Sourdough starter allows you to make bread without yeast. Abigail Cole’s enterprise and resourcefulness allowed her to bake bread without a bakery.
Cole started at Proof, the Inman Park bakery/coffee shop known for its artisan bread and pastries, a little more than a year ago. “It was my first commercial kitchen job,” she said. She learned fast. “I am fairly new to this, but I worked my way up and learned a lot as I went.”
In March, she was promoted to head of bread. A week later Proof and its sister restaurant, Bread & Butterfly, closed down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Owner Billy Allin secured unemployment for most of his 48 employees.
But Cole said the $150-a-week unemployment check was a little skimpy. “That was more than a lot of my service industry friends were getting,” said Cole, “but no one can live off that. It’s not enough to make rent or make a car payment. I had to find a way to supplement that.”
She decided to try to utilize her new skills.
A former dog-walker and waitress in Atlanta and Macon, Cole, 25, had no commercial kitchen. She had no industrial mixer. All she had at her Inman Park apartment was a KitchenAid and a half-sized oven. But she figured, what the heck, she would give it a try.
Soon she began to turn out sourdough bread that was like a work of art, along with tasty cranberry-nut bread, cinnamon buns and cookies. Her focaccia would make you slap your whole family.
All of this was below the radar since she didn’t have a cottage business license. “I’m trying to keep it on the hush-hush side with my landlord,” she said last week. She accumulated customers through social media and accepted clients by appointment only, baking about four or five orders a day.
Customers had to buy combination orders if they wanted bread. The “breakfast box” includes one loaf of sourdough bread, six bagels and four cinnamon buns for $30. Another assortment includes a loaf of sourdough, a loaf of cranberry-nut bread and either cookies crackers or focaccia for $42.
Because her tiny oven could only bake one loaf at a time, it took nine hours to complete those orders. After a few weeks, she found a commercial bakery in her neighborhood where she could work part of the time, with an industrial mixer that helped reduce preparation times.
“It’s kind of forcing me to learn how to use ovens that are not my home oven, and not the ovens I’m used to at Proof,” she said.
Baking guerrilla bread has its challenges. The trunk of a car is a nice warm place for dough to rise, while driving back and forth between her apartment and the commercial bakery, but the timing has to be precise. “It’s within a small window of time, so things don’t over-proof in the trunk,” she said. “My biggest fear is the dough will go flying.”
Sometimes the dough itself is a danger. “I had focaccia dough explode in my refrigerator Monday morning,” she said last week.
That volatile dough is helping earn her some bread. Like thousands of restaurant workers in Atlanta, Cole was thrown for a loss by the pandemic. She found a way to make up some of the difference.
Of her efforts, Proof owner Allin said, “It makes me proud, whether or not I had anything to do with it.”
He hopes what she learned at Proof will be useful. “The only legacy I’m going to have is: Did people under our guidance in any way learn how to be self-sufficient and succeed?”
This week Proof is gearing back up for a slow re-opening. It has been serving take-out only and requiring masks on its customers who want bread and pastries. Allin hopes to add simple sandwiches and coffee in a little while. And Cole is back working at Proof for a few hours a week.
“We’re going from second gear to third gear in a five-gear car,” said Allin. Bread & Butterfly is also opening tentatively, selling just bakery items made at Proof, but with no sit-down service yet.
“Some of us are able to go back to work, but it’s not going to be to the scale that it was before,” said Cole. “Hopefully I’ll be able to get some baking done at home.”
We hope so too.
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