Passion, artistry baked into Desert Bread pop-up’s sourdough, pastries and cakes
On Saturday morning, when most of his neighbors on a quiet block near Sunset Park are sleeping in, Brett Boyer is up at 3 a.m.
In the early morning hours, Boyer toils away at elephant heart plum jam in a Parisian copper pot, rotates batches of intricately layered croissants in and out of his solar-powered oven and tops chocolate chip cookies with salt flakes.
By 8 a.m. a modest group of neighbors has gathered in a socially distanced crowd in the driveway, waiting for the Desert Bread pop-up to open and Boyer’s pastries, sourdough breads and photo-ready cakes to be available for purchase.
Rising ‘Bread’
Boyer got his start in 2011, when his husband and business partner, Brendon Wilharber, gifted him a KitchenAid mixer.
“I told him all I wanted to do is bake,” Boyer says. “It was only two weeks into knowing me. He helped me realize my dream.”
Encouraged, Boyer knocked on the back door of Chez Panisse, the Alice Waters restaurant in Berkeley, California, heralded for being at the forefront of the farm-to-table culinary movement.
“It fit my ethos,” he says. I believe in the slow food movement, of not messing with ingredients.”
As a novice baker, Boyer was invited into the kitchen as an unpaid intern and spent his days learning baking techniques and the value of quality ingredients from the restaurant’s pastry chefs.
“Not everything can be learned in school,” Boyer says.
After Chez Panisse, Boyer worked as a pastry chef at other restaurants in the Bay Area.
When it came time to buy a house together, they turned to their home away from home.
“We would come here every four months when we lived in Oakland,” Boyer says of Las Vegas. “Brendon proposed at the Bellagio fountains. Vegas has always been a part of our story.”
After moving into their Las Vegas home in 2018, Boyer set to work realizing his dream of running his own bakery, focusing on masterful pastry and locally sourced produce.
“He’s a squirrel,” Wilharber says. “He’s always been able to find the things he needs. Finding producers and farmers and vendors is just what he does.”
The only ingredients that come from overseas are the butter, which he buys from Normandy, France, and the fair trade chocolate he buys.
Ingredients he can’t find locally — such as figs, peaches, purple mustard, scallions, grapes and kumquats — he grows in his backyard.
Pivoting to pop-ups
Boyer and Wilharber have been operating their home-based bakery since 2018 when they first started selling fresh loaves of sourdough bread at a Henderson farmers market.
“I remember the first time I sold out, I wept,” Boyer says. “My food is my passion. I really care. And it felt so good to see that people want this.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic complicated their efforts to serve large gatherings of people, they revamped their dormant website and launched their twice-weekly pickup and delivery pop-ups.
“Everything we bake here, we make from scratch. And I mean from scratch. I know the trees the fruits come from. I know they’re not sprayed with pesticides. The wine used in our pear and red wine upside-down cake is made with locally grown grapes,” Boyer says. “And because of Nevada’s cottage laws, we can sell anywhere on our property.”
Boyer’s favorite baked goods are the pastries he makes using a simple dough laminated with countless thin layers of French butter to create a pastry that is flaky, soft and buttery — fit for filling with prosciutto and fontina, sweet potato and pesto or almonds and icing.
“If you’re getting quality ingredients and know the people growing it, you don’t need to cover it with garnish.” 5530 McLeod Drive, Las Vegas. desertbreadlv.com