YEAST
MEETS
WEST
AT BREADWORKS
BY KAREN MITCHELL
Larry Domnitz loafs around. Photo by Megan Newton
In the beginning, it was like any venerable bread recipe: Gather the
best ingredients, knead with a light but firm touch and proceed with
certainty.
When I first met Larry Domnitz in early 1995, he had just opened
his bakery, Breadworks, at the same Community Plaza North
Boulder address it claims today. It was strictly a walk-in retail operation, devoid of a proper counter or even a single chair where customers, tantalized by the aroma of baking bread, could linger to
savor the fleeting bliss of a still-warm baguette on a winter’s day.
But Domnitz had procured the basics—a card table and folding chair
for his office—and he was eager to show off the essential element: a
Llopis wood-burning brick oven, imported from Spain and built onsite in Boulder with help from an oven-builder imported from
Barcelona.
“The Llopis is still the only oven we bake bread in,” he says. “It is an
Old World oven but for environmental reasons we installed a gas
burner. The temperature averages 500° and the oven has been hot
continuously since January 1995.”
I interviewed Domnitz several times over the ensuing years, mainly
for the food pages of the Boulder Daily Camera, and as Breadworks
EDIBLE FRONT RANGE | WINTER 2009
47
evolved into a full-fledged bakery/café, so too did his passion and
commitment for bread-making. From the time he decided to open a
small food business—his first desire was to be a baseball player—
Domnitz had settled on bread.
“I come from Milwaukee and had been involved in non-food-related
businesses in Florida, California and Texas,” he says. “You couldn’t find
good bread anywhere in Southern California in the late ’80s and early
’90s; this was before the advent of the artisan bakery movement. I
taught myself how to bake bread for my own personal consumption
and as I did, it took on a life of its own as I learned about organic
flours and natural starters. I got caught up in baking and I remembered
how much I loved it when my grandmother or mother baked birthday
cakes, mandel bread [almond bread] and challah.”
Domnitz’s first professional baking experience was at the renowned
Gayle’s Bakery in Capitola, California. He then apprenticed himself
at a small artisan bakery in Alexandria, Virginia, where he gleaned
experience on production techniques.
“Boulder just seemed like a town where my business could do well,”
Domnitz says. “There were not many bread stores here. It was kind
of risky—I funded it myself—and the equipment was expensive but I
bet the farm.”
At first, as sole bread baker with about a baker’s dozen of employees,
Domnitz kept his place bread-centric. “I started with a pretty full
lineup of breads,” Domnitz says. “I like doodling with numbers and
I had learned how to formulate bread recipes based on several European traditions, from dark German breads to Irish oatmeal breads,
more than 20 varieties. Our pastries were pretty basic but our
brownies have been a hit since day one.”
Now, with some 65 employees, Breadworks offers close to 40 kinds
of loaves and rolls, some baked daily and others on a rotating basis,
complemented by an impressive pastry lineup. The bakery/café has
grown from 2,200 square feet to 8,500 square feet, with the most
ambitious expansion in 2005 that enlarged the café, a destination for
dining as well as for myriad take-home salads, hot dishes, baked
goods and soups.
“Our customers and their tastes have changed as we have morphed
into a café,” Domnitz says. “We’ve gone more to the lighter breads
such as ciabattas and we notice that more of our customers ask for
wheat alternatives such as spelt. We’re also doing more hybrids using
both starter and commercial yeast, to make light rye, a whole grain
and semolina with cranberries.”
As the Breadworks café business has shown steady growth, the
wholesale percentages have fluctuated cyclically. “We wholesale to
various local restaurants in Denver and Boulder including Q’s
Restaurant [in the Hotel Boulderado],” he says. “Q’s chef John Platt
has served it exclusively for more than a decade.”
The most important addition is that of Breadworks executive chef
Colleen Doran Domnitz, the Minneapolis-born, classically trained
chef whose credentials include stints at Chez Panisse, the Flying Fish
restaurant in Seattle, and the Herbfarm in Woodinville,Washington.
A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New
York, she walked into Domnitz’s life at Breadworks in 1995.
“I was in the back mixing rye mother for rye breads and Colleen
came in looking for a bread purveyor for the Gold Lake Resort,” he
says. In early 2000, he recalls vividly, Doran stopped in again. “She
said, ‘It’s busy here. Would you like some help with the food?’ I said,
‘Are you kidding?’ We were married on Valentine’s Day 2006. That
the café has been the most successful part of the business is 100
percent Colleen and the fact that she has developed such a talented
staff. The two best decisions I’ve made at Breadworks were to choose
this location and to have Colleen play such a key role. Judging from
what I’ve seen over 14 years, there are not a lot of small independent
baking businesses that have been open this long.”
The café’s selections include hot breakfasts such as oatmeal with flax
seeds and millet, scrambles, warm cinnamon rolls, and quiches.
48
EDIBLE FRONT RANGE | WINTER 2009
Around 11 a.m., the lunch crowd comes in looking for thin-crust
pizzas, paninis, curries and rice, and soups. Gelato and sorbet
augment the baked goods.
“My goal was to create delicious, healthy foods at a value our customers appreciate so that they would feel comfortable coming in here
several times a week,” Colleen Domnitz says. “We created a real variety
including our tossed salads, which took a couple of months for customers to get used to seeing here but are now among our most popular
items. I think we’ve hit it by providing a sense of community; people
like to hang out here with their particular social circles.”
Now we’ve baked about 8 million pounds of hand-shaped bread and
for a small neighborhood bakery, that’s a lot.”
Breadworks
303-444-5667 • 2644 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80304
Karen Mitchell is a Boulder-based freelance journalist who views
cooking with shallots as a lifestyle.
Breadworks dishes are made with local and organic ingredients
whenever feasible. Flour, though, comes from North Carolina.
“I was introduced to the owner of a small organic mill there when I
apprenticed,” Larry Domnitz says. “He sent me grains for my recipe
testing and I got some I liked; they were consistent. I’ve been with
him ever since. The flour is delivered to us as ‘Certified 100-Percent
Organic Breadworks High Gluten Bread Flour’ and he also supplies
our whole wheat, multigrain mix, rye flours, and our white and
whole spelt. He agrees not to sell to anyone else in Colorado and, because I’ve been loyal, he has helped with price.”
Over time, Domnitz has sampled flours from local mills but none has
matched the original supplier in terms of oven spring and crust shine.
“We don’t hop purveyors across the board,” he explains. “Relationships
are very important in this business, and it’s not just about price.”
Chatting with Domnitz these days, amid the Breadworks bustle of a
busy weekend, he finally lets me in on the truth about his seemingly
stress-free opening on Valentine’s Day 1995.
“Getting the lease signed for this shopping center space was a long,
drawn-out process, in part because the center was being remodeled,”
he admits. “But I had to order the Llopis oven; in Europe, if you
don’t order by July everyone goes on vacation. I pulled the trigger
and ordered it with a leap of faith. Finally, a semi pulled up here in
December of 1994 with the oven materials and the landlord let us
bring it off the truck into this space, which was small at the time.”
Two days before the scheduled opening Domnitz arrived at the
bakery at 5 a.m. and saw fire on the Breadworks floor, ignited from
rags left in a plastic garbage can that combusted. Without his key,
which he had loaned to a workman, he rushed to Vic’s Coffee Shop
to call the fire department.
“We delayed the opening to get the soot off the ceiling,” he recalls.
“The oven was fine. It ended up to be just a little bump in the
history of Breadworks but at the time it seemed like life was over.
EDIBLE FRONT RANGE | WINTER 2009
49