“There are so many experiences and stories of lockdown and you know, I know, how important baking was to so many people. Sourdough in particular. We know that when we feed our starter it comes alive. We know that we renew it and we see it respond, and we create a dough and we see it respond. And that life and renewal that came out of it, I think, was also another positive element. People going through the confusion and that awful time that we had. But also then the connection that it gave people… it was huge and it brought a lot of us together.”
“In February of 2020, I was looking at commercial spaces, building out a business plan, and trying to decide between moving into a space or building a space… and I was like set to meet in March to create our own space in Bentonville. And then, obviously, March 2020 everyone’s lives changed significantly and my my choice either scale way up and take a huge gamble and buildout a bakery in the middle of a global pandemic or scale way back and move back into my house, and bake out of my house again…”
“I use my sourdough starter, I don’t use my discard when I’m making cookies… and I maintain my acidity in my feedings, so i’m never going to have a super sour. If I’m looking for that well then I’m going to look for a grain that will be a little more active faster, and maybe leave it to bloom a little longer… and see how the flavor is changing and imparting on the cookie dough.”
“Sourdough…. It’s like a meditation for me, it’s getting my hands into the dough, feeling the dough, connecting with the earth, connecting with the Spirit. And it’s helped me so much. It still does. This is, perhaps, not the material point of sourdough, it’s more like a spiritual one.”
“We opened those bags of fresh flour, it was like ‘holy smokes!’ We’d never experienced something like this before. We had always just had white flour that was all about function and performance and not so much about aroma and flavor. And so we said, ‘we’ve got to do this, this is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.’ So that was the impetus.”
“And that’s what we’d been working towards….I was going to bed and waking myself up with alarms to go and fold dough and go downstairs and shape, and my wife would be pushing [me] and she’d be saying - it’s fine, it’s not going to be forever, just carry on, and eventually we will get enough for this to be able to be it. - So that was about a year that we juggled and that last contract came along and I quit from my job - that was it. It was a simple decision to make then.”
