Inside N.J.’s 100-year-old bakery giant you’ve probably never heard of

A bounty of freshly baked bread is spread across a table. Round panella. Regular rye and Russian rye. Ciabatta. Braids and rings. Sub rolls. Baguettes.

“When we moved to America,” Linda Kiesel Zabludovsky says, “we decided to open our company. We couldn’t decide what we wanted to open up so we sat around and ate and ate and ate. And what we ate most was pita bread.”

That was 30 years ago, when Zabludovsky and her husband, Shraga, bought Paramount Bakery, which started in 1924 in Newark with a dozen kinds of breads. Today, Paramount is a Jersey baking giant, making 400,000 pounds of bread every week, 150 kinds in all.