You could say that the long lockdown days of COVID-19 inspired Meredith Teller’s breadmaking skills.
But the real inspiration to constantly bake warm, yummy sourdough bread comes from Meredith’s two grandmothers, Hazel and Rosemary.
Those two pillars in her life fostered her love of food and have formed the name of her company, Hazel & Rosemary Micro Bakery & Kitchen.
“Grandma Hazel ‘loved on people’ with food and made the most powerful caesar salad with a kick of garlic. Grandma Rosemary was known for her shortbread cookies and Christmas cake,” Teller fondly remembers.
The company website even features a picture of Meredith making bread in Grandma Hazel’s farmhouse in Collingwood at the tender age of four.
Teller’s home business came about two years ago after she learned to make sourdough bread in a workshop at Season’s Pharmacy and Culinaria.
“Those early bricks of bread were quite dense, but I chipped away at it and came up with fine tasting bread with a combination of flavours that people really enjoy for bread, pizza dough, cookies, and focaccia bread,” she said.
Now that she has perfected the process, she can experiment and loves to use local additives to her bread.
Teller is all about weaving lots of local connections into her food with garlic from Three Forks Farms on Manitoulin Island, Canadian sea salt from Vancouver and an all organic Ontario flour from k2 Milling in Tottenham, near Vaughan.
She added that the unbleached and unprocessed flour has made all the difference in her bread as it gives it depth and retains a lot of flavour. She has met the owner of k2 Milling and toured the milling facility to better understand the process.
Her signature flavour is the Rosemary Sea Salt with Garlic, which is also a nod to her two grandmothers in name and taste.
“We would also joke about how many cloves of garlic were used in my grandma’s food,” she said. “And the ‘Rosemary’ was one of their names, but also a herb of remembrance.”
The original and the jalapeno cheddar are other staples.
She will also rotate experimental flavours like Currant Earl Grey and Orange or Maple Bacon-flavoured bread.
Teller balances the breadmaking with a full-time job at Laurentian University. Thankfully, her husband, Chad Teller, has taken up a lot of the work at their home in Lively.
He’s in charge of the dough preparation and the shaping of the loaves.
The future plan is to grow at a sustainable pace given their hectic lives raising three children.
“I’ve taken on hobbies before and burned myself out. I want to be careful that does not happen again because making sourdough bread really makes me happy,”
She’s open to selling bread through other local businesses and maybe a future storefront.
Right now, the Tellers are producing about 100 loaves of bread each week, 30 baguettes as well as doughs, cookies and focaccia.
Paris Natural Foods started carrying her breads and pizza dough this month. It’s already available at Season’s. Teller and her husband are always at the Sudbury Farmers Market as well, which is currently located at Science North on Saturdays.
Her bread is reaching a little farther west, too, with Maple Acre Farms in Blind River selling her products.
Looking back, Teller mused, “Ironically, I really cannot thank COVID enough for how good of a bread maker I’ve become.”
What emerged from the pandemic for the Teller family is a newfound passion and a connection to the past leading to more dreams for the future.
Hazel & Rosemary Micro Bakery & Kitchen can be found on Facebook and Instagram or visit the website at HazelandRosemary.ca.
You can also learn to make bread with Teller at an upcoming workshop at Seasons Pharmacy and Culinaria.
The event on March 26 will take customers through the whole process and they will leave with freshly baked loaves of bread, dough, organic flour and a sourdough starter.
Anastasia Rioux is a writer in Greater Sudbury. Let’s eat! is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
