Bread and Flours is what I've been hunting for since I arrived in Palm Springs: real sourdough,…read morefour ingredients, and I asked before I bought.
Most bread sold in this country is an engineering problem solved with a chemistry set. Twenty-odd ingredients, half of them unpronounceable, all in service of a loaf that can sit on a shelf for two weeks and still pass for food. I've been reading those labels since I got here, and putting most of them back.
So I asked Kristin -- who owns the place with her husband Mark -- what goes into the sourdough. Four ingredients. That was the entire answer.
You can watch the argument for it before you taste it. Mark works behind glass at the back of the shop, which means the bread isn't a product that arrives, it's a process you can stand and watch. Most of what's on the shelves is made there.
The loaf earns a sales pitch it never bothers to make. The crust is hydrated and resists -- it doesn't shatter, doesn't crack apart, and never makes you work your jaw to get through a bite. Behind it, the crumb is tight and custardy, tears cleanly, and holds under work without saturating. The sour sits somewhere between lactic and acetic, neither overbearing nor understated. The bake is blond, the texture substantial -- chewy without ever becoming exhausting.
If you come to sourdough chasing a crust that shatters and blisters, this one will disappoint you. It isn't built for that, and holding it against the loaf would be a mistake. A crust that splinters is a crust that quits the moment you ask it to carry something.
That's the whole test, and most sourdough fails it in one direction or the other. Bread that's lovely with butter and jam collapses as soon as you build on it. Bread engineered for a sandwich is dull on its own. This does both without compromising for either -- plain with butter, or loaded up as a gourmet sandwich with everything inside, and it holds.
Eleven dollars a loaf. Below what this level of craftsmanship could command.
The Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookie is soft, with a properly caramelized exterior and just a hint of sourdough running underneath the sugar. The chocolate manages smooth and sharp at the same time.
The Seasonal Strawberry Oat Crumble Bar is built rather than assembled. The oats are chewy and read as sweet oatmeal, not the dry feed most bars settle for; the strawberry is fresh, tart, and clearly deliberate, nothing like the thick gelatinous jam usually spooned into these things. The crumble is buttery and hydrated just enough that it doesn't lodge in every crevice of your mouth. It sits on a crust closer to a well-baked pie than a bar base, and nothing in it overpowers anything else.
Both did the thing that separates real baking from the industrial version. You finish and you're happy, ready to get on with your day. Not heavy, not tired. Food is meant to energize you, not slow you down. Most of what gets sold as bread does the opposite.
