A conversation with Jordan, one of our head bakers
There's a question we get asked more often than any other: what's actually in your bread? It sounds simple. For Jordan, the answer is both very short and very deliberate.
"Flour, water, salt, and time. That's it."
And our pride is in saying “That’s it”, in having just those three ingredients anybody can read. Because before we talk about what goes into our bread, Jordan wants to talk about what doesn't.
A list of what we refuse
Every bakery makes choices. Ours start with a list — not of ingredients we use, but of ingredients we ban. Some of those bans are legal requirements. Certain food colorings, like Red 40, are prohibited under California's FDA regulations. But we don't stop there. The moment something is flagged anywhere — any state, any country — it gets removed from our supply chain everywhere. "The standards of our most demanding market become our standard everywhere," Jordan says. It's a straightforward principle, and it shapes every purchasing decision we make.
Then there are the bans we impose on ourselves. The most important one: no améliorants. In French baking, an améliorant is a bread improver — a chemical additive used to make dough more elastic, more forgiving, faster to process. They're legal. They're widely used. And we won't touch them. "An improver is an additive, and an additive is a shortcut," Jordan says. "We don't take shortcuts." The result is a dough that demands more attention, more time, more skill — and bread that tastes like bread.
The same philosophy extends to eggs. We use cage-free eggs, not because it's required, but because it aligns with the ethical standards we hold ourselves to. These are the kinds of choices that don't appear on a label but that matter to us, and increasingly, to our customers.
Organic, from the ground up — for our breads
Every ingredient that goes into our breads is organic. That's not a marketing line — it's a sourcing constraint that Jordan and the team take seriously, including when it makes the job harder.
Take flour. Most of what we use is American, sourced locally and milled to spec. But not everything we need exists here. Certain heritage grains — like petit épeautre, a small, ancient variety of spelt that's been grown in France for centuries — simply aren't available in the United States at the quality we want. So we import them. It adds complexity, cost, and logistics. Jordan doesn't see it as a complication. He sees it as a non-negotiable.
"There's no substitute for the right ingredient," he says. "If we can't find it here, we find it there."
What makes this more interesting is that flour isn't a stable ingredient. It changes across the year in ways that most people never think about. When wheat is harvested, it's full of water. Over the months that follow, it dries out — slowly, unevenly, depending on storage conditions and climate. That means the flour Jordan and Jean-Michel work with in January is a different material than the flour they work with in September, even if it comes from the same mill, the same variety, the same bag. The team has to account for that every single day. Jean-Michel will tell you more about that when he walks you through the baking process — it's one of the reasons working at this level is as much intuition as technique.
The question of butter
If flour is where Jordan gets philosophical, butter is where he gets precise.
All our viennoiseries — croissants, pain au chocolat, all of it — are made with pure butter. No margarine, no vegetable fat blend, no substitutes of any kind. This is standard for any serious French bakery, and we hold the line without exception. Our viennoiseries don't fall under the same organic sourcing requirement as our breads, but the quality bar is no lower.
We set a minimum fat content of 82% for the butter we use, and actively target 83%. In France, butter is legally required to contain at least 82% fat. In the United States, the minimum is 80%. That gap matters more than it sounds. The higher the fat content, the less water there is in the butter — and less water means better lamination, better texture, better flavor. "The fattier the butter, the better the butter," Jordan says, with the kind of certainty that comes from having tasted the difference thousands of times.
It also affects how the butter behaves in the oven. A lower-fat butter releases more steam during baking, which can make layers stick together instead of separating cleanly. When you bite into a croissant and the layers shatter apart, that's not an accident — it's the result of a sourcing decision made long before the dough was ever rolled.
Why this matters at scale
One of the genuine challenges of running a bakery that ships frozen bread across the country is that the ingredient standards have to hold at volume. It's easy to be rigorous when you're baking twenty loaves. It's harder when you're baking hundreds, sourcing from multiple suppliers, managing seasonal variation in flour, and ensuring that the bread someone receives at their doorstep in Washington, D.C. tastes the same as what they'd find in one of our nine locations.
Jordan's answer to that challenge isn't a system or a checklist. It's a mindset, shared across the whole team. "The expectations of a new customer become our norm," he says. "We don't lower the bar because something is difficult."
That's the standard we hold ourselves to. And it starts, every single day, with what goes — and doesn't go — into the dough.
We mentioned that the four ingredients of our bread are flour, water, salt, and time. But what do we mean by time? Florian explains — it starts with a living culture that's been part of our bakery since the very beginning, and it changes everything about how our bread tastes, rises, and digests.