From A Small Home Hobby To A Topeka Storefront Bakery | H&A Sourdough Bakery

Cold Open: 180 Loaves Sprint

So you made 180 loaves in the three days before the farmer's market. Correct. Offering fresh product is one thing we strive to do all the time.

It would be very annoying if you ran out of start. It would be a detrimental

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Meet HA Sourdough Bakery

Alright, another episode of Speak Insider. We have Nate and Kayla with H A Sourdough Bakery. Thanks for being here, guys.

We're excited to be here. Come on, this is awesome. Okay, what does the H A stand for? That was my first question. Great question.

Great question. It took a long time for us to uh think about what we wanted to name it, but it ended up being after our kids. H is for Hadley and A is for Aspen. Cool. Nice. Okay.

I was thinking hungry and angry. Angry. Hangry. That's way better.

Because when I'm hangry, I want bread. Some people have been like, ha, sourdough, and we're like, close.

Whatever can you do by you?

Yeah, whatever can you do by the bigger. Sure, buddy. Love it.

How did you guys start this? How long have you been doing this? Uh what's kind of the background?

So we're going on about five years, um, four years in business, five years as just my hobby.

Wow.

Crazy.

Yeah, it started as just my hobby, and then I went out on a whim and signed us up for the farmer's market, not thinking that we are gonna be hearing back from anybody anytime soon. And about two days later, we received an email that's like, Welcome to the downtown Tobika farmers market.

Wow. Is they're like in like an application process. Yes. Yeah. Yep.

You have to have a like a business number and all the official things. Like an IEM. Yeah, yeah.

You still have to s kind of go through the process and you had to have signed up, like you know, started a business online.

So it was a commitment at first. And I was saying, you know, I'll support you, and this is what you want to do.

Yeah.

Um, not thinking that it would launch

From Hobby To First Market

into what it is now.

Yeah, tell us about that first farmer's market.

Oh gosh, we still have a picture of it. We still have a picture of it.

We didn't have any signs.

Our signage was like a top of a like a plastic tub, like the lid. A tote tub. A tote tub. And I wrote like with a red sharpie, like one for three dollars or something. And someone was like confused on price. But it just like the level of signage from that to what we have now, it was you know, from the only started out doing sweets.

Oh really?

Everything's like changed from from then.

Like the fourth or fifth market in where we're gonna do that.

We did like muffins and cookies, and then we were like, you know, now that our bread is established, now we can start to sell it. So we didn't really launch as a bread company right away.

That was some that was today though, like it's mostly bread, or what's kind of the breakdown of your different products. I would say mostly bread.

Yeah, a sourdough bread company. Uh-huh. Fakasha bread, uh sandwich bread is our priority focus. Yeah. Sweets on the side.

What do you what do you mean the bread wasn't ready? And like what made you decide, okay, hey, we're ready. The bread is ready.

So anyone can make bread, right? It um but wanting to serve it to the community was uh a focus of ours that it needed to be right. You know what I mean? Like if we're not sure. To serve it and not be like almost embarrassed to have it on your table. Sure, right. Uh within that day or two, three days, or else it's you know, not up to our quality standard of good.

I was just getting ready to say, I feel like that would be the hardest part about having a sourdough company is anything you sell, like you have to make in the in the past couple of days. Correct. Yeah, because it just starts to go bad quicker. That's correct. Wow.

We only guarantee our products for like five to six days if you want to freeze it.

But

The Science Of Sourdough Fermentation

wow. Can you describe how is sourdough different than other types of bread? That's a great question. That's a good question.

Do you want me to handle that one?

Yeah, you can handle that.

Uh so sourdough, um, the process of it is what makes it different than normal bread. So when you make sourdough, you kind of have that rising phase throughout the building of the bread. Let's call it that. You build the bread and it rises and it does all that fermentation, which usually happens in your gut with some of the store-bought bread. So um the store-bought bread uses yeasts and all these other bad ingredients that ends up kind of sitting in your gut and then boiling up all those other things in your gut. Our sourdough bread, or sourdough bread in general, um, has a fermentation process that kind of handles all of that rising and gluten development pre-bake, and so it's cleaner for you when you eat it on the way down. Interesting.

You know what that he him just nerding out right there, you know what that reminded me of? It reminded me of Jack Hishma when we had Joy Light on. Yeah. Because he was talking to us about coffee and you know the the science behind. All the levels of things.

This is a total nerd in coffee, and we respect him for that. Yeah. And I truly don't know maybe even enough. Like I there's so much to learn about sourdough, um, and we're always constantly learning.

So it's like a commun like an online community.

Sourdough like there's a few people that we've sort of like mentored off of or you know looked at how do they do this or how do they do that? And that was uh one of the ways that we learned, you know, and in time. Um we didn't rewrite the book, right? So uh but we have to make it our own and how does it work for us?

Is sourdough kind of like coffee in the sense that they're you're kind of always tweaking the settings and things and having to monitor levels of just kind of I don't know where the different elements are at and stuff like that? Absolutely. Yeah.

Especially like in the weather. Like the summertime our sourdough rises pretty fast, but in the wintertime when it's cold, it takes a lot longer.

Wow. And that's just I mean, for across the board for anybody, the the humidity is is what changes.

So instead of just setting a timer, you have to monitor like what how tall it is, or like how do you have a bigger way?

So temperature or like height of uh rise, stuff like that is ways you could tell. So that's where the learning takes up takes over. It's not like hey, it's just an hour and it's ready. Right. It's like, hey, you know, how does that feel, or what is that you know? And that's always the biggest question, it's like, well, when's the bread gonna be ready?

Well, it's about two, three hours.

Like alright, I'll set my timer and I'll and I'll wake up. You know, so it's that's been the hardest leap. But uh once we've kind of learned to read the bread is the kind of term that we term that we say, um, then we're good. Interesting.

That reminds me of a teacher I had in high school who had this gimmick. He had no clocks on the walls in his classroom. That kind of sounds like prison. Right. Well, so students were constantly asking him what time it was. So students would always be like, hey, hey, what time it is. And he would always look out the back window at the sun. Oh. And he would say what time it was. And this is like this was a while ago. I'm 38, so this is like 2000s, like no students generally didn't have phones. Yeah. Well, students didn't know on his podium he had a little clock that they couldn't see. Oh, and so he'd be like, uh, it's 237. And they're like, How do you know it's 237? He's like, you can see the angle of the shadows on the sun. And he would just like mess with people.

Yeah, he would have fooled me. Yeah, I know. Yeah.

The Farmers Market Grind

Okay, give us a rundown of what it's like to be on the farmer's market grind. Because I've heard on the tour. I've known the farmer's market tour. That's a great way to put it tour. I've heard it is a grind. Tour-day market. Or what goes into going to the farmer's market and being a vendor?

Good question. Um go ahead. Do you want do you want it from like our perspective? Yes. So we start, go ahead.

Uh we start our weeks on Wednesday, like prepping all of our ingredients, like shredding all of our cheese, chopping all of our jalapenos, getting our starter ready, and then we usually feed it Wednesday night and start Thursday morning.

Uh so we'll mix bread Thursday morning and it'll start baking like either late, late Thursday evening, like 11 or midnight, or come Friday morning.

So each loaf takes about 12 to 14 hours to make from start to finish.

Wow.

So from like usually Thursday morning to Saturday, we're usually up.

Whoa. How many loaves? Yeah. Yeah. How many loaves do you guys bring to a farmer's market usually?

It rotates. Uh but that's come with learning in time. Some some weeks it's maybe 80, some weeks like one week. 80 loaves? One week we brought 180.

What?

Yeah. Crazy.

So you made 180 loaves in the three days before the farmer's market? Correct. Yeah. Did you have to buy new ovens in your home? Like, do you have like a studio for this? Or is this in your love kitchen?

So that's that's come with learning too. Yeah.

So we transformed our dining room into our bakery. So we have like a double oven. Um, we have a nice like roly station that we use for like our brewery.

Nick from Wood and Stuff here in Topeka built us a custom like cabinet, a stainless steel top. He's great. He batters. He did that, it was one of the best write-offs we ever had.

Um then he also made our um cabinet to fit in our double oven too.

Great. So our bakery space looks gorgeous. Uh, and I credit that to her and also to Nick as well. But um it's nice. It it's really built out to work for us. The double oven is is good just for the bakery stuff, and then we can make what 16 loaves at a time?

Yeah, in the right. That was my question. 16 at a time.

How many so in in a okay, so you said how long does it take to make one loaf from beginning to end?

12 to 14 hours.

And how much of that is in the oven?

47 minutes.

Oh, okay. So you can run a ton of. So you're like rolling, you're rolling like multiple cycles at the same time. So while one's in the oven, you're finished prepping the next, and then you're starting.

So it's kind of like um we feed, use it, refeed, and that takes usually about four hours to like re-rise for us to be able to use it again. Wow. Well, the first round of loaves that we've made is now on their final like rise or whatever you want to call it.

So when you made 180 loaves, did you just have you had a bunch of loaves in the oven at all times, basically? Pretty much.

And jugs and jugs and jugs of starter. Wow. Or like I feel like your normal household would have a jug, a jug of starter maybe like this big or even smaller. And they're like, oh, I feed my starter and it's like a little bit. We feel that, but at a larger ratio.

So it's just like we have like six tubs.

And that's correct. At the time of this recording, you guys are just coming off of cider days as well. Yes, yes. That's correct. I bet that was an insane prep for you guys. Insane. Yeah. When I went, I was actually surprised to see both of you guys there at the event. I'm like, I figured one of you was at home just, you know, uh cooking.

You caught us in the hour or two that I was at the market. Okay, okay. So that is how it usually is.

One of you's at home at cool.

Did it go well? It went fantastic. Is it too personal to ask how many loaves of bread you brought to Cider Food?

It's not quite too personal, no.

Just under 300.

Wow. That's wild. Between Fakasha and Sandwich Bread, it was just under that's crazy. And you sold out. It was a good week. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so we were texting, we had a group chat texting to set this time up to record. Yep. And at the time that I got the text from like, hey, does this time work? I was literally walking past your booth in Saturdays. That's right. And I was like, hey, I know that. Yeah, I think that's their booth. And I was like, hey man, are you Nate? Because like we hadn't met. Right. And he's like, yes, are you John? And you had literally sold your last loaf right when I walked up.

Yep. Yeah. That's awesome. Crazy timing. But I was like, wait a minute.

So as someone who you know is on the farmer's market and you know, Saturdays selling out. Is that a good thing? Because you're like, hey, we know we're out, we did what we set out to do, or is it like we should have brought more?

I feel like it's kind of a good or bad thing. I feel nice that we sold out, but I also feel bad for all those people that didn't get a chance to have our appointment.

It's certainly rewarding at the end and we're like, man, this feels good that you know we've accomplished this together. Um but there's always customers that are like, hey, you know, I I missed out.

Can you just make me one real quick? Right.

And it's like, uh, you know, catch me maybe Tuesday. Like, you know, because it takes a while. We gotta go home and feed the starter again and and XYZ.

Starter Feeding And Why It Matters

So can you explain feeding the starter? What does that mean? Yes. So like Kayla said, um it takes like three or four hours to rise. I mean it's like alive, like it's it's certainly alive. Wow. What makes sourdough different than other bread, kind of back tailing back to that question, is we use uh an all-natural starter. That's just flour and water. So we use an organic red wheat flour and water. And if you put those together over time using a certain like ratio, one to five to five or one to three to three, one hundred grams to three hundred grams to three hundred grams is what that uh means to lay flour and what?

Uh the starter, which is somewhere else?

No, you have to start it.

And it takes it's like a chemical. Yeah, pretty much.

Okay. So you you do more water and flour over and over and over, and that starts to develop like the wild yeast essentially. But it's all natural, natural uh gluten and natural yeast in the starter. So once you feed that over and over, then that gives it the rising process in the bread. Using starter. If you use yeast like you can buy in the packets and use warm water, that'll rise it in like an hour. And I can make your bread anytime really, really fast. But we never really want to. It's not as natural. Correct.

Okay, is so is the secret sauce in the starter?

Yes.

And is that kind of like the secret ingredient? Like, you guys have your special formula on how you that's a very good. Can you give us like generally, not specifically? Like how does someone make starter, like how does it work?

Yeah, we're happy to always help people learn how to do sourdough. Uh I think that's one misconception is that we're we're not afraid to help you.

Right.

Yeah. Uh we don't actively sell our starter right now or sell it in the dehydrated form, but we're always willing to help. Uh and that's I kind of sort of forgot where your question was going.

Like, how do you make star from scratch? Like, how does it work? It's just flour and water. Oh, and you just like have to allow the time to ferment. Yes.

So like getting started, you'll start with like just a little bit of water and flour, like 50 grams of each, and then the next day you'll like discard some of that and then start again with 50 grams and feed it more water and flour. And then it ends up, you know, becoming a science experiment.

And I'm gonna be honest, uh hearing all this, I'm just gonna stick to buying it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh there's more science behind it than people know. You're wanting to get in on this. I'm like, yeah, geez. I just want to there's flowers and all kinds of stuff.

And I think we'll get there to like teaching people how to do it.

Um it seems similar to like, you know, if you did like a brewery in your basement, like a home brewery or like made wine, like there is always the beginning element of the fermentation of like that's kind of your core ingredient.

That's the secret sauce. Yeah. Is the fermentation and the starter. That's the thing that everyone can go buy the organic red wheat flour that we use and the spring water that we use out of the jug. Everyone can go buy that. But the only difference that we have is our starter than others. So that comes with time and consistent feeding and keeping it in a healthy environment, not you know, not taking it outside or transferring to a different home or so it's soup, it would be very annoying if you ran out of starter.

Oh, that would be a detrimental problem. Yeah.

There'd no bread.

How long would it take you to catch up to catch up if you ran out of starter?

I've dehydrated. Yeah, we have some dehydrates. I've got some ones. Yeah, it's it's in my safe. I'm just kidding. Yeah.

But we have to white powdered baggies. No, that would look so bad. Uh cut that.

Um, I got seven kilo starter. I did get pulled over one day and had the trailer, and he's like, Are you calling anything illegal, sir? And I go, just a whole lot of starter and bread. And he was like, What? And I go, it's it's sourdough bread, don't worry. You know, and he was just cross the border. Just cross the border with a whole bunch of bread.

Anyway.

How COVID Fueled The Sourdough Boom

Dude, so sourdough is having a heck of a day. Like online, it seems like sourdough is so popular.

It started when COVID kind of came around, and everyone was like, What's in my food? Right. And that's one of the things that got us started was what's in our food and what are we gonna you know feed our kids. That was one of the things that was like Tell us about that.

How did COVID start that for you guys?

Um I think so. One of our daughters is kind of like immunocompromised, so we kind of have to like really watch what she eats and like what she's around. So it kind of made me a little bit more aware of what we're you know, feeding them and what I paid attention to more labels than I normally did.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of added ingredients into some of the things I've done.

We do lots of sandwiches and like PBJs in our house. So that was one like what's one thing that we can implement? I was like, well, we can make our own bread. Right. Well, and then domino and domino, and then a rabbit hole. Yeah. Yeah. Then we got hooked into that sourdough internet phase. Man, this is cool. And yeah. Do you guys remember?

No, you're good. Do you remember kombucha?

Uh, isn't that like the the drink? Yeah. Were you guys ever into kombucha?

No.

No. Were you guys? I have no idea what you're talking about. Okay. Do you know what kombucha is? Okay, so kombucha, to me, it sounds it's a similar kind of an idea to sourdough. I had friends, my friends who are currently really into sourdough used to be really into kombucha. Here's my theory. Kombucha walked so sourdough could run. There you go. Okay? Kombucha walked so sourdough can run. Here's the idea. It's basically the same idea. You would ferment something and you would have like a, I don't know what they call it, but you'd have like a starter. Like you'd have a thing that was alive and growing, and you would feed it and you'd make kombucha. It's like a vinegar-based, it's like a fermented vinegar-based drink that's super healthy for your like gut and stuff like that.

Ladies used to be at the femurist market.

You know, I never tried it. I will say it's disgusting. I hate it. Oh. But my wife used to love my wife used to drink it all the time. And like all my wife's friends, and like all of them, like some of them would make their own, and I was like, that is the most disgust. I'm not like a big vinegar-based kind of person generally, anyways, but anyway.

I feel like it's kind of like drinking flavored apple cider vinegar.

Yes, 1000%. Yeah, that's exactly what it tastes like. That's what it sounded like, and I don't have any interest in that either. Yeah.

It's like me and matcha. I'm like, I'll stay far away from that. Yeah.

I would prefer my grass to stay on the lawn.

Correct, not in my drink.

Exactly. Okay, so what started as just something for you to make a healthier alternative for your kids, turn into a hobby, turn into the farmer's market, turn into Saturday days, all these things. Now we have some news.

Yes.

Uh today, this is being released, October 16th. What's going on?

Do you want to tell them, honey?

I'll let you do it.

So on October 17th, uh at 4 o'clock,

Grand Opening And Storefront Plans

we'll be having our grand opening to our storefront here in Tobeka.

Let's go. Tomorrow. So tomorrow, 4 o'clock grand opening. Yes. Where is it at?

We're in Farallon Plaza, right across from the Dance Factory and Potland Pottery.

Yes. How long is how long has that been in the works for? Has that been a goal or is that just come out of nowhere? That's been a goal.

That's been like a couple of years. We've done a lot of research and looked at a lot of places and made sure it we made sure we had the right fit for not only our business, but our time schedule, our customers.

Yeah. You know, it's a big commitment as far as financially and as well as like time-wise. You want to be there and present in your store and offering fresh product and stuff like that. So our hours are probably going to be in the evening times, four to eight.

Yep.

Um, and that'll help the after work clients, the you know, some of the dance mom or dance dad clients, the master overbees classes, you know, some some of the people that's a foot traffic that's coming in. That's exactly right. So we did Kiku's foot traffic. Bingo. We were some of the Kiku's traffic for a while, and we were like, man. This would be, you know, this would be a pretty good spot, and then it kind of just kept going. So super cool. It's been um brewing, you know, uh fermenting for a while in our brains. But fermenting, fermenting. But um you're gonna have to keep some of those things hidden for a while. So we're happy to kind of now you know let that out there.

So farmers market's been going well.

Yes. We we learned throughout our years at the farmers market, you know, how much to bring. We didn't bring enough for a while. It was 30, 40 loaves, and it was like, hey, we're sold out by 1030. And then we're kind of that company that's just sitting there.

Yeah.

So what do we need to do different? Hey, we need to get a double oven. Okay. Then we started making more, and then it just kind of grew and grew. Wow.

So your spot at Fairlawn, your new storefront, that's gonna be a place where people can buy goods. It's not necessarily it's not a bakery where you're baking the product.

It'll be open Wednesday through Saturday, four to eight.

Wednesday through Saturday, four to eight. Starting tomorrow. Yes. Yep. Dude. That's wild. So exciting.

Does this represent a shift in how much time you guys are giving to this? Like, is this now, like, is one of you now going full-time kind of in this?

I have left my job at the hospital and now we'll be transitioning to full-time.

Let's go. So awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Uh nerve-wracking?

Um, a little bit. I mean, I've spent the last 10, 11 years in healthcare, so it's been a huge jump, but it's a jump that I'm ready to take.

Yeah. I told her I said if we're gonna swim, let's jump in the deep end and let's do it. Yeah, absolutely. So we're ready to go.

You know what'll always be there if this doesn't work out? Your old job.

Yep.

You can always go back. We're not gonna go back. I love it. I love it. We're full throttle. You gotta have the confidence.

We're committed.

I love that. That's super exciting.

Okay. So, what do you what do you do outside of this? I teach golf. I'm an assistant golf professional in Lawrence. Wow. Lawrence Country Club. Uh I love my job. I've been in golf for almost eight or nine years now, teaching and working in golf at different places. But um, thankfully, it allows me some evening times to work at home. And um, I don't work every single day, so I'm able to do some of my off days and help as well. So that's so cool. That's good. And plus the clientele is nice. You can kind of meet and greet, and yeah, yeah. Sometimes they ask, you know, what's going on, and they're good people. Starting a bread company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I started a bread company with my wife, and oh, that's nice. And so it kind of leads into lots of different things.

And you have two kids?

Yes.

How old are your kids?

Four and three.

That's good. Oh, come on.

Yes.

Aspen and Hadley.

Yeah.

Wow. Nice. H

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Taste Test: Bread Muffins Dips

show. Okay. I've been staring at this for a while. Yeah. I can't smelling it the whole time. You brought a little some something here. Yep. Yes. Um Gabe, why don't we push pause real fast? We can cut some of this up and then we'll get it back in. Because I can imagine it might take a second to cut it up.

Yeah, it'd be kind of cool if you could see you. Some of the code though.

Maybe give us a little rundown on what you guys brought. Yeah, of course. Yep.

Um. So we brought a few different items for you, all baked fresh today. We had some bread overnight that was proofing for some custom orders for some customers. So we set a couple of those that we had extra aside for you guys. Oh, we're not taking someone's custom orders. No, absolutely not. No. These ones were. Sorry, Jimmy. Jin, if you're watching, your loaves are safe. Um, but then we brought our most popular flavor of muffin by far, is our blueberry uh lemon zest. Wow. And then we brought our fall favorite, which is our candied pecans.

It's his mom's recipe.

It's my mom's family recipe. So that one kind of goes back. Favorite snack dessert, thank you. It's a good little treat. Yeah. And then our oil dips are launching now that we have a storefront where we have our homemade Italian seasoning and organic olive oil. So it's a good thing to kind of dip your bread into uh just as something to serve it with. Uh white night or for real this is a real dumb question, maybe.

There's no dumb question. No, there are. You'll hear it. What is bread? The muffins. Are the muffins sourdough? Yes. Yes. I was gonna ask that too. There's no dumb question. Okay.

So we use our sourdough discard, which is basically not the bubbly rosen form of or the you know, that form of the sourdough starter. And it gives it a little bit different taste and texture.

Cool. Cool. Okay, let's cut it up.

Those are for you guys.

Oh bless. Let's go.

Jeez, let's get let's get this bread.

Let's get this bread.

Ready? There you go. I have some arm. Oh, he brought a knife in a box. Fancy bread knife. That's a fancy bread knife.

Shout out my brother Blake. He got me like the best bread knife you could ever imagine. Wow. Okay, I'm gonna get it.

Italian herban cheese loaf.

Okay, you said these are the Italian herbs. Oh my goodness.

So organic red wheat, flour, water, salt, or homemade Italian herb seasoning, and love. Nothing else. What's the cheese? Sorry. Well, one of you guys cut that up.

One of you give me the rundown. What is uh someone buys a loaf, this loaf.

Yep.

They're wanting it for for uh sandwich, sandwich bread. What what's a good sandwich to make with this?

A good sandwich that I would chef's choice from their baker's choice, I would do probably like mayo or butter on the sides of the bread, and like kind of put on your skillet and toast it a little bit. Oh, let's go. And then I would do like uh turkey on that same skillet after with a little bit of butter on there. Yeah?

Like almost like panini kind of?

Uh like yes, like kind of seared turkey, and then put some sort of you know, lettuce or vegetable on there, and you're wondering why you're gonna be able to get a slicer, these slices are not even. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that knife though. That is such a high quality looking knife. It's a good knife, but not everybody has a good knife at home. So one thing that we offer is all of our bread is pre-sliced. That's nice. The one that you're holding uh is not. But the reason why it's not is because we baked it fresh this morning. Yeah. So if you know anything about bread, if you slice bread and it's too hot, it'll get gummy on the inside. Uh-huh. So all of our bread has to cool down before we can run it through our slicer and then package it. So customers asked, Can you slice your bread or can you slice it for us? And we're like, Well, I don't want to do this every single time. Right? So we invested into a commercial slicer, and so all of our stuff comes pre-sliced. You can take it right out of the bag and eat it on your way home. You can get home and not fight your knife. You know, it's one thing that we like to say is you don't have to go fight your knife at home. Yeah.

Especially if you don't have a uh a bread knife. Or a cutting board or any of that stuff. Yeah, I don't know if my knives are long enough to cut this bread. What's crazy is I just bought a loaf from them at uh Saturdays. It's all gone. It goes so fast. And we made a sandwich on it for the first time.

Usually what I do serve it.

Um, we got a we didn't get this one. We got uh just a regular, was it a white like the classic? The classic, yep. And my wife did uh she did like uh salami, pepperoni, and uh uh a kind of like an Italian on it. Wow, it's awesome. Yeah, and she melted it, uh uh did some provolone on it. It was awesome.

You can do just about anything with with the sandwich breads, and we offer different flavors. We have a core collection of flavors, is what we call them. So we have our original white original white Italian herbs and cheese, which you're holding, the honey wheat, which is what we started with. We thought that the honey wheat would be a good intro for our kids. It wasn't like you know, it had a little more flavor and it was softer for the kids to eat. Yeah. Um then we have our jalapeno cheddar, which is a top seller, uh, and then our everything bagel seasoning loaves. Those five make up our core.

Those are your core ones. Yeah, what's this one?

Italian Irving.

Now, the one that my wife loves is your uh banana. Is it a banana chocolate chip or the banana breads? Banana breads.

Oh, dude, yeah, yeah, the sweet breads and bread.

She, I kid you not. Uh, we were waking up on, I think it was Sunday when we went to Saturdays, and okay, you know, we're going to Saturdays, getting the little girl ready and all the things. She goes, I can't wait to see H. I'm gonna get a banana, whatever bread. That's the one I want. I I just like the original ones because I'm just a bread guy. Right. Um, and she's like, I'm gonna get the banana one. I was so excited. So highly recommend that one.

The sweet bread is definitely a winner. Chocolate chip for me.

Um before we dive in, you also have some muffins. What kind of muffins are those?

Yep, those are our blueberry muffin. Blueberry lemon zest, one of our top sellers of the year.

Okay. Let's give this a little go here. We got the Italian herbs. And what's the dipping sauce again?

That's our homemade Italian seasoning and organic olive oil.

And that's gonna be a your people can buy that now too at the once the serving that nice.

John, give it a go. Feel free to get in there. There's plenty of seasoning. Get in there, John. You want to get all that flavor. So you should have a little crunch on that outside layer, but then soft all the way through.

So good. That is a

Pricing Freshness And Freezer Tips

good game. That is good. So good.

What does a um on my shirt? What is a loaf like what is what does a loaf like this run? What does that cost someone?

Our core like flavored loaves. Our core flavored loaves are 12, and then our plain ones, the white and honey wheat, are 10.

Nice. Nice, nice, nice. Okay. $12 for a big old loaf, and they come pre-sliced.

He's like, I need some more.

Don't mind me.

Amazing.

I'm a huge sucker for bread.

So our loaves start out at 10. The white and the honey wheat start at 10. Uh, and that's for the full-size loaves pre-sliced. If it has an inclusion, it's $12.

And you said that uh a loaf from the day that it's uh baked is good for how long? About a week.

About five or six days on your counter, and then you'll want to put it in the freezer after that. Oh, okay. It's good for about two or three months.

Two or three months if you put it in the freezer.

So, so on day six, you could put it in the freezer and it's good?

You can put it in the freezer on any of those days. Um what we found is that it lasts on our counter for about five days before it gets kind of hard or before it starts to grow some of that natural mold.

Yeah.

Um, so you just want to freeze it.

Okay, so you said that five to six days uh on the counter is what it's good for, but you can freeze it anytime. Do you have a lot of clients or customers that will buy, you know, five, six, seven loaves knowing that they're gonna freeze all but one and just bring them out as a need be? Yes. I didn't even think about doing that. Whenever I'm with you guys, I just buy one because I'm like, I don't wanna.

How do you unfreeze a loaf?

You just take the slice straight from the freezer to your toaster.

And if you don't want to toast it, you could set it on the counter and let it thaw out and then go from there. So you don't want to recommend to toast it.

What that's interesting.

Okay, I didn't I was thinking, you can just put parchment paper in between your slices, put it in a gallon size, like freezer ziploc bag, and throw it in your freezer.

Wow.

I don't remember that. Oh, sorry.

So, like like you had said, do some clients order multiple at once? Uh one of our long-lasting clients, her name is Jen, she usually orders four at once. And she she's like strict honey wheat. She only likes the honey wheat. Uh, but she'll order one or two um at a time at first, and then she's like, you know what? This is just inconvenient. She's got lots of kids at home, so she's like, I'm gonna order four. Right, yeah.

Or if her mom's in town and she orders eight.

Crazy.

Because her mom takes her back to Oklahoma. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. It's like getting one gallon of milk from the store. You can't just get one gallon of milk. You gotta get it right back tomorrow.

Yeah, might as well get two.

Yeah. Um, so how do with the new storefront?

Um should open these muffins for you too while we're doing it.

Oh, yeah, growing idea.

I gotta say, I've like made this before at my house, like for Christmas. Yeah. And it is nowhere near as good as this. This is crazy.

Let me get let me get a little loud.

Mama Roy's recipe there.

I I would say what I make is maybe 25% as good as that.

What what do you call these? So those are basically Mama Roy's pecans.

Mama Roy's pecans. You should name it that. That that'd be awesome. Mama Roy's pecans.

Here, I'll let you dive into that one.

Dude, I don't like pecans. This doesn't even taste like a pecan.

This is like That's why they call it candied pecans. Candy pecans.

I was gonna say it tastes like candy. This is something you eat on for Christmas.

Yeah, Christmas. Those are usually just a fall special for us. We don't bring those around in the summertime a lot.

Like for Saturdays weekend and then kind of keep them throughout.

But those will also be available in the store. Look at that. That's amazing.

I hope you didn't eat breakfast, John. I didn't. Breakfast came to you.

Breakfast came to you today, fresh and delivered. Um this is amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

With the new store. You guys want to come on again next week?

We'll be here anytime you call.

This is a weekly present.

I mean, we could work something out. We can drop over muffins for your clients. I mean we'll make it happen.

How To Order And Catering Options

So, with the new storefront um coming tomorrow, walk us through the different ways that someone could order bread. Or if they want to get muffins, or like do you guys do catering events? Obviously, the storefront, um, what's the best way that they could they could order? Go ahead.

Um, so they can either order by like our business cards has my cell phone number on the back of it, so they can just text me whenever.

Or your business work phone. Business work phone, yeah. Or let's try that again. My cell phone.

Or they can always message our um HA Facebook page or Instagram page too.

Facebook, Instagram. So a per you're taking uh custom orders just you know through DMs and through your work phone. Yep. The storefront. Do you guys do catering events? Like if someone want to have you out for an event or something?

We've done some events. Uh we did like a Shawnee Heights golf tournament one year where we did like a hundred cupcakes or uh cookies for them, stuff like that. So we do larger scale events.

Um I could see for like a fancy event, it could be cool to have bread and the the oil. And then obviously, probably people want maybe some of the more determined.

Like if someone wanted a private party or something like that, you know. Yeah. Like if you had a approach different. They're like, hey, I need six loaves, and then they kind of do whatever they want with it. Right. Rather than hey, I need you to come slice it up for us. But you know, we we would certainly do something like that if you want to do that.

Like a wine tasting would be cool.

Bread and oil would be so good. That'd be really good. And speaking of wine tastings, uh, I think

Focaccia With Wine Bar Partnership

we have other news that maybe we could share. Yep, absolutely. Um, our facasha bread is partnered with Board and Barrel Wine Bar here in town.

Yeah.

And so that's that's a popular bar. Uh I don't I wouldn't even really call it a bar. It's more of a restaurant. Yep. Uh upper scale restaurant that serves wine. That also just opened. That just also opened.

Yeah, we had them on on our previous episode.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're great. Uh the chef there is is doing really fantastic, and then Nathan is a kind of close friend of ours. Um, so either way, it's a good pairing together. Bread and wine always goes for that.

Heck yeah. 100%. Oh, that's super cool. That's incredible. You said facasha.

Yeah, what is facasha? That's not that, right? Correct.

Okay, what it what is that?

So facasha bread is uh a little more like European style, and it's has more hydration, is the technical term, but it what that means to you to you is more water.

More water.

Has more water. Yep. There you go. So it has more water and it has organic olive oil in it. Whereas our normal standard loaf does not. We just have flour, water, and salt in our sandwich loaf. Our facacha bread will have uh organic olive oil and a little more water in it. Cool. So it's softer and a little more airy. Yes, it's all still sourdough, all naturally fermented, no preservatives, no yeast.

Heck yeah.

We like to say there's there's nothing you can't mispronounce in our bread. Everything, you know, you go to the store and you turn it over, it's like 40 different ingredients, right? Chemicals and stuff. Yeah, chemicals and things you can't even spell or even pronounce, right? Yeah. What is that? You know, organic red wheat flour, water, salt, and love, nothing else.

Rapid Fire Topeka Favorites And Debates

Love, I like that. Well, do we want to transition to some rapid fire questions? Yeah.

Let's do it. Here's my first rapid fire question. Okay. As I still have a muffin in my mouth. How do you feel about the terms granola and crunchy as adjectives to describe people?

I haven't heard granola before. What is that?

I think it's a synonym for crunchy. Oh, okay.

We've heard of that before. And that's I think that's like sort of a crunchy community, and it's a cleaner, uh, like clean eating or clean uh holistic sort of environment.

Really? I think I just live under a rock.

Well, so we uh we started homeschooling our kids, and so we're in a co-op, and uh we like to joke that like a lot of my wife's friends are crunchy moms. Yeah, we've heard that terms. Yeah, yeah. No shame in that.

No, no, yeah. I think that just is about cleaner uh eating and uh yeah stuff like that, cleaner cleaning products and other things. I don't know too much about it. That's great.

Uh favorite local restaurant in Topeka.

Can we can we say food truck question mark?

Yeah, yeah. As long as it's not yours. No, it's not ours.

Uh probably El Zocalo, the food truck. Oh, okay.

The biria tacos. Elzo Cow. Elzo Calo, their the taco truck here in town. Okay. Their biria tacos are really good. Kayla likes those. Where is that?

Um, they kind of do pop-up cycle all over, like Topika, and then their daughter just opened one in Lawrence because she's going to K for nursing school.

Big fan of their or the pad. We like to go to the pad. Oh, padded. Pad for the burgers. That's a those are good answers. Those are great parents.

Yeah. Yeah.

Family likes the pad.

Uh local coffee. Yeah. Yeah. Local coffee shop. Joy Light.

We like Joy Light. Or um, I like to go to dialogue.

Yeah? Yeah.

Or circle coffee is good.

Yeah, yeah. Hacking. That's awesome. Go-to date night. What's a date night? I know. It's a date night in red.

Stop. The scarecrow games. Oh.

We have season tickets to the hockey. Really?

What big fantastic?

I'm a whole different person in the hockey arena. She's like, let's go.

She's really remote to your own. Oh yeah. Yeah, totally. When does their season start? Yeah.

Their season starts the same weekend, our store opens. Okay.

So tomorrow. Tomorrow. Wow. Wow. Heck yeah.

So they play their first game on the 16th and then it actually might be today that it's launched.

Yeah. We're currently trying to get uh some of the players on the podcast. Yeah. We've been trying for a year. We're in conversation, but the schedules haven't lined up. So we'll see. We'll see. We're trying to make it work.

Probably be pretty hard to get them on now that the season's going. Okay, so you're just not.

If there's a will, there's a way. I know.

So you're just not like, oh yeah, we like going to the scarecrow scale. You guys take it. No. Oh yeah.

That's sort of one of those things that was like, this could be a hobby, and then it was like, no, we actually really like this. Let's do this. Oh, that's fun. Do you take the girls? Uh we haven't yet.

You're hoping to at least one or two games.

Yeah. She used to go when she was a kid, so it was kind of like reminiscent of it.

Yeah, they're just like not too sure about noise all the time. Yeah.

It's pretty loud. You have the little like ear protection thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Wait. Go for it. You're doing a home building project. You're doing a building project. Okay. Are you going to Home Depot, Menards, or Lowe's?

Oh, that's a great question. Um, I would probably not go to Menards. Let's go! I would split in between the other two.

Come on! Why are you not going to Menards? And please be elaborate.

Their lumber section's not great. Come on! I think they have uh good materials, but like it's all knickknack stuff. Like I'm serious. Home Depot is is where you get the groundwork stuff done, and then Lowe's is where you kind of get your specialty and cleanliness work done. Menards is for hobbyists. That's right. And Home Depot's for the real the real workers. That's right. Yeah. Come on. All of our wood. That you see inside of our storefront is uh naturally put together by us, all handcrafted, everything, and some uh from Humpty Bill.

So let's go. That should count as three.

That does fit our uh our theory. So we've we've been asking that question now to guests for two years. And it's about 50-50 on where they choose with a couple of you know, lows or uh or other local places. Yeah, but what we used to do. Shout out Waters.

Waters is fire.

Yeah.

Ooh, waters is good.

Yeah, it's a lot of things. People that do their own projects go to Home Depot. Yeah, people that are paying other people to do their projects go to Menards. John does his own projects, I pay people to do it.

I just built a bookshelf this weekend with my boys and we went to Home Depot. That is awesome.

I love to build stuff with my hands. So it uh that's been another like sort of side hobby of maybe mine. So we built a farm stand, we kind of built some of our bakery items that we need in Home Depot for most of all of that. Let's go. Yeah, that's awesome.

What is something that if you could uh what is something Topeka's missing that you wish you could bring here?

Ooh, that's a really good question.

Whether it's restaurant, entertainment.

I think we have a good kind of flow of restaurants. Board and barrel checked a good one off with having a like an upper end scale. Um, the white linen was there too, but I think board and barrel is another good addition to that. Trader Joe's Trader Joe's boom. I love that answer. They got a Costco in Lawrence now, so that's that's I mean I hope so a little bit.

Yep. If you could pick any store that they would start carrying your product, what store would you want to be carrying your product? Um oh my.

Like grocery store?

Is that like grocery store? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or maybe like a restaurant, maybe, or something.

We're pretty established with the stores that we're at now. Uh we have our currently in stores. Yeah, we have our product in Thrive Chiropractic, which is sort of in downtown area. Okay.

Uh sixton, Jackson.

Yes. And then we have had some product in the custom border flower shop as well for some time. Um so you're able to kind of find our products at like a wholesale uh place and a few different options.

So let's say, let's say, like uh a grocery store. If if a grocery store would say, like, hey, we want to carry your bread, which one would you want?

Probably natural grocers. Okay. Smaller scale, not like big corporation. I mean, if there's a family local market, I don't know of one, but um it'd probably be natural groceries over for sure over Walmart or something.

So you wouldn't want to get ground up in the Kroger machine.

Heavens know.

Stay far away from any bit of that. Yeah.

Good question. I may be crunchy on that one. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, just trying it out. Yep, yep. Taking some risks.

Um, how many potholes did you hit on your way over here today?

Uh uh, missed a bunch because I went around in the construction.

That's that's nice. You'd be surprised how many times we get that answer. It's like, oh, you know, I I would have, but I know where the driver.

I had to dodge. Uh what else we got? I have a would you I have a few would you rather questions. Okay. I'm just testing some things out here. Would you rather be the funniest person in the room or the smartest person in the room?

Smartest. Smartest.

Why?

Um I feel like funny can only get you so far.

Oh, kind of. I beg to differ. Yeah. We, as class clowns, beg to differ.

I beg to differ. I don't know. It's good to be intelligent. I I've always not been the maybe the smartest guy in the whole room, but it's you know, it's I'm not necessarily super funny either, but I think I'd rather be intelligent than funny.

Would you rather always know what every person thinks of you or never know? Never know. Never know. Block out the haters. Block out the haters. Yeah. That's awesome.

That's one thing that we've learned to do too, is kind of like, hey, this is this is us. Like we're gonna do our thing, and there will be people that maybe say against us, or maybe say, hey, you're not doing this right, or you know, you tied this wrong, or XYZ. There's always gonna be quote unquote haters, but kind of keep the tunnel vision and and do our thing. Yeah. Yep. We're a team, so

Gluten-Free Questions And Staying In Lane

it's been going really well together.

How do you feel about the rise in like gluten-free worlds?

That's a different community. We support it. Um there's people and customers that come to us and they're like, Do you offer gluten-free bread? And we have to tell them no, because we don't fully offer gluten-free bread. Um we've had customers that are gluten tolerant, so they have some problems with celiac and they can kind of tolerate our bread, but we can't fully say that we're 100% gluten-free.

And and is that something you're interested in in the future, or you're just kind of like, hey man, we're staying in our lane.

Yeah, we're kind of just probably gonna stay in our lane.

It's like a lot of additional like steps you have to take to be like gluten-free.

Oh on top of just the ingredients and like cleanliness of your kitchen, it's gonna become totally separate. Sure, right.

You have to have a separate working environment.

Like flour in the air could could contaminate a gluten-free environment. So um, we recommend the James Homestead. Okay. They're a local gluten-free bakery here in town.

Oh, that's so you can just push people, like, hey, if that's a big thing.

We do, yeah. So they give us some of their business cards and um They're also at the farmer's market, they're also at the farmer's market. So it's a really good, like, hey, go over here, or you know, we're out today, we recommend this person, or stuff like that. So there's certainly a channel uh for the gluten-free people, and there's room for lots of bakers.

Sure. When I uh so I had a friend who's like really, really gluten-free. Yeah. And at home, when I take a knife out of the drawer and I cut bread, I just put it right back. Yeah. It just goes right back in the drawer. Uh, because it's bread. It's like, man, what am I really contaminating? You know? Well, my gluten-free friend is like, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot put that knife back because that might kill me. Right. And I was like, well, I'm willing to take some risks.

That right there is why we can't say, yeah, I'm a gluten-free bakery. So we'd rather not take that risk. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of liability that would come with that too. Just claiming that claiming it, yeah.

Certainly, yeah, we can't claim it. We use organic ingredients and as clean as we can get it, but we cannot claim to be gluten-free. Yeah, that's great.

Where To Find Them And Wrap

Do you have a last question? Uh I was just gonna ask, where can people find you at? Yeah. If they want to connect with you guys, if they want to put a custom order, you're on socials, where can they connect with you?

Best way to connect with us is through social media, either Facebook or Instagram, uh, through Messenger. On the back of our business card, we have our uh business phone. You can send a text message through there or an email. Um sourdough. Um, or our work phone is 785-633-4153.

Nate Caleb, thanks so much for being here. This is been awesome. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thank you.