Why I Started Sourdough

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd be standing in my kitchen at 6am, scoring a loaf of bread before the kids woke up, I'd have laughed. I was a pharmacist. I worked twelve-hour shifts. I bought my bread at the grocery store like everybody else.

But here we are. And the story of how I got here is the story of how I figured out who I wanted to be.

It started with my baby

When my first was little, things weren't easy. There were doctor's visits and questions without answers and long nights where I sat with my baby in my arms and felt completely powerless. As a pharmacist, I was used to having answers — I knew the medications, the dosages, the side effects. But there were days when none of that helped, and all I wanted was something I could do with my hands.

Two in the morning

One night I couldn't sleep. I'd been reading about food sensitivities and gut health and a hundred other things mothers read about when they're up worrying. Somewhere along the way I fell into a rabbit hole about sourdough — how the long fermentation breaks down some of the gluten, how it's gentler on the gut, how people had been eating it this way for thousands of years before commercial yeast was even a thing.

I don't remember exactly when I decided to try it. I just remember thinking: I can do this. I can make my family bread. It felt small and big at the same time.

My first loaf

It was bad. Truly. Flat, dense, more like a hubcap than a loaf. But I'd made it. I'd taken flour and water and turned it into food. And there was something about that — about doing one tiny thing well in a season when everything else felt out of my control — that I couldn't let go of.

So I made another one. And another. And another.

What sourdough gave me

It wasn't really about the bread. It was about the rhythm. Sourdough has its own pace — you feed the starter, you mix the dough, you wait, you fold, you wait some more. You can't rush it. You can't muscle through it. You just have to show up and let it do its thing.

After years of measuring everything in milligrams and minutes, there was something healing about working with an ingredient that doesn't follow a schedule. About listening for what the dough needed instead of what the recipe said.

The leap

Eventually I stopped working at the pharmacy. We started growing our own food. We opened the farm stand. None of it was a straight line — there was a lot of figuring it out as we went, and there still is. But the through-line, for me, has always been the bread.

Every loaf I bake reminds me why I do this. Why we have the farm stand. Why we grow what we grow. Because food is one of the most personal things you can give someone — and there's a kind of peace in making it from scratch that I never knew I needed until I had it.

Why I'm sharing this

If you're stopping by the farm stand and buying a loaf, or grabbing a jar of starter to take home — I want you to know there's a whole story behind it. This isn't a side hustle. This is something I built in the small hours, between the hard days, because I needed it. And now I get to share it with you.

If you've ever felt like you needed to do something with your hands — to slow down, to make something — start with bread. It's the most forgiving teacher I've ever had.

And if you want to start: come find me at the farm stand. I'll send you home with a jar of starter and a cheat sheet, and you can text me when something goes weird. Because that's how this works. We figure it out together.