On the Rise
In the past few years, Ojai, California, has become a sourdough mother of sorts, giving rise to a crop of bakers who are dedicated to perfecting the art of naturally leavened bread. Here, two of those bakers, one an Ojai original, one fresh on the scene, help us understand the “why,” explaining what it is about the age-old tradition of bread-making that forever altered their courses as chefs. This piece appeared in Ojai Valley magazine.
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It’s just three ingredients: flour, water and salt. But ask Ojai sourdough guru Claud Mann how long it took him to turn those three ingredients into the perfect loaf of pain au levain and you’ll be astounded.
“I’d say it took about 10 years,” says Claud Mann, co-owner of patio restaurant-slash-bakery Ojai Rôtie, recounting the decade-old photos of misshapen loaves that pop up periodically on his phone thanks to Facebook Memories. “Those early ones were the ugliest loaves of bread you could possibly imagine. Through trial and error, I was trying to come up with a baking process that would be consistent — and there was a lot more error than trial.”
Tony Montagnaro, part owner of Ojai’s Pinyon, a wood-fired pizzeria, bakery and natural wine shop, gets the trial-and-error baking thing. He’s been both sourdough apprentice and sourdough evangelist, taking to Instagram Live during the pandemic to trade tips and share photos and stories with other bakers on a similar quest, one that culminates in the perfect crackly crust and the softest, chewiest interior.
Mann’s and Montagnaro’s pursuits may align, but the roads that led them to Ojai sourdough stardom were winding. Mann is a longtime local who’s worn many toques — he earned his chops at the California Culinary Academy and San Francisco Baking Institute, cheffed in kitchens up and down the Pacific Coast, hosted TBS’s “Dinner & A Movie” for 16 years, started a food magazine, wrote for all the other food magazines, worked to introduce scratch-cooked food into local public schools, and then opened Ojai Rôtie, where he serves as head baker. Montagnaro, an East Coast native who grew up in pizzerias and has a degree in microbiology, is new to the Ojai scene, having opened Pinyon with friends in 2021 after co-owning a coffee/bar collective in Philadelphia and then rising through the ranks at retail bakery Village Bread in nearby Calimesa.
These days, both are fully committed to the sourdough craft, churning out consistently perfect rustic loaves (Mann) and the sourdough pastries, pretzels, hoagie rolls and pizza crusts that serve as the foundation for the menu at Pinyon (Montagnaro). But talk to them both, and you’ll hear two different answers to the “Why sourdough?” question. For Montagnaro, it’s a desire to do the right thing, the right way, in every aspect of his culinary life. For Mann, it’s about artistry — an unrelenting pursuit to harness the alchemy produced by those three simple ingredients: flour, water and salt.
The Artist: Claud Mann
When you sit down at Olivella Table & Vine at the Ojai Valley Inn, you’re greeted by a warm mini-loaf of pain au levain, made that morning by Claud Mann and his crew at Ojai Rôtie. Or baked that morning, rather — that loaf (and some 400 others like it) actually started taking shape three days prior.
On the first day, Mann and his cohorts build their levain — that’s the starter, or what some might call a “mother.” (They usually have about five 5-gallon buckets of levain going and each weigh about 40 pounds.) The levain has to mature for a day, so on the second day, they build what they call their “mix,” adding a blend of organic wheat, spelt and rye to the levain. They mix it by hand, stretch it and put it into tubs — and then stretch it again every half hour, creating long bands of gluten that’ll give the bread its trademark texture. It’s then shaped and put into a basket to rise.
And then, on the third day, it’s go time.
“It seems counterintuitive, but you need to have lots of steam for the first 20 minutes of baking,” Mann says. “The chamber will be filled with steam, and after 20 minutes, we let the steam out. And then once it dries out, you've got this gorgeous, glorious crust that’s crackling.”
Every single element of every single step in that three-day process is the result of years and years and years of experimentation — experimentation that started with a broken ankle. “I had a pretty bad bicycle accident and I broke my ankle so badly that I couldn't walk for about a year,” Mann says. “And during that period, I said, ‘Well, I can't really cook, but I could sit at a counter and really try to nail down the style of bread I'd like to make.’ And that was really the thing that got me out of the restaurant as a general chef, and got me into focusing on these three ingredients. You can do a million things with three ingredients. It's this incredible palette depending on your intention.”
At that point, he couldn’t have known that his “intention” was to start Ojai Rôtie with his business partner, Lorenzo Nicola. But stay in Ojai long enough, he says, and you’ll start to see what’s missing — like an artisanal bakery — “and also what real estate is available,” he adds with a laugh.
He also couldn’t have known that the bakery half of Ojai Rôtie — it’s equal parts bakery and purveyor of succulent rotisserie-style chicken and fixings — would be such a huge success. He thought they’d make about 25 loaves a day, and he’d spend the rest of the time in the restaurant’s kitchen. These days, Mann is making so many loaves that he had to find a satellite bakery to house the operation, and has hired a small staff to assist.
“Ojai Rôtie just feels like Ojai,” he says. “It's not slick, it's kind of funky, and we really, really care about the quality of everything, and about taking care of our customers, taking care of our employees. It can't be separated. And that to me is what I’ve always loved about the best Ojai establishments.”
The Changemaker: Tony Montagnaro
Think you can’t eat gluten? Confused about why that rustic whole-wheat loaf you ate on your trip to Europe didn’t make you sick, but American bread does? You should probably meet Tony Montagnaro.
Montagnaro is, at first blush, the sourdough baking brains behind the wildly popular two-year-old Pinyon, which he opened with chef Jeremy Alben and natural-wine guru Sally Slade. But have a conversation with the baker, and you’ll realize that he’s a man on a mission to transform the way we approach the food we choose to put in our bodies (and the way the restaurant industry chooses to treat its employees — and its patrons).
“I don't think your body needs to be harmed in order to enjoy good-tasting food,” he says. “You can quote me on that.”
Montagnaro and Alben bonded during those pandemic-era Instagram Live chats, and realized they had values that aligned and a similar outlook on what would constitute the perfect restaurant: a place where every single thing, from the olive oil that tops the sourdough pizza crust to the cold cuts squished into a healthified hoagie, would be sourced locally from farmers and producers in the valley or made in-house.
Every. Single. Thing.
There’d be no shortcuts or cutting corners at Pinyon — no trading in on quality in the name of quantity. To Alben and Montagnaro, opening in Ojai was a no-brainer: they’d be as close to the source as possible, working with kinds of growers and producers they esteem. Being in Ojai would enable them to make good on their mission — and sourdough just sort of seemed emblematic of that.
“We're trying to make our food as accessible to our customers as possible by having an old-world, artisan style that leaves a lot of the more modernized practices out of our kitchen,” Montagnaro says. “We know from our Google and Yelp reviews that people who have had a really hard time with bagels and hoagies and pizza find themselves completely able to handle all the food that we make — even people who haven't had gluten in decades.”
The microbiologist in Montagnaro is able to explain why. “The longer you let a culture of yeast and bacteria — AKA a starter — ferment in a dough, the more the gluten in the dough gets predigested by the bacteria,” he says. “It basically kick-starts the breaking down of that gluten into nutrients so that when your body gets to it, most of the work's already been done.”
And that’s the thing: while other restaurateurs may have profit margins or marketability in mind, Montagnaro and his crew have your gut health in mind. “And the planet’s health. And our employees’ health,” he says, noting that Pinyon’s staff receives a starting wage of $20 an hour and receives a quarterly share of the profits. “And I think sourdough is a great way to describe that. We could use packages, we could skip steps, we could not go the extra mile with all the starter maintenance and pH monitoring, but we would never even think twice about changing it. And the proof's in the pudding — you take one bite and you're like, ‘This is on another level.’”
As is the case with Mann’s pain au levain, that pizza crust you’re digging into on Thursday at Pinyon started to take shape days ago in the Pinyon kitchen, as did the mozzarella (made by hand from curd produced by a local cheesemaker), the tomatoes (vine-ripened in the Central Valley) and the olive oil (pressed locally at Shear Rock farms).
“I do think that restaurants should be held responsible for what they feed you,” Montagnaro says. “And we think happy people make happy food. And you know what? We’re always in a good mood here.”