
{"id":3369,"date":"2008-09-04T08:07:45","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T16:07:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=3369"},"modified":"2008-09-04T08:07:45","modified_gmt":"2008-09-04T16:07:45","slug":"hillsborough-mom-fills-her-empty-nest-with-bread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2008\/09\/04\/hillsborough-mom-fills-her-empty-nest-with-bread\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillsborough mom fills her empty nest with bread"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/kathy3.jpg'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/kathy3-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Kathy Andrews\" title=\"kathy3\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" align=\"left\" size-medium wp-image-3370\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/kathy3-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/kathy3.jpg 1152w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><strong>By Emily Buehler<\/strong><em><br \/>\nStaff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been four years since Kathy Andrews\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153empty nest\u00e2\u20ac\u009d prompted her to bake bread for the Hillsborough Farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d to 30 loaves \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and began selling bread as Simply Sourdough at the Farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Market. The name came from Kathy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s determination to use only sourdough starter, instead of commercial yeast, to leaven her breads.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nIn the past four years, the enterprise has become \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Empty Nest Bakery, home of Simply Sourdough.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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).<\/p>\n<p>What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got a batch of dough mixing in her industrial-sized Hobart mixer. I express surprise at how neat the kitchen is.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just wait,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she tells me. This early, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only mixing dough. By 4 p.m., she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What do you do when company comes?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I ask.<\/p>\n<p>Kathy leads me to the living room, furnished not with sofas and end tables but with more metal racks and dozens of plastic bins. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We wheel it all in here,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she replies.<\/p>\n<p>With all the loaves she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Kathy uses local Lindley Mill\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s organic flours. She grows her own herbs, tomatoes and squash; she picked blueberries for her tarts at the local, organic Philoxenia Farm.<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153<br \/>\nSometimes I think, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWhy do I do this?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she tells me. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wild, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s silly.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ready to greet her regulars, human and canine.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\nKathy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s breads are available Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon at the Hillsborough Farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Market through October. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be available on alternate Saturdays at the Hillsborough Winter Market from October through December.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-land-and-table"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}