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 right across the street from Jumbo's Clown Room, neighborhood bakery-café Friends & Family looks quiet during blue hour. But the morning team has already spent almost two hours with the biggest “baking” of the week. That means preparing a thousand baked goods of nearly 50 varieties, most of which will fill the pastry case when the doors open at 8 o'clock.
Co-owner and baker Roxana Jullapat, who just published her second cookbook, “Morning Baker: Recipes and Rituals for Breakfast and Beyond,” keeps an eye on a rotating oven holding two nearly six-foot racks of 30-sheet pans filled with croissants. She left her career as a fine-dining pastry chef behind to open Friends & Family nine years ago with her partner, Dan Mattern, and helped lead a revolution in whole grain baking.
Croissants fill the display case at the Friends & Family bakery, which baker and co-owner Roxana Jullapat opened with her partner nine years ago. She left her career as a fine dining pastry chef and never looked back.
Jullapat is also among the first of 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 because their jobs were eliminated. That was the impetus for his new book, he says.
“Pastry chefs are much less appreciated and less celebrated” than chefs, Jullapat says. “I feel like [L.A.’s] The proliferation of artisanal bakeries is our answer to that. …It's an incredible twist. It's magical, that's what it is.
“We're in a class of our own, really talented people with really strong, specific ways of looking at food,” says Jullapat, an advocate for baking with whole grains and local flours (and internet pie queen for her fascinating crust-folding skills). “We brought all that experience and opened our own stores.”
“I love muffins,” says Roxana Jullapat. “It's a cake, but it's not a pretentious cake.” Chocolate Morning Muffins, made with chocolate, rye flour and yogurt, are a recipe from her book “Morning Baker.”
(Calvin Alagot/Los Angeles Times)
And each bakery has its own distinctive 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 buy all my pastries now. Recently, Wilde's does all those British things. Santa Canela is a beautiful bakery. Gusto does beautiful work… And it's about time we see pan de sal everywhere, it's about time there's ube everywhere,” he says, referring to Filipino flavors and bakeries like like San & Wolves in Long Beach.
Jullapat's bakery at Friends & Family, which now has a second location in Silver Lake, draws lines of customers for its abundance and diversity: cookies; buns; cakes; quiche; muffins; donuts; bagels; various types of bread; sometimes shell; recently, a Salvadoran pastry called quesadilla, similar to sponge cake but with salty aged cheese; as well as all kinds of croissants: simple ones that break when crumbled and others filled with halva or pistachio cream or sweet chocolate customized to your taste by Tcho, based in San Francisco.
And nothing is made solely with refined white flour. “Items that have white flour also have whole wheat flour, at least 20%,” he says. “That's our rule.”
Friends & Family bakers make several types of croissants, like the pistachio croissant, left. Roxana Jullapat distributes chocolate muffins to her team. The morning shift includes making laminated dough for croissants. (Carlin Stiehl/for The Times)
After the publication of her first book, “Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution,” five years ago, she said she didn't anticipate people would be so willing and hungry to cook and bake with whole grains. That's why “Morning Baker” approaches and treats these grains, including buckwheat, barley, corn, and local varieties of wheat like Sonora, as part of a daily routine, with many recipes that aren't special weekend projects.
“I love muffins. I think it's because I'm not American,” says Jullapat, who is Costa Rican and Thai and grew up thinking of American food as the ultimate indulgence. “It's a cake, but it's not a pretentious cake. You don't need to frost it or decorate it. But you can make it absolutely delicious.”
She unswervingly uses whole grains: rye for her chocolate muffins, graham for pig-shaped crackers, and spelled in her croissant dough. “Einkorn was my first love and I still love it,” says Jullapat, who bakes his favorite shortbread cookie with the ancient grain, the oldest known variety of wheat, prized for its high protein content, nutty flavor and silky texture. In “Morning Baker,” find recipes for her Scandinavian Carrot Muffins and her Pear, Chocolate, Scandinavian Scones, and an introduction to her favorite flours and flours.
Roxana Jullapat says there are a couple of rules when it comes to muffins. You should be able to prepare them in an hour from start to finish, so you can have them for breakfast. And they should include healthy ingredients like good flour.
He's experimented with a new variety of triticale, which is being developed at UC Davis, “and it's s—sexy,” Jullapat says. “It has the properties of wheat with the incredible flavor of rye. If that flour were available to me in quantity, it would be everywhere on the menu.”
She's also a fan of durum wheat, “like a whole grain semolina,” from Grist & Toll, the Pasadena-based flour mill, one of the first and oldest in Los Angeles. Durum wheat 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 “very influential in everything we do,” Jullapat says. “I don't think she realizes how much her business affects ours.
Time 40 minutes
Yields Makes 12 muffins
“The grain completes the story of a bakery,” he 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 previously worked with chefs Nancy Silverton and Suzanne Goin, also celebrates Southern California fruit, often with themed events, including: Strawberry Fest each 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 cobbler, and almonds, peach cloud pie).
For anyone looking to delve deeper into whole-grain croissants, a chapter of “Morning Baker” covers the entire process: making and folding the dough, proofing and shaping. Hybrid dough is an easy-to-use combination of refined and whole flours so that it holds its shape while being malleable for home bakers.
Friends & Family has become an East Hollywood neighborhood staple bakery, with a fully loaded pastry case for which customers line up.
Jullapat's original manuscript was 600 pages long, covering the entire day: savory dishes, lunches, afternoon snacks, family dinners. After working on the project for two and a half years, by the time he sent the manuscript to the publisher, he says he had the overwhelming feeling that the book should just be breakfast.
“The reasons were multiple. We had a lot more breakfast material than anything else. It's the type of food I'm most comfortable with. It's the food I eat the most. It's a reflection of my job, that's the time I'm awake, these are the things I do, bake, eat, everything, and that's what we serve here.”
He also wrote most of the book early in the morning. The baking team arrives at 3 a.m. every day, and when not “at a station” (managing one of the ovens), she wrote.
The move to open a bakery meant a life change in another profound way, he says. Instead of being the last person in the kitchen, making the last sale, serving the last dish, turning off the ovens and fryers at the end of the night, she gets up at 2 a.m. every day and “now I'm a morning baker who makes my own rules.”
Roxana Jullapat will be at the Los Angeles Times Food and Now Serving booth at the Book Festival on Saturday, April 18 from 3 to 4 pm signing books.
