Moving Making Town Goes Sour
Simi Valley is known for serving as a backdrop for dozens of famous television shows and films, ranging from “Little House on the Prairie” and “M*A*S*H” to Poltergeist and Everything Everywhere All at Once. But now, the craft food culture is taking over the stage as a handful of artisan bread bakers have sprouted up on the scene. Our Daily Bread, Farina Bread, The Baker’s Daughters and Carmela’s Bakehouse are a few notable new bakeries whose founders have diverse backgrounds and baking philosophies, but all fell in love with Simi Valley’s tight-knit community and movie-worthy landscape. They share with us how and why they started their artisan bread businesses in a so-called “sleeper town” where businesses close by 9pm. Perhaps the bakers reveal a transformation happening in Simi Valley, from a tranquil movie backdrop to a vibrant foodie hot spot.
“I believe in this more than anything else,” says Maxx Power of his artisan bread cottage business. He’s been baking sourdough bread for over 10 years with an admirable level of science-geekiness, intensity and love for his community.
To begin, Maxx made his sourdough starter from scratch with flour, water, “natural yeast that’s just in the air,” a little bit of time and a lot of upkeep: “I’m a slave to it. I feed it when it’s supposed to be fed. When I leave, I have to make sure it’s rested properly. It has to stay alive at all costs because that’s what keeps everything going.”
Every couple of years Maxx would challenge himself and try a new baking technique or type of bread he had never made before—until last year, when he had a realization: “There was a real void in the region for real bread, properly fermented bread. And I had the skills and ability to make it happen. For me not to bring that to the town was almost, like, a disservice. I decided the only way for me to do it was to go all in.” So, Maxx quit his managerial job working for manufacturing companies, converted his dining room into a commercial kitchen, and started baking full time.
He notes, “Carmela’s is a team of my daughter and myself. I am a single dad, and one of the reasons I decided to do this instead of continuing my operations career was to be closer to home, with my daughter, Caroline (15), by my side doing this for the people, being part of the community.”
“I enjoy things when there’s always a chance you can fail. The challenge of accomplishing perfectly baked loaves every week—I love it. No matter how many times I load the oven, there’s this flutter of anxiety, of excitement… You can’t ever be complacent; you still have to play it like a guitar and be in tune. Then I open the door to the oven, and look inside, and the bread is all beautiful. There’s nothing like validating all of your hard work. It never gets old. I do this for the people, but if it wasn’t for me getting excited all the time, I wouldn’t do this, there would be no point.”
Maxx currently bakes several dozen loaves, a couple hundred pastries and thousands of cookies every week using specialty stone-ground flours and French Normandy butter, mostly for the Friday Simi Valley Farmers’ market. “I want to be out there with the people in my town, providing a service to the town. People come to the market with this anticipation of hanging out and getting their inside connections to goods because they can only get it there.”
He makes everything the morning of the market, whether it’s his staple sourdough—“It’s so flavorful I have to apologize to customers that I’ve ruined [grocery store] bread for them now”—English muffins—“You’ll never be able to eat a store-bought muffin again… it’s next-level”—pretzel croissant—“They should put me in jail for serving that to people it’s so good”—or just something new he’s working on, like a marble rye loaf this week—“Oooooh, with toasted sesame seeds on top, YES!” The market opens at 11am and most of his breads are sold out by noon, so “be there on time and get yourself in the club.” (If you can’t make it, orders online can be picked up or delivered locally.)
Why did he name his business Carmela’s? “My bulldog, Carmela, goes nuts for bread. I give her a piece of baguette and she takes off running across the house with it and shakes it to death, flipping it up in the air. What makes her the happiest dog in the world is the bread. So when I was thinking about a name for the business, I couldn’t think of anything better than Carmela’s because of my dog and her passion for bread.” The Simi Valley community is fortunate that Maxx shares Carmela’s exuberance and ceaseless passion for bread: “The best part is, someone eats it and I get to do it again tomorrow.”
2020 was a rough year for many people, but not for sourdough bread bakers! Baking seemed to fill the new time spent at home, calm frayed nerves, and in the case of Johnnie and Geovanny Ragsdale, replace lost income. “Johnnie was a massage therapist, so when he wasn’t able to practice when the pandemic hit, we looked into running a home business,” says Geovanny. “By September we completed Our Daily Bread as a cottage food operation. By July, I also left my job as a fundraising executive, which allowed me to help the baking business full time.”
Additionally, they had a few kind benefactors who tasted their bread, loved what they were doing, and helped them to purchase additional ovens and a bread slicer. As word spread between customers and through social media, the Ragsdales soon had over 200 customers a month and were effectively replacing all their lost income since the pandemic started. “We have so much gratitude for our community,” Geovanny says earnestly. “They really championed around us and supported us. Some of them knew us, and some of them didn’t, but we are one of the lucky ones who came out ahead at the end of it all.”
Geovanny has since gone back to work, but Johnnie continues to bake in small batches three days a week. His staple offerings include the sourdough bread that kick-started his business, a sweet raisin sourdough challah that’s a bit denser than traditional Jewish challah due to the fermentation process, and seasonal cakes and cookies.
“I like to educate people,” says Geovanny. “Sourdough from the store shelf is not the same as an artisan sourdough bread. The store shelf bread has preservatives. One of the things we’ve always prided ourselves on is that our products have no preservatives, and everything we make is baked and delivered that same day.” She adds, “Sourdough bread is one of the healthiest bread options people can select because it’s a lacto-fermentation process, so it’s actually a lot easier on the gut.” And their bread is easier on your gas budget: You can sign up to have a large sourdough, a cake and a dozen cookies delivered to your doorstep monthly.
“We like this level of production. It was too stressful baking during the pandemic for so many people. We always redo loaves if they aren’t up to our standards. And Johnnie doesn’t just do a basic score, he makes unique cuts and designs, more artistry than your typical baker. It’s hard to put this much care into bread when production levels are too high.”
As for the future of Our Daily Bread and the artisan bread movement in Simi Valley, Johnnie says, “There are more foodies here than the area is given credit for. There’s a lot of interest in this style of bread. It’s a rough business climate to get started in this area, so I think that’s why there is a proliferation of cottage businesses taking off. It’s such a high bar to jump over to get off the ground.” Geovanny can’t help but interject, “But Simi’s an incredible community.” And with hidden-gem businesses like Our Daily Bread sprouting up in town, there’s incredible bread too!
Yasmin Almeida named her business “The Baker’s Daughters” because she’s proud of her father. He was inspired by the book Tartine Bread, and became “the first person to bring sourdough to Brazil.” Yasmin’s father successfully started and managed four bakeries in Rio de Janeiro. When Yasmin moved to the United States eight years ago, she intended to pursue jujitsu, a skillful Japanese fighting method, and even opened a jujitsu studio with her husband two years ago. However, clearly missing her familial roots in baking, she recently decided to open a café next door to the studio.
Yasmin explains, “Owning a café was always a dream of mine from a young age, even though I initially came to the U.S. to pursue jujitsu. My dad came for five weeks when I opened my business to get me started and help me develop my recipes. He helped me so much. Even my sourdough starter comes from my dad.” Now she is up and running with a full-service café with almost entirely homemade goods, with family still at the core.
“I make everything from scratch; I use a natural fermentation process sourdough with just water, salt and flour. Nothing added. I also make a natural-fermentation focaccia that takes 24 hours and 48-hour pizza dough. I make a French baguette that has a 72-hour fermentation, and a French brioche with a long fermentation.” The tomato sauce, sandwiches, quiche, syrups and even the condensed milk used for a Vietnamese-style coffee are all homemade. She laughs when she adds, “the coffee beans, however, are from Brazil.” But still, those Brazilian beans are roasted at California Coffee Republic in neighboring Moorpark.
Like her father, Yasmin has proven to be a successful baker in a short time period. Her store is busy with 10 employees making about 80 loaves of bread a day. She likes making good food, and educating people about gluten and sugar: “Gluten is broken down during a longer fermentation process and this creates a healthier, lighter bread for people who are gluten intolerant. Without this long natural fermentation process, it ferments inside you, creating distress.”
Thinking of her future, Yasmin would like to grow her bakery: “We have room to bake 200 loaves a day.” Given her accomplishments so far, and the fact that artisanal bread is clearly in her DNA, there’s no doubt Yasmin will achieve her goals and help Simi Valley to become an artisan bread hot spot.
Editor’s note: Farina Bread has closed since the writing of this article but plans to reopen when a new location has been found. Follow them on social media @simifarinabread to be updated on their progress.
Mauricio Salinas has always been picky about his bread. He grew up in Peru, where people buy bread for breakfast, lunch, lonche (midday snack) and dinner, and there’s a bakery on every corner. Yet Mauricio didn’t like the bakery near his house, so he requested that his mother walk several extra blocks to buy his favorite bread four times a day before each meal. His fascination with good bread and love of cooking blossomed, and he eventually enrolled in Lima’s premier culinary school, Le Cordon Bleu.
Since then, Mauricio has tried working in restaurants as a cook, but realized he simply wanted to own his own bakery: “Working in restaurant kitchens is not for me. It’s too stressful; it’s a different energy… I like to work in a more methodical way, step by step. That’s why I love baking bread. I’m not a cook anymore, because bread is a natural product like cheese or wine; you need to think of bread as a natural product of fermentation. So bread is less about cooking, and more about how you control the process of fermentation.” Mauricio continues, “the relation you have with the bread and fermentation is not only intellectual, but also you have to create that sense of intuition with the bread. This is something that only happens when you bake and observe and learn from mistakes. After a while, it’s something you sense.”
At first glance, no one who visited Mauricio’s tiny, unassuming, rented-by-the-hour, “back-door bakery” in a Simi Valley strip mall would know the baker behind the scenes is, in fact, a chef with a world-class culinary background and deep intellectual understanding of bread. His shop, opened in partnership with his fiancée, Maria Plascencia, and sister, Eliana Hawkins, started last year as wholesale for supplying small local coffee shops and switched to retail just a few months ago. Word got out via Facebook and it stayed pretty busy in spite of having room for only two people at a time.
His “dream of owning a coffee shop, with good coffee, pastries, sandwiches and artisan bread; a place where people can sit and have a coffee and a croissant,” may be just steps away.
“Simi Valley is a nice place. It’s quiet, not too many people, not too much traffic. We are getting many good bakers, and many good restaurants. Maybe it will become a culinary destination.”
Editor’s Note: Le Herisson is another new bakery in Simi Valley. See our story from Spring 2023 for more info.
