With the words “Eli Zabar, Kosher Baked Breads” on its glass front and the large black Hebrew letters spelling kosher and the OK certification just below, the bakery is a fully enclosed space inside of Eli’s Manhattan on Third Avenue.

“It’s such a pared-down list of ingredients,” Zabar says of baking artisanal breads, “The process is so simple, and the equipment can be so primitive. You get down to the platonic essence, philosophically, of things. I like the extreme simplicity of it. On Saturdays, when the bakery is not open, I miss it.”

Baker Juan Gonzales spends his days preparing the dough and braiding the hundreds of challah loaves. Trained by Eli Zabar, Gonzales has been working in the bakery for about two years. When he left his native Pueblo, Mexico, four years ago, he hadn’t heard about kosher. Now, he’s fluent in the rules as they pertain to baking, and he knows the schedule of Jewish holidays and when the demand is highest for his loaves.

Eli was also encouraged by his general manager, Ross Breen, who is Orthodox and very interested in introducing kosher challah. Breen is the person who gathers the ends of dough when challah is “taken” (a process required in kosher baking when a portion of the dough is set aside) at the end of the day, says a blessing, and discards it. He is also the person who turns on the ovens every morning, a legal requirement for “Pas Yisrael,” an even higher level of kashrut.

As Mendele Mokher Seforim, grandfather of Yiddish literature has written, “Anything is good with bread.”