Sunset Magazine – Living in the West
Muffins in Agoura Hills -(Article in the current issue of Sunset living in the west Magazine)
The average carb lover probably heads straight for the bread at StoneGound Bakery. The challahs, sour-doughs, and multigrains- made with whole-wheat flour ground on-site – are delicious.
But the more advanced bakery aficio-nado goes instead for the muffins: big as softballs, golden-domed, and crunchy in all the right places. The sticky-sweet honey bran one gives roughhead a good name.
Come for your morning coffee, and you’ll get a sense of a honest bakery hard at work. Muffins $2.55; stongroundbreads.com
- Alan Phinney
Kosher Oatmeal Cookie Recipe
Stone Ground Bakery’s Kosher Oatmeal Cookie Recipe: Post-Holiday Baking
-By Amy Scattergood
Stone Ground Bakery in Agoura Hills, just off the 101 between Calabasas and Ventura, is one of those L.A. shopping mall treasures, a great bakery trapped in anonymous concrete that you find only if you know the happy repeat customers–or have exited to get gas and discovered great bread instead. Read more
Where to find us
Stone Ground Breads is located just south west of the 101 freeway on Kanan Rd. in Agoura Hills, CA
Please call directions: (818) 597-8774
Click here: for directions
The Old Fashioned European way
In September 2004, Sherman and Franke took over the space of a former bakery in a strip mall that features restaurants like Islands and the International House of Pancakes. Like its immediate neighbors – a deli and a karate studio – StoneGround is nearly undistinguished in the row of retail businesses. But Sherman and Franke weren’t thinking small when they planned the business. Like any retail bakery, they wanted to feature a case of mouth-watering pastries and racks of delectable breads. But the pair also patterned their layout after up-scale restaurants with open kitchens, so customers are able to watch young bakers rolling out the pie crusts and shaping bread dough.
In their wholesale area, the space is crammed full of racks of beautiful golden breads waiting to be shipped to a variety of natural and specialty grocers. StoneGround Bakery was first approached by Whole Foods to produce kosher breads for their shelves and then added Trader Joe’s as a client. Other markets that carry StoneGround include Gelson’s, Bristol Farms, Lassen’s and Malibu’s PC Green. “These stores are carrying more kosher products today,” Franke said.
As patrons sipped coffee and devoured pastries on the bakery’s small patio, Franke took a moment out of his hectic schedule to sit down. But within a few minutes, he bolted out of his chair and darted back inside to supervise the removal of freshly baked pumpkin and blueberry pies from an industrial oven. When he returned, he held a piece of sugary crust and revealed it was made without sugar.
It’s a challenge to make sugar-free products that don’t skimp on flavor. Not to be outdone, Franke returned into the bakery and returned with a sourdough roll. He pulled off a piece, eager to demonstrate its intense sour taste. “The bad sourdoughs have an unpleasant aftertaste. We played around until we were happy with the flavor. Since we don’t use preservatives, we add honey to the dough to preserve the bread,” he said.
Franke is enthusiastic about being able to mill his own flour. He invites customers in to admire his authentic 30-year-old stone mill. He turned on the mill and demonstrated how his flour still contains all parts of the wheat. In traditional bakeries, mills leave elements on the floor that carries healthy benefits. At StoneGround, nothing goes to waste. “Very few
bakeries actually have a stone mill,” he said, beaming with pride.
The bakery produces a variety of breads, including Nine-Grain, Rosemary Rye, Sunflower and many types of Challah; including a whole-wheat, a chocolate chip, a water, and a jalapeno version, just to mention a few.
805 Living Magazine
Please look for the article about: Stone Ground Breads, featured in the September issue of 805 living magazine.
805 Living is available at your local News stand.
LA WEEKLY Article
Stone Ground Bakery in Agoura Hills: Handmade Challah for Rosh Hashanah
Drive up the 101 past the city, into the hills nearing Ventura, to a little strip mall right off the freeway in Agoura Hills, and you’ll find a bakery that feels unquestionably like Europe and has some of the best challah you’ll find in town or out of it. Stone Ground Bakery, which celebrated its fifth anniversary on Friday, is owned and operated by Abby Franke, a baker who apprenticed in his native Germany and is a former production manager for La Brea Bakery.
That Franke, a Lutheran from Hohenlimburg, Germany, runs a kosher bakery might seem strange at first, until Franke begins telling you about his late business partner Paul Sherman, a first-generation Israeli Jew from Tel Aviv. Together, the two men created a remarkable business, a business that thrives despite (or perhaps because of) some essential paradoxes. Chief among these is the fact that Franke has managed to build a company that distributes nationwide to Trader Joe’s and to some 300 grocers, temples and restaurants locally, yet still makes all of his breads by hand and grinds all of his whole wheat flour in a 40 year-old stone mill jammed into an over-sized closet off the single large room which serves as production facility, workroom, and proofing area for the entire bakery.
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| Photo credit: Stone Ground Bakery |
| A bakery’s bread line |
Franke makes six kinds of challah (plain, sesame, chocolate chip, whole wheat, whole wheat with sesame, and an excellent jalapeño), in addition to many breads (whole grain sandwich loaves, baguettes, rolls), cookies and pastries. Yesterday the bakery also began making honey cakes and the hard-to-find round challah for Rosh Hashanah. (They’ll be available until October 5th.) All of the challahs are braided by hand. In fact, except for the mixing, pretty much everything is done by hand. The almost one million almond macaroons that Stone Ground recently delivered to Trader Joe’s? All formed by hand. And don’t get Franke started on the subject of freezing his products. He does not.
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| Photo credit: Amy Scattergood |
| Bakers forming challah by hand at Stone Ground Bakery |
The bakery has a cozy retail shop in the front, from which you can see the bakers forming breads on the huge wooden table in the center of the building. An enormous German-made MIWE deck oven (Franke said it took them two days to assemble the oven, which was delivered in pieces and carried painstakingly through the tiny glass door in the front of the bakery) sits to the right of the front counter, loaded with coffee thermoses and jars of Austrian-style pretzels. A photo of Sherman hangs on the wall.
Franke says he’d like to expand some day (“you see how small my store is”), but for now he’s happy, churning out millions of raspberry rugelach and making his challah (“I have my secret about how we mix it; we mix it more than once”) and milling as much flour as he can.
Stone Ground Bakery: 5005 Kanan Road, Agoura Hills; (818) 597-8774.
