Bread News
Fine-looking new bread in Dallas is being baked at Oak Cliff coffee shop
For the serious bread set, there's a new sourdough in town called Candor Bread that's an offshoot of Davis Street Espresso, the coffee shop and roaster in Oak Cliff.
Davis Street has always offered pastries and other treats at the shop, along with bread for sandwiches and toast made on site by baker Laura Blomstedt.
But in the spring, the shop began selling full loaves of their classic sourdough. The loaves are available Friday and Saturday at the shop, although quantities are limited, requiring that you arrive early.
In late May, they inaugurated a subscription service, where you can sign up ahead of time and have a fresh loaf or two baked expressly for you, ready to be picked up on Friday.
"We've always made everything in house — and that included sourdough bread, solely for what we served in the cafe," says Davis Street general manager Will Riggs. "But there had always been the hope of launching that as a bakery enterprise and selling loaves to customers. This is our first avenue outside of using bread for toast in the shop."
Riggs says they spent "years" nailing down the recipe. "It's a beautiful bread — sourdough with a crisp, hard outer crust, a textured, chewy center, and a nice tang," he says.
The starter is always an important component; they got theirs from a regular in the café. "But it's been picking up things in the air here," he says.
One big step was the acquisition of an oven, a big improvement over the "tiny little ovens" Blomstedt relied on for years. "A few months ago, when we developed bakery side of café, we got a large deck oven, and now you can see Laura baking all the loaves."
They've started with a classic white sourdough, and will eventually add a whole wheat and a chocolate sourdough made with 5 Mile Chocolate, their own bean-to-bar chocolate offering.
The subscription not only guarantees you get your bread, it helps them gauge demand. "Having a subscription also gives customers more flexibility," he says. "If you've ordered the bread, it means you can come in whenever you want."
Candor is just the latest in the good-neighbor grand plan of Davis Street founder Shannon Neffendorf.
"The vision is to find things that Oak Cliff is missing," Riggs says. "Coffee was part of that, 10 years ago. We introduced chocolate last year. We were already making bread, and people would ask, 'Can I buy this as a loaf?' When we saw that void, it seemed easy to take that step to help take care of people around us right here."
