December 31, 2017

Newton Food & Drink Diary: Koko Bakery

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Newton/Watertown’s Koko Bakery.

How did you end up in the restaurant business?
KOKO bakery is a local small artisan bakery focused on quality, not quantity. We provide hand made breads, pastries and sandwiches — always fresh. Most of our French and German style breads use levain: a way of fermenting the bread dough. The ingredients are simple (flour, water, levain and salt), the process is complex. Some breads take over 40 hours from beginning to end. We spare no effort in making the finest breads and pastries possible.

Nobuko Maruyama, KOKO’s founder and owner loves bread, especially French baguette. After five years formal training at a popular chain bakery in Japan, she realized baking was her passion but had doubts about the mass production process. She moved to Boston where she worked at Japonais Bakery in Brookline, several independent bakers in the Boston area, and most recently at the Boston Harbor Hotel, The Langham Hotel, and the MIT catering department.

Returning to her love for artisan baking, she had an internship at Annarosa’s in Salisbury, learning from their deep French bread experience. She followed that with professional training at King Arthur in Vermont. With complements from Annarosa’s owner and Jeffrey Hamelman at King Arthur, she was now ready to open her own bakery.

Guaranteed fresh, KoKo’s products span the bakery spectrum — from premium French croissant to German rye — from red bean buns to blueberry scones.

Nobuko wanted a small, take-out bakery where the focus was on friendly, fast service, and very fresh, made-daily products. The bakery now serves over 40 different items every day, with specialty baked donuts, breads, French and Japanese pastries, both sweet and savory.

We’d love to learn more about the struggles you’ve had along the way.
Finding the right real estate was amazingly difficult. We spent over a year looking at spots in Watertown, Newton, Waltham, and elsewhere. We realized that Watertown and Newton lacked a good bakery like this, so we focused on those areas. And we live in Watertown, so that was also a motivation. We wanted to balance rent, location, and finding a place where building out a kitchen would be feasible. We finally found a good home on California Street in Newton.

Building a business is hard work. Competing with Duncan Donuts and Starbucks is easy on the quality dimension, but hard from a business perspective. They get such discounted raw materials, and have an industrial process that means every cup of coffee costs them just pennies to make. That is not true for us. Each cup of coffee, each pastry, each loaf of bread is lovingly made by hand every day fresh in our little bakery. That takes time, talent, and means we are paying people for that talent.

Finding the right oven took a lot of time. USA suppliers really don’t make such ovens as what we needed with two temperature zones and steam controls. So we ended up ordering a double deck oven from Germany. That took a lot of time and logistics, including the day the oven arrived and we had to hire a rigging team just to get it through the door and set up!

Tell us something interesting or unique about Koko Bakery.
Koko offers a lot that you don’t normally see in local bakeries. For example, we rotate through a range of baked (not fried) donuts, that are very popular, including Valrhona cocoa donuts, Limocello lemon donuts, and egg nog or apple cider donuts in the fall.

Koko makes a very unique Azuki Milk pastry which is built from traditional croissant dough, has a small bottom layer of azuki (sweet red bean paste) and a condensed milk cream filling.

For customers that are gluten sensitive, but really for anyone looking for a unique and wonderful flavor, we offer a flour less almond lemon cake that is very popular as well.

Our new special fruit danish is orange: it has a slice of orange on top, and we purposefully leave the peel on the orange for better zest and to mix sweet with zesty flavors.

There are only a small handful of places in Boston to find traditional shokupan Japanese bread. Koko makes two varieties, one with a little milk and butter, the other without, called “Koko Bread”.

One secret ingredient we rely on heavily for the French pastries is imported French butter. It really makes the difference for our plain and almond and chocolate croissant for example.

We are now the second location in the city to offer Ogawa coffee, and customers find the unique flavor and intensity addictive!

One of our specialties is German Rye Bread. We sell both 80% rye and a heavy but delicious 100% rye, and this is pretty unique within the Boston area.

Most Popular Items

Chocolate Croissant

Our chocolate croissants are hand-made fresh daily from imported French butter. This is a customer favorite and we often sell out before noon!
Dietary: Vegetarian
Koko Bread

This is a great toasting bread that takes over 24 hours to make.
Dietary: Vegetarian Vegan

Fruit Danish

We offer blueberry fruit danish year-round, but also a rotating special. Shown here is the orange fruit danish alongside the blueberry. It has a little pastry cream under the orange for sweetness.
Dietary: Vegetarian

Lemon Baked Donut

One of our specialties is baked donuts. Made fresh every morning, this lemon donut has Limoncello icing and lemon zest in the dough. A favorite at Koko!
Dietary: vegetarian

Rice Flour Strawberry Pastry

An in-house recipe, this is a new favorite for the season. We will be rotating through different fruit as the summer goes by.
Dietary: vegetarian gluten_freeParking Advice:
We have tons of nearby on-street parking on both sides of California Street.