The baker plotting plant-based bakery-cafes
Matt Ricotta launches Manifold Bakery in his SoCal backyard
Baking buds, hi! This is the latest profile of a pastry chef or baker working climate action into their recipes. Have you peeped the chef embracing the “plantry” or the cake artist making desserts on top of glaciers? Not yet, you say?! Well, peep!
On days when Matt Ricotta has pickup orders to fulfill, his workdays begin at 5 am. Luckily, his commute is short — just a hop, skip, and a jump across his Venice, California backyard. He converted his rental place’s accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, into a pastry kitchen for Manifold Bakery, the plant-based cottage bakery he launched last month.
He pulls doughs that have been proofing overnight out of the fridge: brioche dinner rolls, conchas, and cinnamon rolls that he’ll later crown with a svelte poof of vegan cream cheese frosting. Baking each tray, one by one, will slowly heat up the space as the day goes on.
Starting a cottage bakery is a feat. But the Le Cordon Bleu-trained baker and Stanford-educated business wiz told me when I caught up with him by Zoom last week that it’s just the first step — a “soft launch of the brand,” if you will. If all goes well, Matt will eventually expand Manifold enough to put climate-friendly pastries, breads, and sandwiches within easy reach of busy eaters in cities on both coasts.
Matt has dreamed of opening a bakery for years — a dream he credits to the “baking days” he spent with his dad as a kid, when Saturdays became workshops for whipping up recipes from an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. Going to patisserie and boulangerie school, as he did in Paris in 2021 (right before I did!), confirmed it. He wanted to bake professionally. That settled, one important question remained in his mind: how to weave in sustainability, which he’d been interested in since high school and college.
“‘Why don’t I make plant-based food?’ was kind of the first thought,” Matt told me. Vegan diets cut planet-heating emissions, water use, and land use by 75 percent compared to typical non-vegan diets.
Easier said than done, though. Matt’s pastry and bread education had been as butter-, cream-, and egg-centric as you’d expect for a school located in the land of Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier, those gout-y gastronomes.
So, when back stateside and while enrolled in a joint business and environment masters at Stanford, Matt taught himself the vegan side of baking.
“It was definitely a learning curve,” he said. That’s in part because vegan baking substitutes are sometimes less universally applicable than the animal-based counterparts they’re replacing.
Vegan eggs are the pinnacle of this phenomenon. While you can use chicken eggs for lots of purposes — to bind a cake batter, thicken a curd, or add color and flavor via an egg wash — you typically need different egg replacers for those (and other) different aims. Matt found he liked the Bob’s Red Mill egg replacaer for recipes that need “binding and a little lift,” cornstarch for thickening, JUST Egg for egg wash — the list goes on.
He experimented at home for a year, while also notching pastry internships at Eleven Madison Park and Tartine Bakery, before beginning to publish plant-based recipes on his popular Instagram account and Substack.
After graduating from Stanford this spring, he started planning Manifold in earnest. He bought a dough sheeter, a giant mixer, and appliances, jumped through the legal hoops to open a cottage bakery, and honed his menu, which blends his American, French, Italian, and Southern Californian influences. Before Thanksgiving, he began accepting pick-up orders for a holiday menu of treats that included a pillowy hazelnut pastry and a pumpkin-swirl cheesecake that hit Instagram before Vaughn Vreeland’s did (just sayin,’ Vaughn!!).
Behind the scenes, Matt is laying the groundwork for what he hopes will be Manifold’s “many phases of evolution.” He’s handling the whole biz himself — from accounting to production schedules — so he knows how to staff up when he eventually expands.
He’s also continuing to refine his culinary philosophy on plant-based baking. For now, he’s exploring two approaches, to see what’s more personally satisfying and what lands best with customers. Some recipes, like his plant-based chocolate chip cookie, are meant to replicate the flavors of the original versions one-for-one, to show that vegan stuff can stand up to recipes using eggs and butter. Others are meant to demonstrate that the process of veganization can actually improve and add flavor, compared to the original versions, as with the banana bread that’ll be on his menu soon.
That recipe, Matt explained, “is about highlighting the fact that the plant-based ingredient itself — the banana — is the main vehicle of flavor, and that making it plant-based is to its benefit, because the flavor isn’t muddied by animal products.”
He’s also letting his definition of sustainable baking continue to proof. “At this point, I am focusing primarily on plant-based. But sourcing is absolutely in my mind,” he told me. After he’s widened his menu of “base recipes,” Matt hopes to start sourcing flour from farms that follow soil-restoring, regenerative growing practices and to start buying his seasonal fruits and vegetables locally. Doing so can help strengthen regional food economies and also is a way to bypass the few supermarket fruits and veggies that travel by plane and have heinous carbon footprints to show for it. (Most imported foods travel by boat, which is nbd, emissions-wise.)
A few years down the line, Matt hopes that Manifold will be selling plant-based treats to eaters in big cities — probably Los Angeles, and possibly New York, though the locations are to be determined. The vibe? He’s picturing “delightful” bakery-cafés that serve breakfast and lunch, complete with sweet and savory menus.
“I want it to be a replacement for essentially the Starbucks pumpkin loaf and the Sweetgreen salad that you’re having right now, especially the meals that we aren’t thinking super critically about,” he said. “I want it to inspire change in the way that we’re eating.”
An extra helping
Snag holiday treats from Manifold Bakery, if you’re near Venice, California. When the December menu goes live Monday, order a candied orange and almond puff pastry galette — his spin on a French pithivier — so I can live vicariously through you!
Bake some of Matt’s recipes at home, like his apricot-rosemary linzer stars or his Biscoff bomb cookies.
On another topic, read my essay for
, out yesterday, about how to make your holiday feast climate-friendly.