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Hillsborough mom fills her empty nest with bread

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Staff

Kathy AndrewsBy Emily Buehler
Staff Writer

It’s been four years since Kathy Andrews’ “empty nest” prompted her to bake bread for the Hillsborough Farmers’ Market. With no more children at home, Kathy found that baking her usual weekly two loaves left her discontented. But rather than bake less, she increased production — to 30 loaves — and began selling bread as Simply Sourdough at the Farmers’ Market. The name came from Kathy’s determination to use only sourdough starter, instead of commercial yeast, to leaven her breads.

In the past four years, the enterprise has become “The Empty Nest Bakery, home of Simply Sourdough.” Kathy has expanded her offerings to include about a dozen kinds of bread, from basic sourdoughs to whole-grain breads and flavored loaves like chive and cheddar. She bakes focaccias topped with herbs or fruit and flatbreads like the artichoke-onion-pinenut-parmesan, but be warned: her flavors change every week. She also bakes savory tarts and galettes, sweet tarts, crackers and crostini, and the perennial favorite: bone-shaped sourdough dog biscuits (safe for human consumption).

What’s truly amazing is that Kathy bakes almost all of it the day before market, beginning around 4 a.m. When I arrive at her house at 7, she’s got a batch of dough mixing in her industrial-sized Hobart mixer. I express surprise at how neat the kitchen is.

“Just wait,” she tells me. This early, she’s only mixing dough. By 4 p.m., she’ll be mixing, shaping and baking as the different doughs required for all her various loaves reach their ready points. The kitchen island will be covered with flour and the windows will be open to let in the humid summer air, cool in comparison to the air in her kitchen.

All around the house, I spot bakery equipment. A six-foot-tall proof box waits in the kitchen doorway, while a multi-shelved metal cooling rack lines one wall. Kathy got the Hobart from eBay, but her husband, George, had to rebuild it; it makes about 15 loaves.

George also custom built a shelf for their oven and lined it with tiles to make the oven better for making bread: The preheated tiles help the oven come back to temperature quickly when loaves are put in, ensuring that the loaves get the maximum amount of heat and can expand fully before their crusts form. At the bottom of the oven is a stainless-steel trough for creating steam in the oven. The steam also enables the loaves to expand fully by delaying their crust formation.

“What do you do when company comes?” I ask.

Kathy leads me to the living room, furnished not with sofas and end tables but with more metal racks and dozens of plastic bins. “We wheel it all in here,” she replies.

With all the loaves she’s making, Kathy needs a lot of sourdough starter. She keeps her starter in the fridge to slow down its activity. Beginning on Tuesday, she increases it by feeding it flour and water. Each feeding doubles the amount of starter, until by Friday morning she has enough bursting out of her refrigerator to make her dozens of loaves of bread.

Kathy uses local Lindley Mill’s organic flours. She grows her own herbs, tomatoes and squash; she picked blueberries for her tarts at the local, organic Philoxenia Farm.
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Sometimes I think, ‘Why do I do this?’” she tells me. “It’s wild, it’s silly.” But by Saturday morning, all of the loaves have cooled and been packed into plastic bins for transport to market. By 7:30 a.m., Kathy and George are in downtown Hillsborough, setting up her glass case filled with loaves and the silver dish piled high with dog biscuits. When the market begins at 8, she’s ready to greet her regulars, human and canine.

Kathy’s breads are available Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon at the Hillsborough Farmers’ Market through October. They’ll be available on alternate Saturdays at the Hillsborough Winter Market from October through December.

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