HOLLYWOOD — Estela Villalobos’s workday began at eleven at night and ended when the rest of the neighborhood’s was starting, and for forty-one years she was asleep by the hour most people ate the bread she had made.

Mrs. Villalobos, the overnight baker at a wholesale bakery off Melrose Avenue that supplied cafes and lunch counters across Hollywood, died October 14 at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. She was 82. Her granddaughter said the cause was cancer.

The night shift is its own country, and Villalobos ran it. She came in as the ovens were cooling from the day and left them hot for the morning crew, turning out hundreds of loaves, rolls and pan dulce in the dark while the ovens roared and a radio played low. The work was hot and heavy and precise, timed to the minute, and she did most of it alone, which suited her.

Her bread reached more of the neighborhood than most people realized. The rolls at a dozen counters were hers. So were the loaves at the Copper Kettle, the diner near the Boulevard that will mark its ninety-fifth year next summer, and whose owners said this week that customers had been eating Villalobos’s bread for decades without knowing her name.

“Estela never wanted her name on anything. She wanted the bread to be right,” said Refugio Santana, who baked beside her for fifteen years. “She could tell by the smell if a batch was two minutes from done. She’d be across the room mixing, and she’d just say, ‘Pull it,’ and she was never wrong. Forty years and I never saw her burn a tray.”

Estela Villalobos was born in Sonora, Mexico, in 1943 and came to Los Angeles in her twenties, learning to bake in a commercial kitchen where a foreman took a chance on her. She raised three children on overnight wages, sleeping in the day, attending their afternoons and evenings, and rarely seeing a full night’s sleep for the better part of her working life.

She retired at 74, only because her shoulders gave out, and could never quite adjust to sleeping when it was dark. Her family grew used to finding her awake at three in the morning in her last years, sometimes baking anyway, in her own kitchen, for no one but the pleasure of it.

Mrs. Villalobos is survived by two daughters, Alma Reyes and Sonia Villalobos, both of Los Angeles; a son, Beto, of Bakersfield; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her husband, Ignacio, died in 2018.

The bakery marked her death by taping a handwritten note to the front counter for the morning customers. It gave her name, the years she had worked, and one line beneath: the bread this morning, it said, was hers — the recipe she left, baked by the people she taught, coming out of the oven at dawn the way it had for forty years.