It’s a blustery, dark, cold morning in February. I’m on the backroad to Sauble Beach at 5am to bake bread with Katy and Matt from Crust & Crackle Artisan Bread. When I arrive, Matt is already snowblowing the driveway and the kitchen light is on. Katy is already hard at it, flipping loaves of bread into two ovens in their repurposed, expanded home kitchen.
Having enjoyed their products before, I knew what I was in for when it comes to taste, but having the opportunity to work with Katy for a day is what’s exciting. I know my way around a kitchen, but a bakery? I couldn’t bake to save my life. Nevertheless, I’m here to learn a thing or two and get some flour on my shirt. Here goes nothin’.
I step in the door and the smell of fresh bread hits me like a ton of bricks. It’s glorious. Katy sets me up in the kitchen while she gets her kiddos up and running before the sun rises. “What’s for breakfast?” one of them asks. “Toast,” she replies. The small but mighty commercial ovens emit a warm glow from the corner of the otherwise sleepy family home. A six foot tall steel bread rack is already filled with upwards of 50 loaves of fresh bread, the result of yesterday’s prep.
Crust & Crackle got its start in a way oh so many hobbies-turned-side-hustle-turned-careers, sometimes do – out of necessity. In their household, several members have serious food allergies and sensitivities. This made navigating safe, reliable food choices from the grocery store a complicated endeavor. Thankfully, Katy’s culinary background allowed her to start baking at home from scratch.
Today, Crust & Crackle offers local, organic, flavourful bread to the entire region via an ingenious delivery schedule and baking regimen. Each loaf is lovingly crafted using Canadian organic and sustainably grown grains. On the local front, some of their flours are grown and milled in Bruce County from Stone Bridge Flour, located in Kincardine.
What started as a safe way to feed the family has blossomed into a full bore business, now employing Matt full-time as well. A licensed electrician by trade and Sauble local, he now handles the logistics of the delivery side of the business, while Katy, uses her background as a professional chef to develop weekly special sourdough and focaccia flavours that are always revolving to showcase seasonal ingredients and tastes.
The kitchen is well planned out. Central is a massive island where the majority of their mixing, measuring and shaping happens. In the corner sit those two badass ovens courtesy of Simply Bread. Designed to fit in a small square footage, they’re the nucleus of the operation.
“They’re single phase, so they require less electricity than a lot of other commercial bakery equipment,” says Katy. “When we were shopping around for mixers and ovens we had to make sure that they fit into our electrical requirements. They have steam injection, and then they have two inch stones on three decks, so they hold that mass residual heat. Everybody bakes sourdough in a dutch oven, so it’s like that but on a mass scale. When I first started, I was using Dutch ovens, but it killed my back. So then I went into open baking, which just means that I was baking on a sheet pan and then inoculating the oven to steam. That was becoming tiresome, but I could only produce so much – about eight loaves in an hour in a home oven. Between these two ovens, I can bake two dozen loaves in a half hour.”
The business started slow and gained speed quickly. Acting as a side hustle for extra cash at first, it kicked into high gear when Matt came on board full-time as a co-owner. The two have never looked back.
“We started taking everything really seriously,” says Katy, smiling. “The year that Matt joined me, we baked just over 14,000 loaves. And then last year, we haven’t finished tallying up our numbers, but it’s between 18 and 20,000. It’s been pretty cool.”
What’s a typical day look like? Tuesday is the beginning of the week starting with prep.
“Usually on Tuesdays I’ve got 100 or so sourdough loaves to prep. They go in the fridge overnight to cold proof, and then on Wednesday morning, it depends on how many orders rolled in but I could bake anywhere from 100 to 150 Wednesday morning. That’s from like 5 – 9 a.m., and then Matt goes out for delivery around 10. And then, while he’s out for deliveries, I begin prepping for the next day – it could be anywhere from like 100-120 loaves. By the time he gets back we have to sit down and decompress, have lunch and then around 2 p.m. we start shaping. The kids get home at 3:45 and we’re still shaping. Then we jump right into dinner. And then bing, bang, boom – the day’s done. I’m in here all day. Like, all day,” she laughs.
A graduate of Georgian College’s Culinary Management program, Katy has been in and out of restaurants her entire life.
“I was always cooking in the kitchen with my mom when I was little. So, I was a natural. I don’t feel out of my element in the kitchen. I’m either in the kitchen, or I’m in the garden. Growing up [in Bancroft] my mom had gardens. We raised animals for our meat. We had to fish, that kind of stuff. So, everything was from scratch. It was just part of life, and when I grew up, that stayed with me.”
The last of the loaves come out of the oven. Katy and Matt press pause on the interview and go into complete business mode to label, sort, and pack the hundreds of loaves in front of me. They’re placed into bags, storage bins, in the car and down the road in about 30 minutes, still warm. By the afternoon, people in Owen Sound, Shallow Lake, Wiarton, and Meaford, on this particular day, will have bread that was baked in Sauble an hour ago.
Now, it’s mixing time. Out come the tote bins. We mix pounds upon pounds of carefully measured organic flour, rye, spelt, and flax, we toast seeds, measure water, and feed the starter. The first of our three dough mixtures goes into the Italian industrial mixer and begins its slow process of combining everything together. The smells are profound, even through my mask (baker’s lung is a real thing). The starter in particular is fascinating – it bubbles and rolls in its bin like a living being trying to get out.
“People ask me if they can buy our starter all the time, and I tell them no,” laughs Katy. “It’s like this, if you can’t grow, maintain and understand the ebbs and flows of a starter then you will be unsuccessful baking sourdough bread. Everyone should start from step one and that’s growing their own starter from scratch.”
I try my hand at shaping the newly proofed dough, with varying degrees of success. Katy and Matt make it look effortless, pulling and pinching dough into uniform balls in seconds while I pull and tug it around to the point I confuse myself. They sweep in to show me the ropes and save the poor dough ball. 3pm rolls around and the day is winding down. We thoroughly clean the kitchen top to bottom and snack on fresh focaccia.
When you love what you do, it shows. Even from working with these two for a single day, I can tell they love this work, their clients, their network of drop locations, and the relationships they’ve built in the region. Breaking bread, so to speak, is what they truly excel at.
“Your house smells so good,” I say, dipping bread in olive oil and balsamic. “Do you ever get tired of the smell of fresh bread?”
“No,” is the resounding answer.
Words and photos by Nelson Phillips
