On the Rise

Twenty-four hours before Sarah Bogdanovitch and Marcelle Fernee loaded up their bicycles with 37 crusty and still-warm loaves of bread, and then pedaled them to customers in Ortega, Avondale, Riverside, San Marco and Springfield, they had to decide what kind of bread they wanted to bake.

The two women settled on their own version of olive bread, mixing four quarts of kalamata olives prepared by Riverside Arts Market pickler Olive My Pickles, and 30 pounds of organic unbleached white flour in an industrial mixer at Murray Hill Baptist Church. After letting the giant glob of dough rest overnight, they separated it into loaves, letting them rise in the church’s kitchen, before popping them in the oven to bake. “Working with bread is working with a living thing,” explains Fernee. “It’s not the sort of thing you can walk away from.”

The olive loaves were just the most recent offering from Community Loaves, which the two 23-year-olds formed in November. The subscription bakery offers a weekly loaf of freshly baked organic bread, delivered by bicycle to the historic neighborhoods around downtown Jacksonville. Customers pay $24 a month for a loaf a week or $12 a month for a loaf every other week. The idea of a subscription service appealed to the business partners, in part because they could decide what kind of bread they would bake based upon whatever ingredients looked good. They’ve made granny apple sourdough bread with fermented green apples substituting for the yeast, prepared a seven-grain hot cereal that they’ve folded into the dough, and baked rosemary whole-wheat bread with herbs from Maggie’s Herb Farm in St. Johns County.

“We are free to experiment,” says Bogdanovitch, her blonde hair tied up with a scarf and wearing a modified Starbucks apron, with the mermaid logo covered by flowered fabric. “We gather up our ingredients each week, and what we find dictates what we make each week depending on what is good, what is fresh and what we are inspired to do.”

From the beginning, says Fernee — the organizational and graphic talent of the pair — “everything has been just crazily synchronistic.”

Bogdanovitch had daydreamed for a while about creating a bakery delivery business based upon the model of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where farmers sell a share of their crop to customers who then receive a weekly bag of fresh produce. But it was something she figured she’d do sometime in the future since, until last November, she was living 10 miles outside of Homer, Alaska. When her boyfriend Jonah Pierre accepted a job teaching music at LaVilla School of the Arts, Bogdanovitch agreed to move to here — but she assumed it would be just long enough to convince Pierre to move somewhere else. Instead, she quickly found a community of like-minded people and an urban fabric that could be navigated by bicycle. When she met Fernee and told her about her bread subscription idea, Fernee jumped on board. She had worked as a baker for the wholesale Maria’s Bakery on the Southside, and for Bakery Moderne after she moved to Riverside. At the time, she had a job she loved at St. Johns Flower Market in Avondale, but she wanted to do something extra in her down time. The prospect of starting a small batch organic bakery with locally sourced ingredients seemed like the ideal enterprise.

The pair approached members of Murray Hill Baptist Church about using their kitchen for their bakery, and church nursery school cook Lydia Manns decided it was a good fit. They call her their “kitchen mother” and she calls them her “hippies.” “To me, what they are doing is part of the very thing that we do,” says Manns. “They want to improve the lives of people in their corner of the world.”

As the olive bread dough reached its peak, Fernee slid the bakery sheets into the oven, while Bogdanovitch stood by with an aluminum pitcher of water. When all the loaves were in, she opened the door and tossed water on the oven’s edges. It sizzled and evaporated into a puff of steam, which gives the bread a nice crust and adds to the rise as it bakes. After about 35 minutes, the loaves had turned a honey-brown and the smell of fresh-baked bread wafted from the oven. She pronounced them done after pulling a loaf from the oven and hearing a hollow sound when she rapped it with her knuckles.

There have been a few sacrifices to the gods of the kitchen, says Bogdanovitch. One day, they dropped and broke a 24-ounce bottle of olive oil on the floor. Another time when Bogdanovitch was spritzing the oven with water, she accidentally hit the oven light bulb and it shattered over all of the loaves, destroying the day’s batch. They recently bought a grain mill, and with the help of Zen Cog Bicycle Company in Jacksonville Beach, they’re affixing a stationary bicycle to it so they can mill their own flour, sprouts and brown rice. When Bogdanovitch travels to Upstate New York to visit her family over the summer, she plans to search New England for a farmer who grows heritage wheats that could supply them with grain or flour. (The wheat in the South is soft and more suitable for biscuits than bread, she notes.)

In the meantime, the women are happy to wait and see how Community Loaves shapes their lives. Bogdanovitch finished her degree in Russian and comparative literature at Oberlin College, and she’s been trading work at Down to Earth Farm in Middleburg for a weekly produce share, learning about organic agriculture. She also works in the kitchen of Sun Ray Cinema in Five Points. Fernee thought she’d study sustainable agriculture at Appalachian State University, so she’d have the skills she needed to revive her family’s farm in northeastern Spain. Now both are learning skills they couldn’t have anticipated needing before launching their business last winter.

“There are a lot of ways to get the skills and the tools you need to live a happy life,” says Fernee.

“That’s our motto,” adds Bogdanovitch. “That’s what we tell ourselves every day.“

Susan Cooper E

sceastman@folioweekly.c

Find Community Loaves on Facebook, or contact them at communityloaves@gmail.c