Every morning at 5 a.m., Michael Lanasa is already at work, his hands deep in dough.
As owner of The Breadery -- a month-old bakery on U.S. 40 in
Ellicott City -- the Catonsville resident helps knead, stretch and shape some 200 to 400 loaves of bread a day into perfect rounds.
The bakery says it's the only one in Howard County that mills its own wheat.
Working with his employees to produce 17 varieties of bread -- ranging from $2.95 to $4.95 -- Lanasa, 42, faces continual deadlines that begin at 7 a.m. when The Breadery entices its first customers with its ovens' first yield, hot rolls and muffins.
"Baking bread is more of an art than a science," says Lanasa who spent 1 1/2 years visiting about 20 bread-making businesses -- tasting, testing and learning about the five- to six-hour production process. "It's all time, temperature and humidity, and the key is a long rising time, plus each loaf is hand-kneaded and -shaped."
In addition to learning about the process, Lanasa also researched the history of bread-making.
"There's a whole education that people have lost, beginning with bread recipes that started with the American Indians," he says.
Lanasa plans to have tours of his bakery for children's groups. He has researched the mill-town history of Ellicott City and has decorated a wall in The Breadery with historical information that covers a cross section of the first flour mills in Ellicott City.
Lanasa says his interest in bread-making began two years ago when he was in Cincinnati looking for ideas for a new business venture and discovered a family-operated bread-making business that milled its own wheat.
"I saw it, I tasted it, and I thought, 'Why not a bread-making business in Howard County?' " says Lanasa, who earlier owned and sold a retail business specializing in wood stoves in Anne Arundel County. He says he chose Howard because of its upscale demographics and because his Catonsville home is only 10 minutes away.
In July, he found a 2,900-square-foot warehouse between two fast-food restaurants and began designing a layout and cleaning the warehouse. "We filled up two 40-cubic-yard Dumpsters with concrete," he says.
The result is a bright, open room with lots of windows that allow customers to watch the entire bread-making operation, from the 45-minute process of milling the wheat to shaping the dough.
