Monday, January 17, 2000

Suzanne Dunaway started Buona Forchetta bakery in her Beverly Glen kitchen, turning a passion for Italian bread-making into a $2 million business.

By: IRENE LACHER

"I really think that's a basis for curing many of our ills--lovers making good food together and having a ritual for joining each other once a day at the table. So I encourage people to get into the kitchen, no matter what they make. Even tuna-fish casseroles, for all I care."

Of course, bread is better in Dunaway's self-illustrated book, the newly published "No Need to Knead: Handmade Italian Bread in 90 Minutes" (Hyperion). The proprietor of the upper-crust Italian bakery Buona Forchetta Handmade Breads isn't the least bit proprietary about her recipes, and insists anyone can make bread with success.

"This cloud of mystique hangs over it," says Dunaway, who's in her 50s. "That's why I wanted to write the book. It's time to dispel those fears. It's time to get people into their kitchen with no knowledge or equipment and plug in.

"Plus, it makes your house smell good."

Dunaway should know. She started Buona Forchetta (which means "good fork," or good food, in Italian) in her own fragrant kitchen in Beverly Glen five years ago. Since then, she and husband Don Carlos Dunaway have built Buona Forchetta into a $2-million business that has earned bravos from foodies in the field and the press.

Gourmet magazine has called her "handmade filoncini (small, long loaves) flavored with hazelnuts and sage or chunky with olives . . . addictive in the same way as really fresh and artful sushi." Mary Sue Milliken, TV host and chef at Border Grill in Santa Monica, says her 9-year-old son, an aspiring gourmet, insists on Buona Forchetta bread for his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

"I love her bread, and I'm always searching it out," Milliken says. "I think it has a fabulous niche in this market because it's so different from a lot of the other more hard-crusted breads that are out there."

Today, Buona Forchetta employs 40 people who produce 4,000 loaves a day--and as much as 9,000 in peak holiday season--for 75 markets and restaurants in greater Los Angeles as well as some specialty breads for caterers. Among the 11 varieties on store shelves are simple baguettes, pane osso that looks like a dinosaur bone and focaccia, a round, flat Italian yeast bread sprinkled with cinnamon.

Dunaway is surfing the last decade's wave of popularity for artisan-style bread--the handmade loaves prevalent in Europe. She discovered them in what she calls her "wild, reckless youth" of the early '60s, when she moved to Viareggio, a small Italian town near Pisa known for its marble. She had gone there to paint, but she also developed a taste for the country's virtuoso cooking and baking.

"It's like a dream--the cool open markets and fresh foods and the gestalt of eating," she says. "Italian bread has a substance to it. It has this incredible integrity, these beautiful holes. It's cool to the touch inside. It's almost creamy, this bread, yet the crust is chewy. It fights back."

Dunaway picked up tips from the proprietor of the neighborhood forno, or communal oven, beneath her apartment. But baking remained a side dish as she pursued a career in illustrating, drawing for Gourmet, Bon Appetit, the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times during the late '70s. Her metier? Illustrations of food, naturally.

It took serendipity to bring out the professional baker in Dunaway. Six years ago, she brought a loaf of focaccia to a dinner party and the hostess popped it into the freezer.

"Later she pulled it out and had it for dinner, at which point she called me and said this auspicious sentence: 'If you don't get this focaccia on the market, you're crazy,' and hung up."

Dunaway baked another batch and took it to her neighborhood gourmet market, the Beverly Glen Marketplace. She asked the owner, Joe Rosa, whether she should go into business.

"She asked me to taste it, and, oh my gosh, it's the best bread I've ever had," Rosa says. "I said, 'I think you should market it and use our place to get it off the ground.' "

Soon Dunaway's kitchen was humming as she filled orders for Beverly Glen. But she didn't leave success to chance. "We sent all my friends' daughters to the store and had them buy all the focaccia and talk about how good it was. We did a terrible thing," she says with a laugh.

Dunaway's inspired naughtiness paid off. She began making the rounds of other upper-end markets and less than two years later moved the operation to an actual bakery--a 2,300-square-foot space on Barry Avenue in an industrial area of West L.A.

By then, Dunaway's husband had decided to stop screenwriting and join her.

"My husband took over one night because I was exhausted, and then he asked if he could come into the business," she says. "This is the one thing I've done all by myself in my life, so it was very poignant and very important for me as a woman that he wanted to join me."

Don Carlos Dunaway, who handles the books, says he doesn't miss his former life. "Writing was almost all pain. I'm having much more fun coming up with ideas with Suzanne, figuring out how to execute them. It's 1,000 puzzles a day."

Dunaway says it took some time, but the couple, now married 25 years, figured out how to negotiate a 24-hour-a-day relationship. "We've worked it out that when you go home and you're headed to the hot tub with a glass of wine, you seal your mouth off with tape," she says. "And if anything about business comes up, we say, 'We don't want to talk about that right now.' "

Four years ago, Dunaway returned to Italy to hone her techniques. She visited Genzano, "a foodie town" near Rome known for its meat-smoking and salami-curing establishments.

"I spent the night there with a couple of bakers and watched them," Dunaway says. "I learned that we were doing pretty much what they were doing, except with better flour. Our flour has more gluten in it. That means bread will be more elastic. It will have more substance to it."

Dunaway is still on the move. She presses the flesh like a politician at store openings and book-tour appearances. And in the spring the Dunaways are planning to relocate again; this time they're looking for a 6,000-square-foot facility that would nearly double Buona Forchetta's capacity and expand into the Santa Barbara market, although there's a limit to Dunaway's dreams. Their share of the local artisan bread market still would be only a fraction of that occupied by Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery or Il Fornaio, the San Francisco-based restaurant and bakery chain.

"After that size, we'd probably stop because we really like to keep the bread absolutely handmade and like home," she says. "You get people thinking about their bread. Do they really want soft, sliced bread or would they rather have something with a little tooth that makes their day a little nicer? You get a little luxury in your life with your bread."

Copyright (c) 2000 Times Mirror Company