The oven at the San Juan Bakery is really nothing more than a giant brick box surrounded by sand. There is no thermostat and no internal heating system. The cooking temperature is reached by wheeling over a huge flaming spout and heating it in sections. It takes experience and to become successful at using it, you have to take it on its own terms.
“Basically, we point what we call our ‘torch’ at three different places in the oven,” said owner Dianne Hampton, 72. “We try to get roughly the same temperature through the whole thing, but it is never exactly the same due to many different factors.”
The process starts in the afternoon when the bakers finish the day’s production. The torch, which looks like a giant fire hose nozzle, is ignited and blasts the oven’s interior for three hours. Then the dampers and oven door are closed, and the bakers go home for the day.
At around 3 a.m., Hampton’s son Jesse comes in, and the baking commences. At this point, the oven will be around 350 degrees, and everything must be done before the oven cools down.
“He starts with the pastries in the morning first thing,” Hampton said. “After that, he bakes the French bread and the sweet and other kinds of bread. After that, as the oven cools down, he bakes the turnovers and the cookies. Cooking times depend on how much we bake. Sometimes it will take an hour to bake turnovers because the temperature is so low, and sometimes it’ll take only 30 minutes.”
Hampton refers to her son as the “accidental baker,” as he took on the job when Hampton lost her regular baker after one of the shutdowns during the pandemic.
“We were closed for months because of our mixer being broken and an employee getting COVID,” she said. “The baker we had didn’t want to come back because she found another job, so Jessie stepped in.”
The bakery building was constructed in 1860 and served as a general store. It was the first brick building in town made from brick, which kept it from being burned down when a fire took out the rest of the block in 1867. It was converted into a bakery in 1930. Hampton began working there in 2003 and, along with Jesse, bought the business in 2012.
One of the first things she did was to bring back the recipes used in the bakery’s early days, including the popular blueberry doughnuts, which are only available on weekends. The bakery goes through about 200 of them a day.
“There was a song, back in the day, that they used to play on a radio station in Santa Cruz,” she said. “One of our customers who came in every Sunday told me about it. The song mentioned different things about San Juan Bautista, and one of them was stopping at the bakery and getting a blueberry donut. So we had to start doing them again.”
(“The San Juan Song,” released in 2006 by resident Dayan Kai, namechecks residents, businesses, and local landmarks and indeed includes the line, “And the San Juan Bakery has blueberry doughnuts, fried.”)
The most popular items at the bakery are fruit turnovers. Hampton usually has five varieties of turnovers, and she rotates between apple, apple cinnamon, apricot, lemon, blackberry, cherry, berry, spiced mango, guava, lemon and pumpkin.
“It is all about the apricot, berry, and apple,” she said. “We tried Bavarian cream and chocolate, but they didn’t catch on. We don’t want to get so far stretched with flavors because we end up with too many left at the end of the day.”
The bakery’s french bread is also very popular, and Hampton produces a wide range of other breads, like coffee cake, banana nut bread, garlic cheese rolls, dinner rolls, and, for this holiday season, panettone.
“People have suddenly started asking for panettone again,” she said. “It has been out of favor for a long time, so it was fun to bring it back. And there are other types of bread like that we don’t make anymore, like maple walnut bread and date nut bread that we would like to make again.”
Hampton attributes the quality of the bakery’s goods to the oven and to the homemade approach to preparing the doughs she uses.
“It’s just the bricks and the humidity in there,” she said. “It makes a nice crust on french bread and cooks everything to perfection. And since everything is made by hand, every cookie is like a snowflake because they are all different. And everything is fresh, with no preservatives. If we don’t sell it that day, we take it home with us.”
Though the bakery is one of San Juan’s cornerstone businesses, and arguably the most famous in the region, Hampton is humble about its impact.
“I was happy when they moved the Visitor Center here,” she said. “It made me feel more important to the community. But I think all of the stores and restaurants in town are contributing in their own way. Coming out of the pandemic, things are a bit different, but I think that we all bring something great to the town.”
Heavenly Bites – Hampton’s favorite item, the Heavenly Bites are doughnut holes filled with Bavarian cream and then either glazed or dipped in chocolate or maple frosting. They are extremely delicious but extremely rich—I could not imagine eating more than one or two at a sitting. The bakery also sells glazed doughnut holes, which are sweet, light as a feather, and fluffy. When I buy them, I always get at least three extra because I know I will eat at least that many on the way back to the car.
Jalapeno Cheese Bread – “We had to switch to mild jalapenos because I can’t eat the hot ones anymore,” Hampton said. “You could eat it with anything: peanut butter, tuna, or warmed through with a little olive oil. Some people tell me they make French toast from it.” This is a go-to choice if you are headed off to dinner with friends. The jalapeno gives it a little heat, but it is very manageable. The various levels of browned cheese in the topping provides a nice spectrum of flavors and the moist jalapeno blends in perfectly. It really is a great all-around bread, but I like it best as a dinner add-on, warm with a bit of butter.
Turnovers – When we first started visiting San Juan, my mom and I would always make a point of stopping at the bakery on our first day in town and pick up a couple bags of assorted turnovers to nibble on back at the hotel room. It is hard to choose a favorite, but I like the apricot and cherry ones the best and my mom loved the guava and cinnamon apple. For me, they are best when they have been slightly warmed up or, if you hit the right moment at the bakery, still hot and fresh out of the oven. They are the weekday must-have—I suspect very few people leave the bakery without taking a few with them.
Blueberry Doughnuts – I am evangelical about the bakery’s blueberry doughnuts and I cannot visit the bakery or talk about it without mentioning them. Available glazed or unglazed, these cake doughnuts have a slightly dense break-away texture to them and are packed with blueberries and juice to the point of being a deep purple in color. They are available only on weekends and are worth a trip into town, but come early because they do sell fast. To me, the glazed version is the must-have, just because the glaze seeps deep into the doughnut producing little pockets of intense sweetness, but the unglazed version has just as rich a flavor.
Dinner Rolls – About the size of a small hamburger bun, the dinner rolls are made with the same dough as the French bread, though not baked to the same degree, leaving them chewy but still light in color and texture. They heat up well and make for great sandwiches. I have friends whose invitations to dinner are predicated on me bringing these rolls with me.
BenitoLink thanks our underwriters, Hollister Super and Windmill Market for helping to expand the Eat, Drink, Savor series and give our readers the stories that interest them. Hollister Super (two stores in Hollister) and Windmill Market (in San Juan Bautista) support reporting on the inspired and creative people behind the many delicious food and drink products made in San Benito County. All editorial decisions are made by BenitoLink.
