How did your quarantine bread taste? This new baker turned an experiment into a business

Way back in March, it seemed as if everyone was trying their hand at baking bread – making sourdough starters, buying up all of the flour and yeast, and watching videos to perfect their own artisanal bread.

Now that the novelty of quarantine has worn off, are people still naming their sourdough starters and feverishly baking?

South Knoxville resident Stephanie Carlson has leveled up her bread-making skills, adding bread maker to her resume and starting a small business, SoKno Sourdough. Whenever she has a lull in her freelance schedule, she turns out loaf after loaf of crusty, rustic sourdough to supplement her income.

It started more than a year ago when a friend offered Carlson some of his starter to make sourdough – a fermented dough filled with natural wild yeast and a bacteria called lactobacilli. Carlson said she kept it “alive” for months and pulled it out of the fridge right when the pandemic started.

“I wanted to give making a real loaf of bread a shot,” said Carlson. “It worked way better than I thought and it tasted good. I made it for friends and they said ‘you need to sell this’.”

Carlson had trouble finding flour, so she went in on a bulk order with a friend.

“I didn’t really like baking; I preferred cooking,” admitted Carlson. “I thought that there was such a science to it; baking is so exact. I studied and researched sourdough enough to understand the different variables and how to manipulate those to get what I’m looking for.”

Carlson started baking boules – a mostly round, rustic, country loaf made in her Dutch oven. “I continue to do the boule and began to do bagels in eight packs, and that has been fun and well received,” she said.

Inspired by the love of her neighborhood, Carlson called her business SoKno Sourdough, and her fiancé created a logo using her handwriting in a sourdough loaf. “One of my friends works at a local print shop and traded his services for my bread,” said Carlson who wraps each order in brown paper and seals it with her logoed sticker.

Initially, Carlson would bake to order. “Now I have an online order form in my Instagram and Facebook profiles @SoKnoSourdough,” she said. “I am doing Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday pickups and accepting orders a week out.” Pickup locations vary, but often can be arranged while Carlson is brew-tending at Alliance Brewing.

While Carlson said she does not feel comfortable physically protesting, she wanted to protest with her money by donating a portion of her sales to support gender and racial equality causes. “Since June, I have donated from my bread sales and still been able to pay my own bills. I plan to continue and switch up the organizations on a monthly basis and hopefully eventually donate a larger percentage.”

Carlson had left her full-time job over a year ago and was working from home – pursuing remote work and building a career. “I have a lot of different jobs; one of them is in the service industry and we really got hit hard,” she said. “I only wanted to make bread to cover my costs. I made it for a discounted rate for people in the service industry, and now I have a little business.”

In addition to working at Alliance Brewing, Carlson does event planning – helping merchants in the Old Sevier district establish the Sunday in Old Sevier market and plan the Cheers to Clean Water: Tennessee River Paddle-Off – which was canceled for September.

With her hours cut at the brewery and most events on hold, Carlson has been focusing on her other business, Eleventh House Creative, providing services in copywriting, copy editing, social media marketing and event coordination.

“Right now I’m down to three jobs,” she laughed. “This is random, but a lot of people are writing books right now, so I have been proofreading and editing. That’s been fun. I can read a book and help a person with wordsmithing edits.”