Beautiful crust: Bellacrosta on an expansion mission

Deirdre Hill expertly works the dough – cutting, folding, rolling – before placing rounds in proofing baskets.

Hill is head baker at Bellacrosta Bakery and Fine Foods in Spokane Valley, where bread-baking is a two-day process.

Day one is for making leaven, combining the starter with flour, water and salt. Day two is for dough-making and baking.

Three months after opening, Bellacrosta – the name combines the Italian words for beautiful and crust – already has a waiting list for its baked goods.

The baking facility, in operation since February, is the new incarnation of the bakery once associated with Clover, the restaurant in Spokane’s University District. Now independent of the eatery and 10 times bigger than when it first started, Bellacrosta is increasing production, expanding wholesale accounts and planning to open storefronts throughout the greater Spokane area. The first is slated to open in Liberty Lake this summer.

“It’s a dream that we’ve all created and are seeing come to life in a really, really big way,” said Marta Harrington. She and her husband Paul own Clover and Bellacrosta – they’re minority partners – with restaurateurs Scott and Liz McCandless, who own nearly all Subway and Papa Murphy’s restaurants in Eastern Washington, Idaho and California as well as the Edible Arrangements in downtown Spokane and a test kitchen in Spokane Valley.

They started their baking operation in an outbuilding at Clover, which opened in a renovated Craftsman-style house near Gonzaga University in 2012. The cramped baking shed was about 300 square feet or “maybe even smaller than that,” Harrington said.

When wholesale accounts started picking up last summer, Clover moved its baking operation across the street to an 800-square-foot facility.

Still, it wasn’t enough space.

Renovations began in December on the Spokane Valley building already owned by Conversion Concepts, the McCandlesses’ umbrella company. When the remodel was completed in February, the bakery moved again and changed its name.

The new 3,000-square-foot facility is housed alongside the commercial kitchen where Clover dry-ages its beef for the restaurant. It’s also where Bellacrosta will make its stocks, sauces, spiced nuts, salt and pepper blends, rubs and dressings for retail sales.

The bakery’s first storefront is slated to open in July or August at 1235 N. Liberty Lake Road, Suite 109, near the new Yoke’s Fresh Market.

“We really want it to become a neighborhood gathering place,” Harrington said.

The menu will feature grab-and-go seasonal salads and sandwiches on a half or quarter baguette. The shop will also feature baked goods – tarts, cakes, cookies, pastries, rustic breads – and specialty food items, such as bone broth made from roasting chicken or beef bones for 4 to 6 hours with a mirepoix paste but no salt or preservatives.

“There are no preservatives in anything we do,” Harrington said.

She and McCandless hope to open a second Bellacrosta storefront before the end of the year, and possibly a third. As many as two more are slated to open in 2017. Tentative locations include the South Hill, North Side and downtown Spokane.

Meantime, Bellacrosta invites community members to visit its new bakery. An open house takes place Wednesday. Guests can expect live music, wine, beer, appetizers, pastries and a chance to see the heart of Bellacrosta’s baking operation: a new stone-hearth, circular-vapor Bongard oven, custom-built in France.

It cost about $80,000 and can hold 15 loaves per deck. There are four decks.

Installation took six days. Test bakes began at the end of January. Regular temperature is 500 degrees.

“It’s a hot oven,” Harrington said. “The idea is that’s what gives the bread that amazing spring. The spring on this bread is just amazing.”

Before the Bongard, Clover’s bread “had the beautiful crumb,” she said. “We had the beautiful crust. But what we didn’t have was this lift.”

Baking also took longer. The old oven held nine loaves and took two hours to bake them.

Despite the expansion, McCandless said, Bellacrosta’s focus is on “quality not quantity.” Both he and Harrington credit their “amazing team” of six bakers and eight packagers and delivery drivers. (Clover had two bakers and no delivery people.)

The plan is to share their skills in bread-baking classes, led by lead baker Hill.

“We’ve got artists. These guys have a tremendous skills set,” said McCandless, who already offers classes on salad dressings and barbecue sauces, rubs and brines at his company’s test kitchen.

Head baker Hill – whose specialties include pastries, desserts and cakes, particularly wedding cakes – owned Pine Street Bakery in Sandpoint for 15 years before selling it about four years ago. In the 1980s, she worked at Gayle’s Bakery and Rosticceria, an institution in Capitola, California. This particularly impressed Harrington and McCandless, who want to offer something similar to the greater Spokane area.

Bellacrosta exclusively uses flours from Shepherd’s Grain, olive oil from Sciabica’s California and a natural starter that, Harrington said, “has got a little history.”

The starter originated in Montana and came to Harrington’s family through a friend of her brother in San Francisco. It’s decades old.

But, Harrington said, “Age is not relevant. You can make a beautiful starter in 7 days, 14 days.”

Bellacrosta makes nine different loaves of bread and another nine rounds – from nine-grain wheat and marbled rye to olive, walnut, pistachio-cranberry, garlic-parmesan, sea salt-herb and country white.

“Where we really want to shine and grow is the rustic breads,” Harrington said.

To that end, Bellacrosta hired bread consultant Shaun Thompson Duffy; his former co-workers at Luna, the longtime restaurant on Spokane’s South Hill, still refer to him as “Bread Jesus.”

Duffy ran Boozies Bakery, the now-defunct wholesale baking operation at Luna, which still produces bread for the restaurant and retail sales. Duffy now runs his own business, Culture Breads, and recently led baguette training for the staff at Bellacrosta. He also said he “tweaked” a few recipes to help make breads “a bit more consistent.”

While bread uses few ingredients, it can be tricky to master.

“It’s flour, water and salt – and a lot of care and love,” Harrington said. “It’s physical. It’s mental. It’s your hands, your heart and your body. I don’t know of many jobs where you’re engaging in all your senses all of the time.”

Plus, she said, “There’s chemistry involved.”

Customers will eventually be able to order online. Plus, Bellacrosta baked goods will be available throughout summer at the Liberty Lake and Millwood farmers markets as well as the Thursday Market in the South Perry District.

Loaves cost $6 to $8 each. Six-packs of pastries – such as cupcakes and muffins – are $12 to $15. Look for cranberry-orange and berry scones, apple turnovers, plain and chocolate croissants, cookies, bagels, rolls, pretzels and crackers, too.

Bellacrosta’s baked goods can also be found – among other places – at Nordstrom Café at River Park Square and Rocket Market.

“We were their first retail,” said Alan Shepard, owner of Rocket Market on Spokane’s South Hill.

“They’re very serious about doing good work. It takes days to make their bread. It’s definitely an art. My personal favorite is the rosemary-potato. That fennel-raisin is right up there, too. It’s weirdly good with peanut butter on it.”

Fennel-raisin is also Harrington’s favorite.

“I could eat bread all day long,” she said.