In Central California - New York Style Buttered Roll/Kaiser Roll/Hard Roll??

[ChetaMorton]

On the Trail of the Buttered Roll ... 

 

Anyone have a suggestion for a place in Central California near Brentwood-ish where one can buy something REALLY close to a New York Kaiser/Hard/Buttered roll - this is not your average dinner roll. A friend of mine moved there a year ago and is just being made MISERABLE by missing his Buttered Roll on the way to work every morning and I would LOVE to surprise him with a suggestion. 

Come on guys dig in and show me the way to that place no one would think to look!  Thanks for any and all help.  Alley

[weinoo]

Sadly, the NY Kaiser Hard Buttered Roll is rarely found even here in NYC.  It's as rare as a good bagel.

[Katie Meadow]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/dining/buttered-roll-new-york.html

 

The discussion of the NY Kaiser buttered roll sent me down a seriously weird rabbit hole. The above ode to the Kaiser roll received a fair amount of response, not unsurprisingly. I will admit that growing up on the upper west side of NY around the corner from Barney Greengrass I don't think I ever ate a Kaiser roll. We didn't have a local bodega that I knew about or grab breakfast from one when I was in high school. Two excerpts from the article are hilarious:

 

It can be hard to explain the appeal of a buttered roll.

Unlike the breakfast sandwich or the cruller, the humble buttered roll makes no claims to lusciousness. It’s not really greater than the sum of its parts: a round roll, sliced and slathered with butter. There is no alchemy involved.

 

“I loved and relied on them when I was very broke and young and coffee still only came from a cart or a deli,” the chef Gabrielle Hamilton said. “I was always annoyed that they didn’t spread the butter evenly, so you had to eat a dry outer ring until you got to the center, where you got a gross mouthful of too much butter — if it even was butter. Still, it was a lifeline.”

[Margaret Pilgrim]

 

Our search has been for a decent baguette or levain 25 miles inland from the Coast.    There should be signs, "Bread stops here."    

[MokaPot]

@ChetaMorton, when you say Brentwood, I'm assuming you're not talking about the Los Angeles neighborhood (southern CA). Is Brentwood considered central California? Seems like it's closer to the San Francisco Bay Area, which is northern CA.

[Toliver]

I guess we're lucky here in Bakersfield because we have the Pyrenee's French Bakery. I've never been to the bakery's actual store (no pastries sold there, just bread) because their bread can be found in most of the local grocery stores.

I had a co-worker who always bought their sliced sourdough sandwich loafs because the ingredient list is something like "Flour, water, yeast, salt". No additives or preservatives.

If you look at their baguettes (click) they're not the ling skinny baguettes one thinks of from France. They're a little bit thicker. I think there's a Basque influence at work there.