Empire Baking Company: 34 Years of Baking Bread for Dallas

Empire Baking Company: 34 Years of Baking Bread for Dallas

Written & Photographed by Melinda Ortley

Meaders Moore Ozarow evaluates every restaurant she walks into the same way. She looks at the bread. Not as a supplier checking whether her product landed on the table, but as someone who has spent more than three decades believing that what a kitchen puts in front of you before the meal begins tells you everything about how much they care about what follows. The restaurants that love good bread tend to love good food. When a new bar in Dallas recently started ordering from her bakery, Empire Baking Company, she made a note to go eat there. A buzzy steakhouse whose bread was meh? Checked off the dinner rotation for now.

Empire Baking Company has been making that case to the kitchens of Dallas since 1992. Over half the business is wholesale, fine dining restaurants, hotels, and beloved institutions across the Metroplex. Three retail bakeries scattered across DFW serve as a beacon for anyone who loves a really good loaf, an inventive sandwich, or an afternoon cookie pick-me-up they'll start thinking about while eating breakfast. Thirty-four years, and the thing that drives all of it has never shifted. "Bread is a spiritual thing for me," Meaders says. "It is a representation of care for people and what they do."

There is movement everywhere you turn inside the Empire production facility. Trays roll past on carts, machines run at full capacity, and bakers weave throughout. Supplying 200 discerning DFW kitchens is a serious responsibility. But the easy hum at multiple stations with finished product stacked high and delivery trucks out the back feels unhurried. Nobody flinches when the boss walks in. Music is playing. A hefty family meal is being served.

Many of the bakers have been with Empire for twenty plus years. Chris, the head baker, has clocked in for thirty-three of the bakery's thirty-four. Meaders' head packer was there for the first Christmas and every one since. There is something that happens to a baker over decades, a surrender to the variables they cannot control;  the humidity, the temperature, the dough that needs another hour because today it just does. Meaders and her team have built that ethos so completely into Empire that it has stopped being a philosophy and started being just the air in the room. 

One of the bakers is wearing a flour-dusted Barton Springs Mill hat. She had spent years as a cottage baker, selling at the Dallas Farmers Market, her whole practice built around Barton Springs Mill flour, before finding her way to Empire. We fell into conversation immediately, trading notes on varieties, why this grain over that one. Her eyes lit up talking about all of it. She was a particular fan of Marquis. It felt similar to the kind of excited exchange that happens with a stranger when you realize your grandmothers' secret ingredient is one and the same.

There is one loaf at Empire that people come back for with devotion. The Heritage Wheat loaf, made with Barton Springs Mill Butler's Gold organic stone-ground flour, begins two and a half days before it ever sees an oven: the starter, the high hydration dough that has to be held in proofing baskets just to keep its shape, and the twenty-four-hour cold proof.

She talks about Butler's Gold and the Barton Springs Mill farmers with the same fondness she has for the many hands that make Empire bread sing. This wheat makes the loaf. When the subject turns to the growth of the local grain economy and what it has meant for Texas bakers, her words have weight. She was baking for Dallas some twenty-four years before James Brown first milled a single wheat berry, and she has watched it grow from nothing into something that has changed the way this state bakes.

"I'm crazy about James and what he's doing. He's incentivizing farmers to grow what needs to be grown, paying them to not grow soybeans, doing what is needed."

When Meaders goes home, she makes toast with a portion of Empire's Jalapeno Horseradish Schmear or Pimento Cheese, which carries a bright dose of dill, or she'll make homemade croutons to scatter on a salad. Both are daily reminders of the joy of good bread, and the people who show up every morning to make it.

Visit Empire Baking Company in Dallas, Texas. View locations here.

Butler's Gold is available as organic, stone-ground  Whole Grain, Double (OO) flour, and whole wheat berries.