Maurice Sendak’s book In the Night Kitchen features Mickey, the main character, whose body gets covered in a suit of baked batter. He bears a slight resemblance to the chubby toddler on Milk Belly Bakery’s signage. Both images evoke the pleasures of eating baked goods, especially when they’re still warm from the oven.
Milk Belly is a compact, bustling space. A few bistro-sized tables are lined up beneath a wallpaper with a palm frond motif. Enclosed in glass, the front counter displays fresh bread, scones and cookies. It’s the first set of enticing visual cues which suggest there’s even more to choose from behind the kitchen’s closed doors. The menus sit on top of the counter with short lists of sandwiches and toasts.
It’s easy to identify co-owner Jason Venters as he moves from preparing orders to greeting customers while also explaining the various kinds of breads for sale on any given day. He’s a tall man endowed with a prominent beard and a genial manner. Venters runs Milk Belly with his wife, head baker Maria Belzunce. After cooking stints in Los Angeles and Napa, the couple, both longtime veterans of the culinary industry, moved to Santa Barbara with their young son. That’s where Milk Belly started.
At the time, there were no Asian bakeries in the area. “We tried out our black sesame kinako sourdough, the purple rice sourdough and some scones,” Venters, who is half-Japanese, told me in a phone interview. People really responded to what they were making. “Pretty early on, we started to get a substantial amount of [online] orders, which was promising for us,” he said.
Kinako is a roasted soybean flour and one of several ingredients Belzunce incorporates into traditional sourdough loaves. In addition to their popular Japanese milk bread (which rises high like brioche), Milk Belly makes versions of sourdough bread with ube and coconut, hojicha and honey, and a mochi porridge loaf. Venters grew up in San Jose. He introduced Belzunce to kinako at the local bakery Shuei-Do Manju Shop on East Jackson Street.
“The Manju Shop makes Japanese tea cakes,” Venters explained. “One of them is just basically covered in kinako with a lima bean filling.” It became one of his favorite things to eat. When Belzunce tried kinako for the first time, she immediately wanted to figure out what to do with it. Her black sesame and kinako sourdough is an unusual pairing but for Venters, “it just has that comforting feeling for me.”
After Milk Belly proved to be viable, Venters and Belzunce decided to move to the San Jose area to find more affordable housing and to be near Venters’ parents. Once in San Jose, they restarted Milk Belly in a ghost kitchen. The barrier to entering the retail market is lower in a ghost kitchen because there’s no initial front of house costs.
Third-party delivery apps, they discovered, don’t lend themselves well to bakeries. “If you’ve ever asked yourself, I’m going to get some baked goods today, you never really think I’m going to order on DoorDash,” Venters said. “You want to go to the bakery, right? You want to see the case as part of the whole experience of what you’re buying.”
Venters’ toasts are things of beauty that would likely not survive a delivery driver’s race across town. The chef had placed microgreens and delicate slivers of cucumber and radish in and around the avocado on my toast order ($15). The vegetarian ingredients in a green machine sandwich ($15) were also carefully cut and arranged between the slices of bread. “I don’t like to get sandwiches where all the flavor is in the middle, and there’s nothing on the ends,” he said. “Balance is the most important thing to me.”
For Pi(e) Day on March 14, Milk Belly featured an array of splendid looking pies that, at this unfortunate point in time, aren’t regular menu items. Looking longingly through their online photos, I’d be eager to try slices of Belzunce’s Hong Kong style egg custard, the Vietnamese tiramisu egg cream and the Dubai pistachio cream.
Venters said that her Milk Belly recipes are an expression of what she’s always wanted to do. “But [in the past] she was told, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work.’ Now she’s just like, ‘I can do those things.’”
Milk Belly Bakery, open Wed through Sat 9am–3:30pm. 30 E Santa Clara St #110, San Jose. 408.691.1506. IG: @milkbellyca. milkbellybakery.com
