This Iconic Dallas Bakery Still Does Bread the Old Fashioned Way: Behind the Scenes at Empire Baking Company

I’m not a picky eater, but I am tough cookie when it comes to baked goods (pun intended, I’m sorry). I live for the hearty crust of a good baguette, the shattering layers of a perfect croissant, and the buttery crumble of a nice scone. Yet, good bakeries are tragically rare these days – and there’s a simple explanation why.

As Robert Ozarow of Empire Baking Company will tell you, baking bread the old fashioned way is a real pain in the ass. It takes time, it takes skill, it takes patience in spades. But, for this Dallas institution, it’s the only way.

Empire Baking Company was founded in 1992 by husband and wife team Meaders and Robert Ozarow. It’s been serving Dallasites for over 25 years, both with its retail bakery on Lovers Lane and its booming wholesale business. However, throughout three decades of growing from a little bakery to a gluten empire, the company hasn’t changed the way they do things all that much.

It is one of the only bakeries in town which uses a different starter for almost every kind of bread, just because it enriches the flavor. (Starters, by the way, are like little yeast colonies that serve as a foundation for dough. They need to be fed multiple times a day, and it’s easy to mess up. Trust me.)

Empire Baking is also one of the only bakeries which does almost everything by hand – their dough is too sticky to put through machines, but a drier dough wouldn’t taste the same. They use less yeast than most bakeries, making the process slower and more time-consuming. That’s why it tastes so dang good.

And that’s why Empire Baking Company has a long list of Dallas’ top restaurants as clients (Royal Blue Grocery, Abacus, Al Biernet’s, Le Bilboquet, Bolsa, and many others).

We took a tour of Empire Baking Company’s wholesale location to see what goes into making Dallas’ best bread. Check it out in the photo gallery above and below this story.