Did you see the purple loaves of sourdough that have been throughout social media a number of years in the past? I missed them. In truth, I’m 5 years late to making an attempt Karlo Evaristo’s heirloom blue corn masa sourdough bread, and I solely found it by chance. Now, I can consider little else.
Throughout a latest dinner at Le Hut Dinette, a brand new restaurant positioned in a Quonset hut in Santa Ana, my dinner companions ordered the sourdough bread. We needed one thing to assist sop up the peach vinegar and jalapeño oil in government chef Ryan Garlitos’ glorious tomato salad.
What arrived on the desk have been slices of bread in a deep shade of violet. It was toasted on either side, with umber splotches interrupting the purple, your complete floor shiny and shellacked with clarified butter.
I sniffed the bread in amazement, getting butter on my nostril. It had the distinct aroma of blue corn tortillas cooking on a comal.
The blue corn masa sourdough bread with a aspect of beef tallow butter at Le Hut Dinette restaurant in Santa Ana. The bread is made by 61 Hundred Bread.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Instances)
The crust cracked on the slightest provocation, and the center was as fluffy and tender as a milk bread bun.
It was in contrast to any bread I’d tried, with the deep earthy taste of blue corn balanced with a splendidly bitter tang.
Garlitos serves the bread with a aspect of compound butter made with beef tallow from sister restaurant Heritage Barbecue’s briskets, confit garlic and lemon. It’s the type of factor that might maintain its personal on a cheese board. It’s stellar on the bread, however we discovered ourselves consuming it plain, marveling on the blue corn taste.
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“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 needed to supply from a neighborhood baker. He was aware of Evaristo’s breads, having tried them shortly after the baker began making breads out of a cottage bakery in his residence in 2020. And when Le Hut Dinette opened earlier this 12 months in Diesel Commons, the Quonset subsequent 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 identical bread three-Michelin star restaurant Somni makes use of in West Hollywood. It’s been featured in dozens of movies 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 within the Philippines, attracts each day traces and sometimes sells out of his breads, croissants and cruffins by noon.
The previous nice eating chef solely began baking bread throughout the pandemic. He grew up in his mother and father’ eating places on Negros Island within the Philippines, however by no means needed to cook dinner himself. After a nudge from his father, he attended culinary faculty in each the Philippines and Napa, Calif. He finally landed in Orange County, cooking on the Montage resort.
A few years earlier than the pandemic, he stop his restaurant job and began internet hosting elaborate, 20-course pop-up dinners. It was throughout his time internet hosting dinners at Melody in Virgil Village that he was launched to each 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 earlier than the sourdough craze that accompanied the beginning of the pandemic. Evaristo taught himself the right way to make sourdough and began baking loaves out of his residence. In March 2020, when all the pieces shutdown, he already had a baking operation arrange 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.”
A slice of blue corn masa sourdough from 61 Hundred Bread in Santa Ana.
(Karlo Evaristo)
He began with one to 2 loaves a day, posting on Craigslist, the Neighborhood app and Instagram. Restaurant critic Brad Johnson featured the bread within the OC Register, and shortly, there was a two-week wait record for the sourdough boules.
Evaristo moved all of his eating room furnishings into his front room, and changed it with a prep desk and a 50-quart mixer. He scaled as much as 120 loaves per day. However with everybody making sourdough, he wanted a strategy to set himself aside.
“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 realize a deeper blue coloration. However it wasn’t fairly proper. He thought concerning the nixtamalized corn in these blue corn tortillas and began 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 used to be equally floored after I tried it, and made a plan to go to the bakery to purchase a boule of my very own to take residence.
There was a line after I arrived early on a Sunday morning, but it surely moved rapidly. The loaves of bread are the very first thing you discover once you open the door, the numbers 6100 written in flour on the floor. You possibly can simply see the violet peeking by means of the highest of the loaf, the place the bread is scored earlier than baking.
The aroma of blue corn tortillas crammed the automobile throughout the 51-minute journey again residence.
I recommend you could have a meal at Le Hut Dinette, and order the bread and butter. And go to the bakery to purchase a loaf to take residence. If you would like that very same crispy crust and tremendous fluffy center, each Garlitos and Evaristo recommend slathering a slice with butter and toasting it in a pan. Nevertheless many slices you find yourself consuming in a single sitting, is as much as you.
The place to seek out 61 Hundred Bread’s heirloom blue corn masa sourdough
61 Hundred Bread, 728 N. Poinsettia St., Santa Ana, www.61hundredbread.com
Le Hut Dinette, 730 Poinsettia St. N Unit A, Santa Ana, (714) 450-5600, lehutdinette.com
Somni, 9045 Nemo St., West Hollywood, www.somnirestaurant.com
