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I second Valley Fresh. They also have these amazing housemade french rolls sold in a bag of 4 or 6, a perfect little sandwich size. They are absolutely the closest I’ve come to a good East Coast style bread (which for some reason is very hard to do way out west?). They freeze well, too.
One word folks : VIOR’S
Ever heard of it? Doulie and Mini have, and I’m sure there’s a lot of other readers out there that have eaten the Vior’s bread.
It was the best of times, ..it was the best of times. The old Vior’s Italian bakery was something really special. I cannot describe it to do it justice, but I will try.
The bakery was down on Gutierrez st/Anacapa. (I think there’s a smoke shop or something like that there now. And that’s sad.) Anyways, when I was a kid we would drive down daily to pick up our shop’s sandwich bread (Ye Old Butcher Shop) before mom would drop me at school. You walk into a hole in the wall and enter into a beautifully-smelling, dark, mysterious bakery-cavern lined on all sides with stacks of freshly-baked (freshly, I mean that, like right outta the oven) bread. Everywhere. Bread, bread, everywhere. Yeasty, in the best of ways. There are hundreds, no thousands, of loaves sacked neatly into large brown bags with all the ends sticking out. But wait..then there were the sourdough and squaw loaves. Stacks of them. Roy and his chief baker – a thin, older gentleman – would provide the best bread the city of Santa Barbara has ever seen.
There’s nothing even close in SB or anywhere near here
It’s not bread, but given that Noemi Pizza closed, this looks tasty:
(I am NOT aligned with them in any way; I read about them yesterday on John Dickson’s Restaurant Guy site)
https://www.independent.com/2021/01/21/peregrine-supreme-at-barbs-pies-is-umami-bomb/
https://www.santabarbara.com/dining/news/2021/01/25/barbs-pies-opens-downtown/
You can make your own sourdough bread. As a COVID-19 home project, I learned how to do it from this website:
http://www.theclevercarrot.com
It walks you through how make your own sourdough starter, which took me four days, and how to make NO KNEAD delicious crusty loaves. It was so much easier than I thought. The Clever Carrot recipe resulted in super soft, crusty bread with a wonderful aroma. Making the starter was an adventure, and at one point it smelled like nasty abandoned junior high school gym clothes.