Rockland Bakery

I’d been itching to get out of the city and go on a hike. My friend Chris suggested a place near where she lives. She said we had to make one stop along the way, at the Rockland Bakery. Chris sometimes has a sweet place in mind that she knows I’ll like and, boy, was she right! I was overcome with the aroma of fresh baked bread before we even got out of the car.

When you first walk in, you enter a typical retail section. Continue through a hallway and you’ll find stacks of boxes with plastic gloves and brown paper grocery bags. Walk further down the hall to enter the actual bakery where they let you pick what you want right off of the conveyor. Most people go to the bins where they have every kind of bread, but Chris said it was cool to pick right off of the line. I couldn’t believe it: fresh warm bread right as it comes out of the oven! I had to exercise a lot of restraint not to buy everything in sight.

Some of the wonderful treats here include the olive baguette, everything bagels, sandwich rolls, a small sweet roll that’s something like Irish soda bread, and an amazing sfogliatelle. The bagels are warm, soft, and chewy. The chewy and briny olive baguette is equally wonderful. The sweet roll is the perfect size for snacking, and the sfogliatelle (filled with sweetened ricotta flavored with orange zest) is very rich and quite possibly the crispiest, crunchiest food on the planet. I wish the filling was creamier but I think everyone should try this at least once for the crunch factor alone.

Rockland Bakery has a small deli where you can pick up Boar’s head cold cuts and various salads for an easy weeknight meal (something I grew up with when it was too hot to cook in the summertime). If you’re in the area, or not, this place is truly not to be missed.