With a tiny herb garden along one wall and well designed signage and parking out front, a family bakery, Roggenbrot, that produces artisan bread opened three months ago on a quiet street a few blocks from Plaza Mexico in Guadalajara.
“We make bread here that is very different from what people in Guadalajara are accustomed to,” explained Adriana Sanchez in a friendly, lilting voice. Sanchez handles sales, marketing and almost everything except the actual baking, which is the bailiwick of her young-looking mother, Myriam Navarro.
Navarro, besides having a grandfather who was a baker and taught her the craft, has had the good fortune of visiting on three occasions her brother and his family in Germany, where she studied breadmaking informally. She also attended culinary school in Guadalajara.
Roggenbrot means rye bread in German and indeed, the baker and her daughter note that they use a lot of rye flour (and other whole flours and seeds) in their many varieties of bread, including a few streusels, streudels and other sweet bread, which Navarro plucks daily from the large oven.
“Rye flour isn’t available in Mexico,” Sanchez explains. “So we import it from the United States.”
In fact, a lot of Roggenbrot’s ingredients are unusual. “We look for ingredients that don’t have preservatives, colorants, additives or things that make the bread spongy.
We use sourdough starter. It’s a much slower process than normal and the bread is firmer.”
Sanchez laments that, although Guadalajara has a fine tradition of birrotes, small white-bread loaves in the French tradition, nowadays local breadmaking is becoming more industrialized and mechanized.
Navarro says that everything at Roggenbrot is done by hand except for the initial mixing, which is accomplished by a small machine that sits below a sepia photo of her grandfather taking bread out of an oven, just as she does many times every day.
She has three daughters in all, and the others occasionally work in the bakery alongside Sanchez. Besides bread, the family crafts a line of jam and chutney (with less sugar than most) and a line of butter to which chipotle, garlic or fruit has been whipped in.
Navarro said they don’t yet make gluten-free bread but probably will in the future, since there have been so many requests for it.
Full size loaves of bread sell for around 35 pesos, jam for 55 to 65 pesos and special butter for 30 pesos.
“We like what we do!” Sanchez emphasizes. “And we try to spoil our clients.”
Roggenbrot, Homero 125, two blocks south of Plaza Mexico, Colonia San Jorge, Guadalajara. (33) 1812-7042, www.roggenbrot.com.mx. To check the bread of the week, see Facebook, Panaderiaroggenbrot. Open Monday to Friday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Sunday. Credit cards accepted.