Jackson Schnetz was going to be a doctor.
After working at his dad’s restaurants in high school and seeing the long, late hours, he was determined to get away from the restaurant business. His dad, Tom Schnetz, owned Oakland’s Doña Tomás and currently owns Xolo Taqueria and La Esquinita. To escape, Schnetz went to UC San Diego to study biology.
“I grew up in that restaurant scene, I completely thought that I was going to escape it,” Schnetz said. “I was like, I don’t want anything to do with the restaurant world.”
But soon after Schnetz arrived at the UC San Diego campus, he couldn’t help scratching a culinary itch.
Forma Bakery
4920 Telegraph Ave., Oakland; formabakery.com
Open Wednesday through Sunday 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
During his freshman year of college, missing some of his favorite Bay Area foods, he started baking sourdough bread in his dorm. He’d make the dough in his dorm room, and then rent out the communal kitchen to use the oven.
“It was all absolutely terrible, but I still really enjoyed it,” Schnetz said.
So, while attempting to get away from the world of restaurants, he got sucked into the world of baking. And now, after years of refining his recipes and perfecting his bread and pastry techniques, the 25-year-old Schnetz opened Forma Bakery in Temescal at the end of May.
After college, Schnetz started working at Fournée Bakery in Berkeley. He said the creativity drew him back to the food world.
“I just fell in love with that different lifestyle and different food scene where it’s the complete opposite, instead of it being a late-night shift, it’s early in the morning, 3 a.m. start time, but I really enjoyed the whole baking aspect,” Schnetz said.
Schnetz realized that baking allowed more freedom than he originally believed.
“The dough can be many different ways to produce different results and make a flavor profile that I like,” he said.
Eventually, Schnetz decided he wanted to do something that was his own, combining what he’d learned from his father with what he’d learned at Fournée. He found this spot on Telegraph in Temescal, on the same block as the original Doña Tomas.
“I always knew that Temescal was the neighborhood that I wanted to go to,” Schnetz said. “It’s just such an amazing, community-driven neighborhood.”
He came up with the idea for a bakery that merged French baking with Mexican flavors.
“I think that also growing up in the Bay Area helped me to see that you don’t have to bake one way, you don’t have to cook one way, there’s such a diverse food scene,” Schnetz said.
Forma, which means “shape” in Spanish, opened on May 29. So far, they’ve only been offering their pastries and coffee program, sourced from Highwire. But bread will be a large part of their menu starting in mid to late July, once their deck oven is fixed.
Their pastries, and fillings, are unique. Schnetz says he comes up with his fillings by going to the market and seeing what’s “seasonally good.” From there he develops an appealing flavor profile.
“A lot of it is rooted in some of these recipes and stuff that my dad would do or variations of them,” Schnetz said.
When I stopped by, their veggie croissant had poblano cream with chayote squash and potatoes, and their vegan veggie croissant had mushrooms, corn, and tomatillo. Almost half of Forma’s menu is vegan versions of the pastries they offer.
Schnetz said his girlfriend follows a plant-based diet, and he wanted her to be able to enjoy croissants too. To achieve the same texture and taste profile though, Schnetz said you have to treat it very differently than the way you’d make the traditional croissant. The vegan version of laminating butter requires different temperatures for baking. Schnetz uses butter from Tourlami, which has created one of the first plant-based butter alternatives designed for laminated pastries.
Out of curiosity, I got a vegan and traditional version of the plain and chocolate croissants and had my friends Alyssa Case, who works in the menu development field, and Charles Marquet, who is French, blind taste test both croissants. They were both able to choose the vegan one out of the two, based on a slight aftertaste of the vegan butter, but they both agreed the buttery, layered texture was almost the same as the traditional version. Marquet even called the vegan version “better than most croissants he’s had,” in the United States at least.
For Schnetz, the community response since opening Forma has been great.
“All these other local store owners coming through is really, really cool and it feels really good to be giving my all to something that’s received by the community in the area,” Schnetz said. “We’ve started to see that now with repeat customers multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day coming through here, that feels really gratifying.”
