Exceptional ingredients and finessed technique took Ad Astra from a garage to a local baking empire.

Ron Mendoza knows how to craft a good bite – and one that makes people come back for more. He landed his first kitchen job in Long Beach out of high school and began attending culinary school in Pasadena, which kicked off a successful career weaving between savory and pastry and working at some of California’s top restaurants, including The French Laundry in Napa and Aubergine in Carmel.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that as Mendoza began baking sourdough bread at home and sharing it with friends and the larger Monterey community, that demand exploded and he quickly outgrew his cottage bakery (at that time, his converted garage). That was in 2019. Today, that experiment has evolved into Ad Astra, which now supplies more than 30 restaurants, producing 800 burger buns daily in addition to hundreds of loaves, baguettes and pastries, now with an outlet in Carmel Valley.

“It’s flour, water and salt. I mean, that’s nothing. But then it’s, how do you manipulate it with time and techniques and temperatures to get this product that’s this beautiful, crusty loaf of sourdough bread,” Mendoza says. “That’s not fine dining… but it really changed the way I thought about bread.”

His baking philosophy has always been rooted in selecting the highest-quality ingredients and perfecting technique. “You’re closer to having a better product using better ingredients,” he says, leaning on relationships with local farmers and millers as much as possible. The trick, he adds, is how to let the inherent quality of a great ingredient shine through. Many things he carried forward from his days in fine dining – like flow of kitchen, attention to detail, how to run a business – but chief among them is the importance of cultivating a network of farmers to buy fresh produce and herbs.

Sourcing good quality wheat and flour, however, is a bit trickier. Truly local or regional millers are harder to find – and even more challenging searching for organic – as much of the wheat that’s produced in the United States is intended for large commodity markets like cereal.

Mendoza discovered a small family farm in Turlock that had put up a mill and started their own business in hotter climates near Sacramento, more suitable for growing wheat. Mendoza remembers going out to see it, enjoying bread and jam at their house.

“Isn’t this what this is about? Making a connection with people. I see you. You see us. You come in here. We’ll give you a bunch of bread to take home,” Mendoza says.

That family business shut down after a year, struggling to keep up with the work of running it. Since then, Mendoza has found more small-scale millers nearby that he’s working with now. “If a farmer was like, ‘Hey, I’m growing wheat in my backyard. I can give you however many pounds a week and it’s super fresh,’ I’d be like, ‘Cool. Let’s work this out,’” he says.

The focus on ingredients and quality has been foundational to his success. After outgrowing his garage, he moved into the kitchen of Other Brother Beer Co., running into the same issue of limited space after starting with 40 daily loaves and growing to hundreds during the pandemic. In 2023, Ad Astra moved into its own facility on Alvarado Street, expanding from a modest 400 square feet to nearly 3,000.

With multiple ovens and a large walk-in, as well as space for packaging, Mendoza expanded the team, which now averages nine bakers on bread and eight to 10 on pastry each day. The kitchen, visible to patrons coming into the shop, supports baking pastries for both retail spaces and produces all of their sourdough breads, baguettes and burger buns for wholesale accounts.

For Mendoza, the ability to see the bakers at work allows people to appreciate the craft, and the ingredients that go into it.

“Absolutely transparent. Nothing hidden. Here’s the flour stacked right there. You can see what brand of flour you want. You can see how they’re mixing it, pulling the dough out, how many people it takes to do it at any given time,” he says. “That’s what I wanted.”

AD ASTRA BREAD CO., 479 Alvarado St., Monterey; open 7am-4pm daily. AD ASTRA ATELIER, 319 Mid Valley Center, Carmel Valley; open 7am-3pm daily (except Tuesdays). adastrabread.com