Provided by Will Porter
Audio By Carbonatix
When Will Porter returned to his hometown of Gilbert after graduating with a film degree from Tufts University, a simple idea took him on an entirely new path.
He wanted a fresh croissant with breakfast.
He picked up the roll-and-bake versions, packed in a pressurized tube, from the grocery store. The results were “completely inedible,” he recalls. He resolved to learn how to make them himself. That interest turned into an obsessive hobby. In 2022, he moved to France to study pastry and spent the last four years working at renowned patisseries and restaurants there and in Dubai.
Now back in his hometown, the pastry chef has opened his own French bakery, Sablé Boulangerie, in Gilbert’s downtown Heritage District.
Sablé is named after the thin French butter cookie. Although the boulangerie does not sell this crisp shortbread, Porter wanted a name that clearly signals the bakery’s style. There’s also a double-meaning. Sable, without the accented e, means sand in French. That nods not only to Porter’s Sonoran Desert roots but also his work and travels in the Middle East.
“This is a desert bakery,” he says. “These are baked goods that will survive in the heat. But we’re also taking a lot of visual cues from that part of the world.”
Porter’s “small but mighty” bake shop sits across the street from the water tower on Page Avenue and Gilbert Road.
“It’s French-inspired,” Porter says, “but we’re finding our home in the desert.”
Will Porter
What’s on the menu at Sablé Boulangerie?
The boulangerie opened its doors on Wednesday. The initial menu includes seven pastries and a handful of coffee drinks.
Everything at Sablé is baked from scratch each morning. Porter imports French butter, flour and Valrhona chocolate. The baker prefers classic bakes, eschewing trendier flavors. Guests can opt for a croissant or baguette, or go for a sweeter treat such as bubbly round pain au chocolat, pain suisse filled with vanilla pastry cream and dark chocolate chips, brioche tête, a vanilla flan or Porter’s take on a chocolate chip cookie.
The brioche gets glazed with caramelized sugar and apricot. Porter pipes a Nutella-esque hazelnut gianduja in the middle of the bake.
The flan, meanwhile, is different from what Arizonans would expect. For this Parisian-style treat, vanilla custard bakes in a ring of laminated dough. Porter describes the dessert as “somewhere between a cheesecake and a Spanish flan.”
For the bakery’s chocolate chip cookie, “we wanted to make it very luxurious,” he says. Porter uses brown butter and whole vanilla beans instead of extract in the cookie dough, then folds in chopped dark chocolate and tiny blitzed pieces of toffee. The dough rests overnight to create a thicker, taller cookie. After baking, each golden round gets topped with dark chocolate chips, caramelized hazelnut spread and flaky sea salt.
Sip a coffee or latte, or opt for one of Sablé’s more decadent drinks. Those include hot chocolate or a vanilla latte made with vanilla-bean-flecked milk and dulce de leche. Porter sources his coffee from Gilbert’s Mythical Coffee Roasters.
When customers order at the walk-up counter, they’ll see the kitchen through the sliding sets of windows in the cream-colored stucco building. The small kitchen features a large mixer, a proofing cabinet and an oven flanked by a long prep table.
Going forward, Porter hopes to launch a website where customers can preorder their bakes. Rotating monthly specials and more pastries are also in the works.
Will Porter
Chasing perfection, one croissant at a time
Before plotting out his own bakery, Porter focused on mastering laminated dough at home in Gilbert. It was the tail end of 2021, and he tried any recipe he could find, including from home bakers he DM’d on Instagram. While scrolling, Porter also learned about leading-edge pastry chefs, including Cédric Grolet, who is renowned online and worldwide for stunning illusion bakes that resemble fruit. The dedication to visual appeal and flavor made sense to the film school grad.
“American bakery culture is rustic,” Porter says. “You’re talking big cinnamon rolls, muffins, brownies, scones, this English-inspired stuff that’s provincial. There’s not very much emphasis on the aesthetics.”
He signed up for Grolet’s online pastry class, where he learned how to bake cakes, tarts and pastries. The course inspired him to take the leap and attend pastry school in France.
“Paris is a nuclear arms race of who can make the most delicious and beautiful and gastronomic, just excellent, desserts in the world,” he says.
After he graduated, Porter didn’t have it easy. He spoke minimal French and was relegated to “a lot of humbling, hard work” cleaning kitchens and taking on prep tasks like measuring ingredients. His dedication paid off. Within a year, he landed a job at Cedric Grolet Opéra, a high-concept Paris bakery from the chef who inspired his journey abroad. He refined his French and his baking techniques, climbing the ranks to head baker. Long hours and the stress of managing a team of bakers responsible for producing hundreds of ornate bakes at a world-renowned patisserie took a toll, but taught Porter persistence.
“That experience, it’s really true what people say about pressure making diamonds,” Porter says.
Ready for a change, the pastry chef sought out a kitchen where he could slow down and flex more creativity. He landed at Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, the super-luxe island resort in Dubai, crafting desserts for its restaurants.
“It was a big, big change for me, because I went from making 400 items a day to making 25 plates,” he says. “It was a really refreshing experience to come back to that really minute level of detail.”
That work and cultural immersion proved educational, but the itch to start his own bakery gnawed at him. After less than a year in Dubai, he returned to the United States.
Not only is the homecoming meaningful to Porter, who is now closer to his family after years away, but he also figured the concept “would just crush” in a rapidly growing community where he doesn’t see many French bakeries. For Porter, his hometown bakery is just the start of this next chapter.
“The plan isn’t to be an Arizona business,” Porter says. “The plan is to be an international business. I knew that this would be the perfect place to start a base.”
Sablé Boulangerie
Open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Wednesday to Sunday
228 N. Gilbert Road, Gilbert
