She said she intended to use the starter, which is essentially a fermented dough bakers keep to make sourdough bread rise, to continue making fresh bread for her family.
Five years later, that bread starter—made of just yeast, flour and water—is in every item served at Sanford Sourdough Bakery.
Sanford said she started out sharing loaves of bread with friends at church, finding she had enough demand locally to begin selling baked goods at farmer’s markets five days a week before opening her brick-and-mortar location in north Round Rock in January 2020.
“We do it the way that we love it, which is popular in Central California,” Sanford said. “There [are] lots of Californians who missed that style of bread, even though it's just a simple sourdough.”
Starting with traditional sourdough bread loaves, Sanford has expanded her product selection to include sourdough cinnamon rolls and sandwiches. In addition to her baked goods, Sanford also stocks her store with farm-fresh eggs and other products from local businesses.
She said ingredients used in the bakery are also locally sourced, including organic flour milled each week at the Barton Springs Mill and pastrami that comes from a butcher in San Marcos.
“When we opened up the bakery, we decided that we wouldn't sell anybody something that we wouldn't feed to our own children," Sanford said.
She also sells portions of her starter so customers can make their own San Francisco-style sourdough. For those who want to learn the Sanford way, she created an online course available through the bakery’s website.
“Once somebody buys the class, it's theirs forever, so they can go back and relearn it if they want to,” she said. “It’s really handy for people if you get an itch to learn something and then you forget about it for six months or a year.”
The process taught in the classes is the same used by staff daily, Sanford said. Each day, bakery staff mixes, kneads and shapes the dough before allowing it to rest overnight. In the morning, the variety of sourdough goods are baked in a steam oven to produce the crispy, bubbly crust San Francisco sourdough is known for.
“I tell the new bakers here all the time that there's nothing particularly special about what we do other than we make a lot of it,” she said.
Sanford Sourdough Bakery
1025 Sendero Springs Drive, Ste. 160, Round Rock
www.sanfordbakery.com
512-800-0414
Hours: Wed.-Sat. 9 a.m.-6 p.m., closed Sun.-Tue.
