The sky is still a dark indigo-purple at 5 a.m. over this eastern stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, where Thai Town and Little Armenia overlap. Located directly across the street from Jumbo’s Clown Room, neighborhood bakery-cafe Friends & Family looks blue-hour quiet. But the morning crew is nearly two hours into the week’s biggest “bake.” That means preparing a thousand baked goods of nearly 50 varieties, most of which will fill the pastry case by the time the doors open at 8 o’clock.
Co-owner and baker Roxana Jullapat — who has just published her second cookbook, “Morning Baker: Recipes and Rituals for Breakfast and Beyond” — watches over a rotating oven that holds two nearly six-foot racks of 30 sheet trays filled with croissants. She left behind a career as a fine-dining pastry chef to open Friends & Family nine years ago with her partner, Dan Mattern, and helped lead a whole-grain baking revolution.
Jullapat is also among the first in the latest wave of pastry chefs who have chosen to open bakeries rather than work in restaurants creating plated desserts, either because they decided to move on or their jobs were eliminated. That was the impetus of her new book, she says.
“Pastry chefs are much less well-regarded and far less celebrated” than chefs, says Jullapat. “I feel like [L.A.’s] proliferation of artisan bakeries is our response to that. … It’s an incredible flip. It’s magical, is what it is.
“We are in a class of our own, really talented people with really solid and specific ways of looking at food,” says Jullapat, a champion of baking with whole grains and local flours (and as the internet’s pie queen for her mesmerizing crust-crimping skills). “We brought all that experience and opened our own shops.”
And each bakery has its own distinct voice. “You go to Fat + Flour, it’s a very specific bakery. You go to Petitgrain in Santa Monica, it’s a very specific bakery. Have you been to Flouring? That’s where I get all my cakes now. Recently, Wilde’s does all that British stuff. Santa Canela is a beautiful panadería. Gusto does a beautiful job. … And about time we see pan de sal everywhere, about time there’s ube everywhere,” she says, referring to Filipino flavors and bakeries such as San & Wolves in Long Beach.
Jullapat’s pastry case at Friends & Family, which now has a second location in Silver Lake, draws lines of customers for its abundance and diversity: cookies; scones; tarts; quiche; muffins; doughnuts; bagels; several kinds of bread; sometimes concha; recently, a Salvadoran cake called quesadilla, similar to pound cake but with salty dry-aged cheese folded into it; as well as all kinds of croissants — plain ones that shatter with flakiness and others filled with halva or pistachio cream or fudgy chocolate customized to her taste by San Francisco-based Tcho.
And nothing is made with only refined white flour. “Items that have white flour also have whole grain flour, at minimum 20%,” she says. “That’s our rule.”
After her first book, “Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution,” was published five years ago, she said she didn’t anticipate that people were so ready and hungry for cooking and baking with whole grains. So “Morning Baker” addresses and treats these grains — including buckwheat, barley, corn, landrace varieties of wheat such as Sonora — as part of a daily routine, with a lot of recipes that aren’t special weekend projects.
“I love a muffin. I think it’s because I am not American,” says Jullapat, who is Costa Rican and Thai and grew up thinking of American food as the ultimate indulgence. “It’s cake, but it’s not pretentious cake. You don’t have to frost it, you don’t have to decorate it. But you can make it absolutely delicious.”
She unwaveringly uses whole grains: rye for her chocolate muffins, graham for pig-shaped cookies, spelt in her croissant dough. “Einkorn was my first love, and I still love it,” says Jullapat, who bakes her favorite shortbread with the ancient grain — the oldest known wheat variety, appreciated for its high protein, nutty flavor and silky texture. In “Morning Baker,” find recipes for her einkorn carrot muffins and pear, chocolate and einkorn scones — and a primer on her favorite flours and millers.
She has experimented with a new variety of triticale, in development at UC Davis, “and it’s a sexy m—,” Jullapat says. “It has the properties of wheat with the incredible flavor of rye. If that flour was available to me in quantity, it would be everywhere on the menu.”
She’s also a fan of durum — “like a whole grain semolina” — from Grist & Toll, the Pasadena-based flour mill, one of L.A.’s first and oldest. The durum is grown in California from the seed of an Iraqi variety, known for its sweet, malty flavor. Grist & Toll founder Nan Kohler’s flours are “so influential to anything we make,” Jullapat says. “I don’t think she realizes how much her business affects ours.
“Grain makes the full-circle story of a bakery,” she says. “You can’t have a bakery if there wasn’t a seed, if there wasn’t a grower, if there wasn’t a miller.”
Jullapat, who formerly worked with chefs Nancy Silverton and Suzanne Goin, also celebrates Southern California fruit, often with themed events, including: Strawberry Fest every spring (think strawberry danish, strawberry-rhubarb financier and brown butter strawberry jam bars) and Peach Fest in the summer (peach hand pie, peach brioche bun, peach almond tart, peach cloud cake).
For anyone looking for a deep dive into whole-grain croissants, a chapter in “Morning Baker” covers the entire process: making and folding the dough, proofing and shaping. The hybrid dough is a user-friendly combination of refined and whole grain flours so that it holds its shape while staying malleable for home bakers.
Jullapat’s original manuscript was 600 pages that covered the full day: savory dishes, lunch food, snacks in the afternoon, family-sized dinners. After working on the project for 2 1/2 years, the minute she sent the manuscript to the editor, she says she had an overwhelming feeling that the book should be just breakfast.
“The reasons were multiple. We had far more material for breakfast than anything else. It is the kind of food I felt most comfortable with. It’s the food that I eat the most of. It is reflective of my job, that is the time that I’m awake, these are the things I do, bake, eat, everything, and that’s what we serve here.”
She also wrote the majority of the book early in the morning. The baking crew arrives every day at 3 a.m., and when not “on a station” — in charge of one of the ovens — she would write.
The flip to opening a bakery meant a life flip in another profound way, she says. Instead of being the last person in the kitchen, making the last sale, serving the last course, turning off the ovens and fryers at the end of the night, she’s up at 2 a.m. every day, and “now I’m a morning baker making my own rules.”
Roxana Jullapat will be at the Los Angeles Times Food and Now Serving booth at the Festival of Books on Saturday, April 18, from 3 to 4 p.m. signing books.
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