This Miami baker learned to make bread via YouTube. Now he’s up for a James Beard Award

March 8, 2024March 8, 2024 Admin

Miami baker Jesús Brazón keeps a history of bread failure on his phone.

The proprietor of the family-owned Caracas Bakery, who taught himself to bake via YouTube, scrolls back years through hundreds of photos with a critical eye, pointing out the imperfect loaves he has loathed.

They are not like the perfectly sculpted baguettes now gracing the bakery shelves. No. The photos tell a different story. This loaf was too dense. That one tasted bitter, while another had too many holes. And don’t even get him started on his first seedy bread: “It tasted like a rug.”

Standing in the newest Caracas Bakery, which opened in 2023 in Miami’s MiMo neighborhood, Brazón marvels now at his mistakes and the improvements he made with dogged precision — and the fact that the painstaking journey he embarked on after fleeing Venezuela in 2008 has led to a nomination for a James Beard Award.

“It’s actually a little unreal to be nominated,” he admits. “I didn’t know anything about this five years ago. And so many people have been working their way up from the bottom of a bakery who haven’t had the chance to do their own thing like I did.”

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Baker Luis Rondon and co-owner Manuel Brazon prepare sourdough at Caracas Bakery in MiMo on Biscayne Boulevard.

Along with his father Manuel, with whom he opened the first Caracas Bakery in Doral, Brazón is a semifinalist for a 2024 James Beard Award in the outstanding pastry chef or baker category. Manuel Brazón, who with his wife Scarlet Rojas arrived in Miami in 2014, worked at Zak the Baker in Wynwood — also a 2024 Beard semifinalist in the category of outstanding bakery — for four years before the first Caracas Bakery opened in 2020.

That first bakery was tiny, just 1,000 square feet. Even after years of perfecting his sourdough — his phone will corroborate the fact he’s been working on it since 2014, inspired by a bakery in New York City’s Chelsea Market — Brazón wasn’t quite prepared for the onslaught of customers both before and after the pandemic shutdown.

“It was just my dad and my mom and me,” Jesús Brazón recalls now. “We had a barista helping out in the front.”

The lure of freshly baked bread drew the curious, and quickly long lines formed outside the bakery every morning. Bread often sold out by noon. An overwhelmed Brazón lured his father away from Zak the Baker to make the business a true family affair and was able to add pastries and other items to the menu.

The lines still exist at the Doral location, which is a takeout-only venue, but Brazón’s dreams have only grown bigger — and so has the menu. The MiMo Caracas is a busy, bustling sit-down breakfast and lunch spot, tucked away in an unassuming strip mall next to a Doggi’s Arepa Bar.

Jesús Brazón says the move to MiMo was a bit of a test for him.

“A lot of our clients were from other parts of Miami, Aventura, even West Palm Beach,” he says. “ I wanted to try and open a bigger place. I didn’t want to do it in a Latin community. I thought, ‘Let me test myself and prove I can work anywhere.’ ”

Baristas Gabriela and Andrea prepare coffee at Caracas Bakery in Miami.

He noted many businesses opening in Coral Gables and Brickell, but the locations didn’t seem quite right. Imagining the sorts of neighborhood bakeries found in his hometown of Caracas, he wanted a place that would draw locals and would be a steady, popular presence.

To that end, he has expanded the menu beyond bread, pastries and ham-and-cheese stuffed cachitos (Venezuelan pastries). You’ll find full breakfasts from creamy scrambled eggs, pan con tomate, salmon or mushroom toast. There are breakfast and lunch sandwiches, too, from the popular B.E.C. (bacon, eggs and cheese on a sweet potato bun topped with caramelized onions) to the new and unique broccoli sandwich (roasted broccoli, sun-dried tomato pesto aioli, white cheddar and mozzarella).

That one was inspired when Brazón was watching someone dip toast into broccoli cheese soup.

“I am chubby,” he jokes, “but I still love broccoli.”

Pan Canilla, a typical Venezuelan artisanal bread, at Caracas Bakery in Miami.

The James Beard Award finalists will be announced April 3, with the winners announced June 10 in Chicago. But whatever happens, Brazón is already hard at work on the next big step for Caracas: opening a location in New York. He has been traveling north to look for space with the dream that he could spend half his time there and half his time in Miami.

But leaving Miami for good is not on the table. He’s got family here, a son. And he’s grateful to Miami for the success he has had.

“I took a risk starting this,” he says. “Since I’ve come to the U.S. I’ve thought: ‘If I lose everything, I lose everything.’ But it all paid off.”