Lutz, has been making bean-to-bar chocolate as a hobby for 20 years, usually at her own home but never in the summer. Now she’s going pro thanks to the new bakery’s accommodations.
“The craft of bean-to-bar chocolate making has always been a dream, but it requires space and power and temperature controls,” De Lutz said. “On the Westside, nobody has air conditioning. But this space came up. This has really been our dream come true.”
They’re roasting the beans onsite, winnowing and cracking their own cacao, and focusing on a more unique blend: dark milk chocolate, which flips the standard cacao-cream-sugar ratio of milk chocolate to utilize high cacao content with less sugar and more cream, here in the form of organic whole-milk powder from California’s own Alexandre Family Farms. The result is a creamy but not-too-sweet bar.
De Lutz is wary of pulling customers away from Petitgrain Boulangerie, but views Petitpain as a more specialized outpost for the neighborhood — with six pastries as opposed to Petitgrain’s 30 — that could assist in boosting Petitgrain’s success. The bakery also functions as a commissary kitchen, keeping De Lutz’s lines of customers full of boules and baguettes, ideally for years to come.
Petitpain … et Chocolat is located at 1013 Pico Blvd. in Santa Monica and is open Wednesday to Sunday from 6:45 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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