Sarmentine is rolling dough when you are sleeping
Alexandra Zandvliet, a Bordeaux native, brings authentic French baking to The Barlow.
It is 3:23 on a Wednesday morning, and I’m standing outside of Sarmentine beside The Barlow’s play area/foam pit. Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club is blasting from the speakers behind me as I look out onto McKinley Street. I am very cold and, as far as I can tell, I am the only person within a football field in every direction. I am also very tired.
While many bakeries finish their products the night before, Alexandra Zandvliet, the owner of Sarmentine is from France, which means that if she was ever to do something so outrageous, she might never be allowed back in her home country.
“A baguette the next day to some people is bread,” she says, walking me into her expansive kitchen. “For me that is a day old.”
The first order of business is to put several variations of molded dough into a temperate proofing cabinet. While she rolls out Sarmentine baguettes on a 50-square-foot steel table with her assistant, she tells me the story of how this establishment came about.
“We liked the spirit and positive attitude of the people here,” she says, elucidating why she and her family liked America when they lived here for two years on her husband’s work visa. “These days in France there is a lot of complaining, and people aren’t always trying to change or fix things. People here are open to trying things differently.”
The only thing missing from the American Dream, she recalls, was the bread. She shuddered at the reckless use of sourdough.
“I tasted a croissant and I was like, ‘This is not possible. Did someone add vinegar to this?’ The French do not have as much acidity in their bread, which lets you taste the cheese and the wine you eat with it.”
Zandvliet needed to use an online French recipe to kickstart her adventure into baking. Over the next few months, as her skills got better and better, friends and friends of friends started asking if they could buy some. But, by this point, her husband’s visa was over, and they had to go back to France.
Upon her return to France, Zandvliet began an internship at a boulangerie. Then she started house hunting.
“We missed our life here so we decided to come back. It didn’t make sense to go back to school to be a midwife, and so I started selling bread at schools and other places before I got too busy with too many orders.”
To handle the demand, Zandvliet opened Sarmentine’s first store in Santa Rosa in August of 2021. A year later The Barlow reached out.
“The location already had this big oven and so it was good timing. With the space, we can do almost all of the baking for both locations here.”
Sarmentine now sells up to 80 different products, including pastries, cakes, savory quiches, French Viennoiseries, and their signature Sarmentine baguette.
“The Sarmentine is a toasted sesame baguette. We toast some organic sesame seeds then we add some water to rehydrate them before adding them into the dough. We also use a French levain and we do a long fermentation…..and a lot of love”
Zandvliet’s work day usually ends around 2 p.m., after which she drives to her home in Santa Rosa, takes a 2-hour nap, and then at some point sinks back into the role of a mother for her daughters.
“The word ‘artisan’ is used very freely in association with lots of products,” Jenna Lamperti, one of Sarmentine’s other bakers, says to me as I’m leaving to take a nap myself. “We make everything from scratch and use local, organic ingredients as much as we can. This is the epitome of artisan.”
Thanks for this informative story.
Thanks Laura, for getting up at that early hour to report on this!