Grimaldi’s Bakery at Menahan and Grandview. — Photos by Diego Cupolo.

It began with a two-dollar loaf of pumpernickel.

After years of flavorless bleached-flour sponges and overpriced gourmet raisin-flax nonsense, my hunt for decent bread in the neighborhood made an extraordinary leap of progress during a recent visit to the Food Dimensions at Myrtle and Broadway. Having sworn off the supermarket as the last place that would carry bakery-style breads, I was in disbelief when I picked up a new item in the bread aisle and gave it a squeeze, feeling the hard crust give a little, confirming the deliciously soft interior beneath.

	Take a photo tour of the Grimaldi Bakery. Click to begin.

I brought the pumpernickel home and though it wasn’t mind-blowing, it was a good-quality loaf made by people who cared about their product — something previously unavailable in my local food stores. The bread bag read “Grimaldi’s Bakery” and indicated it was made nearby in Ridgewood. Immediately, I began salivating in thought, wondering if the bakery could end my long search for the perfect Italian loaf, a simple bread filled with moist air-pockets encased by a tough, flour-covered crust so flavorful a plain slice could satisfy the most exotic of cravings.

Only a few days passed before I chased my dreams of finding that golden bread right into Grimaldi’s Bakery, located at the corner of Grandview Avenue and Menahan Street. There I met John Quinterno, Grimaldi’s out-of-town delivery director, who gave me a tour of the 36,000-square foot facility while recounting the bakery’s rich 100-year history.

It all started four generations ago when Sicilian-born Vito Grimaldi opened a small wholesale bakery in North Brooklyn. In those days, bread ovens were built in basements, usually beneath the storefront expanding outwards under the sidewalk, to use the ground as insulation for the heat.

“You could always tell where the bakeries were back then,” Quinterno said. “In the winter their ovens would heat the ground around the store and there would never be snow on their sidewalks.”

Over the years, the business expanded as it was passed down through the family, eventually becoming the $15 million operation that it is today. Grimaldi’s delivers fresh bread to about 2,000 customers in the New York metropolitan area and sells its frozen products in 34 states. More than 200 types of breads are made in the one-and-only Ridgewood bakery. Kaiser rolls and hero sandwich loaves are the best sellers, accounting for 40 percent of their store delivery sales.

Everything is made from scratch, all 150 employees live in the area, and one can sense a respect for traditional baking when touring the facility. At one table, I was surprised to see three men hacking away at a 200-pound slab of dough, individually weighing the pieces on the same kind of balance scale Vito Grimaldi might have used, and hand-rolling each portion into perfect soon-to-be-baked spheres. Quinterno said they were making Napoli bread, the large circular Italian loaf that I would soon put to the test.

“We still make these the way Mr. Grimaldi’s grandfather made them when he first started the business,” he said. “Yeast is a living organism and the dough has to be handled very gently.”

But don’t be fooled by the quaint techniques — this is a large enterprise, and the bakery makes between 120,000 and 150,000 loaves a day. Rolls and sandwich breads are made on the high speed line, a contraption that flattens, pinches, flours and rolls small pieces of dough into precise shapes. Prior to being slow-baked under steam in stone hearth ovens, all bread items sit in a fermentation room for 12 hours to let the bread rise naturally while sitting atop corn cones (similar to corn meal) which allow better airflow.

“Sure, we could inject the bread with accelerants like most other bakeries and have the bread rise in five minutes, but the quality of the bread is much better when you use natural fermentation,” Quinterno said. “While it’s a lot more expensive and time intensive, you can definitely tell the difference.”

“This is as much an art as it is a science,” he added.

When the tour was over, I was in a deep state of relaxation as I removed the required sanitary baby blue bouffant cap. Either the repetitive movements of the high speed line hypnotized me or I was mesmerized by watching simple breads being created with passion and attention to detail in the 21st century. Quinterno went back to work and I headed for Grimaldi’s retail store, which is full of alluring Italian desserts and 60-cent bagels, but I could not be distracted from the mission — I had my eyes set on that Napoli bread.

At $3.35 a loaf, the “Napp bread,” as the cashier called it, looked like 32 ounces of hard-crusted bliss. I had learned Napoli loaves are mixed in small batches, about a hundred at a time, and are baked at low temperatures without steam in the radiating heat of a stone and brick, three-deck stepped tunnel oven. I was lucky to get fresh loaf, still warm through the paper bag, and headed home.

Once inside the apartment, I poured extra virgin olive oil into a dish and sprinkled oregano and a little salt on top. Tearing of the first piece off the loaf, it was easy to tell the bread had the right consistencies: a rigid crust that roars when it crumbles and an airy interior so moist it sticks to your fingertips when pinched. With the first bite came a sigh of relief, the end of an era and a declaration of love. This was the loaf that would end my prolonged and painful bread quest.

I grabbed another piece and the simple combination of crunchy and soft was so good I was eating the bread plain, without the olive oil, having flashbacks of long summer afternoons on my grandmother’s balcony in Avellino. Cool days spent barefoot, admiring the surrounding mountains of Campania from a wooden lawn chair in the sun, slowly eating a fresh loaf of plain bread, making crumbs for black ants on the tiled floor below.

With food, satisfaction should never be easy to achieve, making moments of triumph that much better to savor, swallow and digest… funny to think this wouldn’t have happened without a leap of faith in the Food Dimensions bread aisle.