Ybor Bakery Breaks With Recipe, Keeps School Deal

Trans fats almost shut down a decades-old tradition in Hillsborough County schools.

That tradition is the purchase of authentic Cuban bread from a local Ybor City bakery in operation since 1915. The crusty loaves with the soft centers have been a staple in local school cafeterias longer than 66-year-old Tony More can remember.

More's memories go back to Tampa Bay Elementary, where he ate Cuban sandwiches made with bread from his father's bakery.

"We used to deliver to all the elementary schools, the junior high schools and the three high schools," said More, co-owner of La Segunda Central Bakery with his cousin, Raymond More, since 1974. "It's a big account for us. Not our biggest, but big."

The school district has grown, and so has business - with deliveries to restaurants throughout Florida and the Southwest. Now the nation's eighth-largest school district with 191,000 students, Hillsborough has 25 high schools and buys more than 800 cases of the Cuban bread each month.

Food service distributors took over the out-of-county and school bread deliveries five or six years ago. One of those buyers is the go-between with the district.

Last summer, when the Hillsborough schools contract didn't materialize, More asked the buyer what was going on. He learned the district was looking for a supplier of Cuban bread without trans fats.

New York City restaurants, as well as many school districts across the nation, have banned trans fats. Hillsborough schools had cut all trans fats from school cafeterias - with Cuban bread "the last hold-out," said Mary Kate Harrison, the district's general manager of student nutrition services.

Trans fats, made from vegetable oils that are heated and blasted with hydrogen, lengthen the shelf-life of foods but raise levels of bad cholesterol and lower levels of good cholesterol.

"They were considering buying bread from a bakery in New Jersey," More recalled. "I said, 'There is no way a guy could make Cuban bread in New Jersey and ship it to you.'"

More found a picture of the "Cuban bread" on that bakery's Web site. He said, "It looked like a piece of ... I don't know what.

"I said, 'I'm not going to lose the school board to someone from New Jersey.'" He experimented with a shortening made from palm oil, with no trans fats, and was relieved that neither he nor anyone else who tried it noticed a difference.

Harrison was not impressed with the bread samples from the New Jersey bakery. "They were awful," she said.

The district was delighted that the Ybor bakery could make the change.

"It's an authentic product, authentic Cuban bread," Harrison said. "We also like dealing with a local vendor."

Because the bakery, at 2512 N. 15th St. in Tampa, produces about 6,000 loaves of Cuban bread a day, all the bread is now made without trans fats, including the standard 36-inch loaves that are still hand-rolled, More said.

No one has complained.

All the Cuban bread - including the smaller loaves packed 24 to a carton for schools - still has a palm frond placed down the middle by hand before baking to create the signature trench on the top.

"It doesn't look any different. It doesn't taste any different," More said. "Everybody seems to have come out all right on this deal."