Plain Jane: Why SF’s most unassuming bakery is also its most ambitious

The proletariat, single-story building I’ve arrived at gives no indication that anyone inside is getting “bougie with the grains,” as Amanda Michael, owner of Jane the Bakery, puts it.

I’ve parked in a lot in San Rafael, not far from a Dollar Tree and Mancini’s Sleepworld, and since there’s no signage, Michael has texted me a picture of a faded green door to make sure I enter the right place. I’m at one of her bakery’s newest commissary kitchens to see her grain mill in action. 

What’s happening behind the green door is pretty extraordinary. Since last fall, Jane the Bakery has been quietly milling its own flour. If you’re a health nut — one who knows that freshly milled flour keeps the bran, germ, and endosperm intact, thus providing the grain’s full nutritional value — this is big news. And if you’re a bread nerd, you probably know that a loaf baked with freshly milled flour has a stronger fermentation and can create the kind of custardy crumb many new-wave bakers aspire to.

But what’s even more amazing about Michael’s project is that the flour she’s milling is not made from just any grain. It is made from Food Alliance certified wheat — a number of varietals that her brother, Cannon Michael, has started growing solely for the bakery at Bowles Farming Company, the family’s six-generation, 10,000-acre property in Los Banos in the Central Valley, a three-hour drive from the city. Most of what the regenerative-certified farm grows is the likes of tomatoes, carrots, watermelons, honeydew, and sweet corn. They also grow organic cotton. Barring just being used for a cover crop, what they haven’t focused on is wheat. Until now.

In fact, in the past few weeks, the team at the environmentally-friendly farm has harvested 80,000 pounds of einkorn, a high-protein wheat and one of the most ancient grains, dating to 8000 B.C. “It grows slowly and has tiny grains,” Amanda says. “But we actually had good success with it.” Amanda has used einkorn from other millers, so she’s excited to start working with the family-grown grain. “We’ll be bringing back an einkorn baguette we’ve done in the past. It always sold out.”

It’s loaf to table but also all in the family. This is the stuff that would make Alice Waters burst into happy tears.

Though their father was a lawyer and their mother wrote children’s books, the Michael siblings, who were raised in Russian Hill, come from California agricultural royalty. They’re descendants of Henry Miller, one half of Miller & Lux, the ranching company founded in 1858 that once owned more than a million acres in California, Oregon, and Nevada. (And, yes, famous enough to compel celebrity chef Tyler Florence to name a steakhouse after it.) Miller was the great-grandfather of the founding stakeholders of Bowles Farming Company. “I think Henry Miller was my great, great, great grandfather,” Amanda says. “But I’m not the best family historian.” 

She’s also not the best self-promoter: “It’s not my strong suit,” she admits, refreshingly. Though Jane the Bakery’s breads are some of the best in the city, she hasn’t cultivated the type of following enjoyed by Chad Robertson from Tartine or Josey Baker from Josey Baker Bread — guys with a bit more bread bravado. She honestly doesn’t seem to have a shred of ego. That means you’d have to be paying close attention to realize that since 2011, when she launched Jane the Bakery on Fillmore Street (a stylish cafe, named after her daughter, serving pastries, salads, sandwiches, and quality coffee), Amanda has quietly grown her brand into a mini empire. 

Today she has a cafe on Larkin Street in the Tenderloin and a Geary Street commissary and bakery. During the pandemic, she took over Clement Street’s Toy Boat. Then, in 2022, she purchased Tiburon’s Sweet Things, a wholesale bakery, and began using the San Rafael-based commissary kitchen for production, turning it into Jane/Marin. She took over a counter in Cal-Mart in SF’s Laurel Village and, in late July, is slated to open her seventh Jane location inside SFMOMA. 

At this point, the bakery produces not just pastries, cakes, and cookies but a couple thousand loaves of bread each day. But things got serious — or “bougie” — when Amanda launched Jane Grain a couple months back. The milling project has its own website, but the shift in her baking is denoted only briefly on Jane the Bakery’s Instagram. The staff has yet to be trained on the details. “We’re getting to it soon,” she says. “It’s a lot of information. We don’t want a barista being asked a question and standing there slack-jawed.” 

At 9 a.m. on a weekday, Amanda greets me at her commissary. Most of the day’s baking has already been done. It’s a typical catering kitchen: fluorescent-lit, windowless, and outfitted with stainless-steel tables and a slew of mixer paddles hanging from a rack. Huge, loud fans are cooling racks of rye bread, so Amanda pulls me into the “frosting room,” full of shelves of colorful sprinkles. Barring a baker who comes in to make chocolate shavings, it is unoccupied.

Amanda is 56, but she could fit right in with today’s twentysomething cool-girl bakers, like Sophie Smith from Butter & Crumble. Her cuffed jeans are just the right amount shredded, and she has on silver Golden Goose kicks and a black tee that matches her blunt-cut hair, pulled into a ponytail. On her forearms are very of-the-moment tattoos: line drawings of a rolling pin on one and a whisk on the other. I ask when she got them. “Oh, dear God — in my 20s?” she laughs. “It was a murky time in my life.” 

Amanda attended UC Berkeley and worked in restaurants while in school. “I just kind of fell in love with them,” she says. “But there weren’t a lot of women. I’d apply for a job on the line, and within like 10 days, I’d be stuck doing desserts.” After she embraced the baking life, “it ended up being great,” she says. “It gave me a lot of autonomy, and I ended up loving the earlier hours.” She got obsessed with bread while doing a stint at a bakery in Tahoe. “I loved the process,” she says. “You make everything, and it’s gone, and you get to start over the next day and make adjustments.” 

Today, between all the Jane the Bakery locations plus wholesale accounts, the dream she and Cannon had been kicking around for five years — to grow wheat for her bakeries on some of the farm’s fallow fields — went from an idea to something viable.

Last fall, Cannon harvested the first crop, which they had cleaned and siloed at a facility in Sacramento. But by next year, they will have repurposed equipment that will allow them to do this on the farm, too. 

From the frosting room, Amanda leads me to the mill, which is located in the back of the kitchen, where one of her head bakers takes a break from rolling out dough for a quick demonstration. He pours hard red spring wheat, which is one of the many varietals they’ve harvested on the farm, through a funnel into the contraption. What slowly comes out the other side in a dusty poof is … flour. There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s a process as old as time. What is spellbinding, though, is the alchemy of it all.

“It’s been interesting getting to know each grain,” Amanda says. “Some are thirsty, and we have to keep hydrating the dough. The Yecora Rojo that we use like an all-purpose flour activates the dough. When you’re working with it, you can feel the spring beneath your hands.”

The durum wheat which is used for 100 percent of Jane the Bakery’s California levain (every one of their 24 types of bread has a different ratio of the milled flour) makes a bread that is sunny and bright. “Older flour can get rancid and lose its earthy flavor. I sound like a kook talking about it,” says Amanda, who’d really prefer to let the bread speak for itself. “At the end of the day, though, it’s got the bran, the germ, the protein — it’s just better for you.” 

There is also magic in the connection. “It’s nice to bring some bread back from the city to the farm,” says Cannon. “The people who planted it and harvested it and nurtured it actually get to eat a loaf of bread from their labor.” 

In most cases, wheat is grown in such quantities that it becomes nameless and faceless. “For Amanda to be able to take direct production from the farm is unique,” Cannon says. “Our supply chain is now directly connected.” Kind of like a brother and sister.