794: She Wolf Bakes Thousands of Sourdough Loaves Each Week. Kim Vallejo Keeps It All on Track.

21:58Yeah, for quite a long time. I've always kind of worked in food in some capacity. My very first job was at a Wegmans because I am a very good upstate New Yorker and we grow up, you know, diehard Wegmans fans. That was my very first job. I was a florist there and I absolutely loved that. From there, I did get into waiting tables. I had been a bartender. I think bartending is probably one of the things I've done for the longest amount of time in my life. I was a bartender for roughly 15 years, which sounds insane. How am I even old enough to have done that? I don't know. But definitely working with my hands and working with food and kitchens and ingredients always just felt really natural to me.

22:43It was something that I tried many times to leave and kept finding my way back. You know, I went to college to leave my job at Wegmans and learn something and pursue, you know, sort of a different path. But I just I needed the money to buy the books. And so you end up waiting tables again. And once I got out of school, that was my safety net as I moved and relocated to different cities. Bartending was the thing that sort of helped me settle and land and find a community and pay my rent, of course. And even after grad school, I thought, you know, I'm done with this work. I'm going to go work in international development.

23:17And I pursued this whole nonprofit career, but I couldn't help but run a community garden and do some communal cooking there. And food has just always been a part of my life. So bread is a constant for sure, but there's been a lot of like exploring other areas of food as well.

23:36Matt Rodbard:Do you think there's something specific? Like obviously we all love to eat food, but is there something about the people or the way that it kind of fits into your life that you think draws you to it? Definitely something about the people. That was something I said when I worked in the nonprofit sector is that, you know, when I felt a need to change and felt a need to leave, I felt like I needed to find my people was kind of the mantra that I kept repeating to myself. And there's just something about people who have a sensibility with food, who can feel an ingredient and like understand what is happening with food, especially as you're growing it or working with something that's alive like bread.

24:13Like it does take a real kind of nuanced like tuning in that I think just not everybody has. And it's a really special part of working in food is finding people who kind of share and understand that, I think.

24:26Matt Rodbard:Yeah, I think that's certainly one of my favorite parts about working in food and having this podcast, getting to talk to people about what working in food looks like for them. And for me, as a eater of bread and frequenter of the Fort Greene farmer's market, She Wolf bread is the loaf of bread that I buy at the farmer's market. Which loaf can I ask? Well, thank you for asking. It depends on the season. I would say I normally buy the seeded sourdough boule, which is this kind of oval shaped bread. But the Pullman loaf is the square loaf. Right. And I think it's like the most cartoonishly perfect slice of toast specifically for making a tomato sandwich or BLT.

25:04Matt Rodbard:But it's a much larger loaf. I don't know if I can put in a request to do a half size. I freeze my bread. So it's not that it's not going well. It's just that I don't have like room in the freezer for all of that bread always because I don't have a very big household. So it really depends on the season. But I'm getting into Pullman season. It's a long way to answer that question. Yeah. No, we get that request a lot. The Pullman is a large loaf. We do kind of make it for families. It's obviously very popular with kids. It's the kind of loaf that you're going to make a PB &J and send it for lunch.

25:34It looks like the toast emoji. Exactly. Exactly. It's a perfectly shaped loaf of bread. My hot tip for the Pullmans in particular is that I usually only eat half of it as bread. And then I save the other half and slice it up and let it dry out and make croutons out of it. Because it's already squared off because of the pan, it just is really easy to break down into crouton size and shape, which, hello tomato season, you're going to need some good croutons to have on hand. And I think that is just such an overlooked use of bread that you can actually cook with it, too. It's not just eating it as bread.

26:11And in my house, we have a bit of a salty, crunchy snack addiction and to wean us off of chips. So I started making croutons very regularly and it's been a game changer for us.

26:22Matt Rodbard:Well, this is the kind of like insider knowledge that I was really hoping up on. Do you think maybe for somebody who hasn't had the opportunity to try SheWolf before, you could explain the bakery, the business and what your role in it is? Yeah, absolutely. So as a bakery, we've been around for about 16 years and we were born out of this mantra of wanting to make better bread, specifically from local ingredients, which is a really rare thing. And it's honestly hard to do and hard to find for lots of reasons. The local grain industry doesn't kind of exist the way that it used to or it's coming back.

26:57But, you know, we weren't growing a lot of grains in the Northeast until relatively recently. the whole of the bakery came into existence because Andrew Tarlow who I believe was on the show not that long ago.

27:09Matt Rodbard:Yeah my co-host Matt had him on maybe a month or so ago. Yeah not too long ago so he's the business owner and he opened a restaurant about 16 years ago Romans in Fort Green a fabulous you know Italian sort of celebrates the seasons and everything that's local and fresh and he really wanted bread that would stand up to that to that menu and that mission and it just didn't exist. So he took it upon himself to put out an ad in the paper to hire a baker, someone to make bread more along the lines of what he was trying to do with the menu in-house at Romans. Austin Hall, who was our original and founding head baker, and he's still with us today, he responded to the ad and would come in and work overnight and sort of mix this bread by hand and bake it off in our beautiful wood-fired oven at Romans.

27:55And people just lost their minds for it. They had never had bread that delicious. June Russell, who is a really prominent name in working with local grains, she was at GrowNYC at the time and trying to bring local flour and local grains into the green market and make them more readily available in New York City. And so when June and Austin met, it just completely was a game changer and set off this mission that we're now on to help restore the Northeast grain shed by making beautiful bread. and using local flour. The mill that we were buying a lot of our local grains from, farmer ground flour, they were quite new when we started.

28:37And so they were learning how to mill at the same time that Austin was trying to make better bread. And working hand in hand, they were able to troubleshoot a lot of the early days of, you know, is this flour working for bread? Does it need to be, you know, grind slightly differently? Or how do we make this better? And so we've really evolved together. And with the growth of Farmer Ground, our business has also been able to grow. And we've continued to just source local grains from anybody that we can to continue to expand our mission and turn it into not only bread now, but also sweets. We're making cookies and brownies and muffins and cakes and all sorts of delicious things out of local grains.

29:15Everything's organic. We use a ton of stone milled stuff and everything is made by hand in our shop at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Okay, that's such a great, expansive overview.

29:25Matt Rodbard:And how many markets do you sell at today? Like what's kind of the scope of where this bread can be found? Yeah, we are mostly still selling at the farmer's market. We currently do 12 farmer's markets every week. So that's two almost every day. Monday and Tuesday, we're just doing one market each. But the rest of the week, we're in a couple of places at the same time, which is logistically really fun for me to figure out as the person leading the business. But we also have expanded our wholesale program pretty significantly. So we're now available in a number of restaurants. A lot of She Wolf bread plates are out there.

30:01And our name is on the menu, which I love seeing. We are selling probably to about 70 wholesale customers between Brooklyn and Manhattan. So you have an opportunity to find us in a lot of places. Not a lot of retail locations still. The farmer's market is still probably the best place to get your hands on our whole selection. And then also the Navy Yard that they're there. Yeah. So the Navy Yard location is really new for us. We moved into the Navy Yard, oh gosh, September of 2024. So towards the end of the year. But we didn't open our cafe until May of last year, May 2025. So this has been a whole new experience for us.

30:40Not only are we now making the bread, but we have to put stuff on the bread. We're making sandwiches. We're making salads. We're making coffee beverages. We have a whole beverage program, things that we had never done before. But we're having so much fun there. something that we didn't realize was going to be, you know, sort of an exciting opportunity with the cafe, is that it allows us to make things at a smaller volume than the farmer's market does, right? Because if you're going to make something, let's say we have a new cookie, and we send it out to the markets, you have to have many hundreds of these cookies in order to satisfy all of your customers.

31:13People are going to be really disappointed if they come and you're sold out. with the cafe, we can test run a dozen of something and just see what happens and try some experimental stuff, which has been really exciting for us to evolve and grow as a bakery. And then things that hit, we're able to scale up the production, send it to the market. And it's really just kind of changed our approach to R &D and how we do product development, which has been

31:39Matt Rodbard:great. Oh, that's really cool to get to know about. And you alluded to being the person that's maybe organizing the spreadsheet or winning the farmer's markets, but what does your job kind of look like in practice? My job is literally anything and everything. I am some days the wholesale driver, just driving around the city with bread in the van and dropping it off. Some days I'm working the farmer's market. Some days I'm also making bread. Not as often as I used to when we were a much smaller business. I used to get on the bench quite a bit more, but I'm great at shaping bread. I love shaping bread.

32:13It's probably the favorite part of my job. But I'm also, you know, overseeing all of the logistics, making sure that our deliveries are arriving on time, making sure that the staff have everything that they need and that, you know, any of the issues they're facing, we're able to address with with HR or however need be. It's really it's managing the people. It's managing all the places that we're in at once and certainly making sure the product is looking good. Wow, I wonder what the inside of your brain looks like. I feel like there must be a million different things going at once. Yeah, just as like every single day, I think I'm just as likely to be like pouring over sales numbers, looking at our P &L, but I'm also translating like a dough problem to one of the bakery managers and also like thinking about van maintenance that needs to happen.

33:01It's I'm really all over the place every day.

33:03Matt Rodbard:Do you think having the experience with actually making the bread makes the other parts of your job more easy to understand? Absolutely. You know, it's really tricky to make bread the way that we make it. And it's all sourdough. Right. And so there's a process and a timeline that we're always thinking about three or four days at the same time. It literally takes us 72 hours to make a loaf. And so you need to have this very visceral understanding of the bread making process in order to successfully onboard your new wholesale customers. You want to set expectations. I can't get 20 new loaves for you tomorrow because we started that bread two days ago.

33:42Right. And so I just don't have it. It's just not in production. And the more fluent you are with the process, I think the better customer service you can give. But also you're going to be better at selling it. It's something that I really try to instill in our market team and our sales representatives. We used to do a day where I would bring the salespeople into the bakery program. We haven't been able to do that quite as readily now that we've grown and scaled quite a bit. But I think that understanding of how it's made and the appreciation for how much work it is and how hard and difficult it is just makes you really able to answer customer questions at the market and talk with energy and passion about the products that we make.

34:20Matt Rodbard:Yeah, I, like many New Yorkers, had a period of time where I was making my own sourdough at home. And I think it made me really understand the cost of buying sourdough so much more because it takes forever, especially when you're not as used to getting all of the process down. And I think just having that kind of understanding of this is a three-day process is super cool, I'm sure, as a seller, but also as a consumer. Yeah, and that it's going to change. I think one of the hardest things about making bread at home that a lot of home bakers are not prepared for is that your kitchen probably is not as climate controlled as a professional kitchen.

34:57And so a day like today where it's extremely hot and humid, you're going to have a very different experience making bread than in the middle of winter when it's bone dry and ice cold. Like your kitchen is going to feel different. Your oven is going to heat differently. And certainly your starter is going to ripen differently. And your bread is going to improve differently. And getting that dialed in is one of the more frustrating parts about making bread. Like you want it to be good, but you have to get all of these factors to kind of line up in order to get the outcome that you're looking for.

35:26And it's certainly one of the things that we try to do is create as much climate control in our facility so that we can have a similar production, you know, day to day.

35:36Matt Rodbard:Right. When I was in my bread baking era, I also was in my having a pet snake era. And so I would proof my dough in the snake's room because it was always very humid and hot. Yeah, that's a great tip. It was a very, very Brooklyn thing to do. I love that. I'm inspired. Now I need a snake so I can do some more baking at home. I do recommend it's a very low maintenance pet. You're into that kind of thing. Definitely. So we're talking about sourdough and how that kind of impacts operations. Another thing that comes to mind for me is working with local grain and also the variety of grain that you're working with.

36:08Matt Rodbard:And especially as the business is scaling, I think certainly now compared to 16 years ago, there's more local grain being grown in New York. But I'm curious if you could speak to what is the grain that you're working with? Like what's the kind of diversity of grain and how does that impact the final product? Yeah, those are great questions. We try to work with as many grains as possible. Anything that we can get our hands on, especially if it's from this region, we're going to get excited about. And do you count that as like New York or like East Coast? A little bit of both. We try to buy a lot of stuff from New York.

36:38We are working to expand our sourcing to like some folks in Western Mass or in New Jersey or Eastern Pennsylvania. People who would come to the green market. Yeah. Or just it's within the region. You know, there's a lot of ways to kind of think about local food and to sell into the green market specifically here in New York City. They have some pretty high standards. You have to be sourcing from within I think it's 250 or 300 miles from New York City. And so there's literally a map they give you when you're a new vendor with a big circle drawn around it and anything within the circle, which I think extends down to maybe northern Delaware and up to doesn't quite hit Maine, but does get into Massachusetts and maybe lower Vermont, New Hampshire.

37:21All of that is fair game. So we literally will look at the map and try to figure out who we can buy stuff from. Our current kind of all-purpose bread flour that is just the white roller mill flour, we're getting from a mill called La Mélanaise in Canada, actually, outside Montreal. So it's kind of within the region, but it does technically fall outside of that green market region. So depending on how you're talking about local and from the northeast, we want to explore all of it. We want to see what's happening in our general region. Working with the kinds of grains that we're working with, which are often heritage, stone ground, less traditionally used in baking, comes with a lot of advantages.

38:07Certainly it's more flavorful and more fun and exciting for us to work with. But it also comes with a lot of challenges. We're hiring bakers who maybe have never had to work with these kinds of grains. And they're going to have a lot of questions about how it ferments and what it should feel like. And that does present us with a lot of challenges in how we're training people and how we're able to recruit. But what we find is that it actually is also the secret to making our jobs feel really exciting and interesting. And it creates better job quality for our bakers in particular because we do the same thing every day.

38:42We come in and we mix the same doughs in the same order every single day. But because we're using these sort of small scale heritage grains, it's never exactly the same. You can't do what a lot of other bakeries do, which is, you know, you put it in the bowl and you hit mix and you leave it for two minutes and then you come back and it's done or five minutes or whatever it is. the recipes that we write have to involve or integrate a good bit of judgment. You have to be able to see what's happening to it and understand if, you know, this lot of wheat is thirstier than last week's because it was harvested during a drought and it's just drier and inherently wants more water.

39:22Chemically, it's going to be a little different. It's going to ferment differently, right? And so we're doing literally the same things in the same order every day, but it's always a different experience. We're always having to be very tuned in and paying attention and asking, you know, what do you want? What do you need?

39:35Matt Rodbard:How can we make you happy? Totally. And also grains can be seasonal. I know that they're like stored as a crop, but do you get to work with this like for the Pullman that I love so much? Is that the same grain from the same supplier the whole year or does that shift? That's a good question. It is mostly the same grain from the same supplier. There are going to be different lots of flour from different harvest dates in it. And that's where we're going to see the variation. You guys might not perceive it as the end product consumer. Well, that's why you're doing your job, right? Yeah, exactly. So that the end product is the same.

40:06So that you can buy the same loaf every time and rest assured that it's going to be as you remembered it and as you want it. But yeah, for us, the experience might be wildly different from month to month based on, you know, which lot of flour we're working with and what the growing and harvesting conditions were like.

40:20Matt Rodbard:Right. And then some of maybe the newer grains that you're bringing in, those are getting translated into kind of like new menu items. Yeah, we're definitely always on the lookout for new grains and new partners and new mills so that we can innovate. It's something that we take very seriously, our commitment to the green market rules and regulations of using local stuff. And so we actually start, if we want to create a new product, we almost always start with what's the local ingredient? What is the thing that we're going to feature that is going to make Grow NYC happy and take the compliance box that we're sourcing locally, but that's also going to taste great and tell something interesting about our local agricultural systems?

40:59A great example of this, I met some folks through some friends a couple of years ago that are trying to restore the American chestnut. They're planting chestnut trees all over the Northeast and turning it into flower. And who knew, I didn't at the time, that chestnut meal used to be the original polenta because, of course, polenta corn comes from the Americas. There was no corn in Italy. Polenta used to be made from chestnut meal, which I just never even questioned. Right. And so I became enamored with this because while our bakery is not explicitly Italian, we do take a lot of inspiration from Italian foods and influences.

41:39And so as soon as we heard this story and, you know, these people, these rowdy chestnut farmers trying to restore an industry, we wanted in. We wanted a part of that. And it's not something you can get a whole lot of. You can't get it at great volume yet. It's not very readily available. But we committed to taking some chestnut meal off their hands as soon as they had it and finding a really special way to highlight it and use it. We put it in a shortbread currently that you can only get at the Navy Yard. It's not something we bring to Green Market yet. But that sort of hyper focus on ingredients and sourcing is the thing that makes us really excited and that drives our R &D.

42:18Matt Rodbard:I'm trying to think about if I've ever had a chestnut meal baked good before. Yeah, you probably haven't. I don't know. There's not very many out there. I don't know if I have, but I like that idea and I like the kind of thematic connection. And also She-Wolf, the name, that is also Roman, right? And it's origin story. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's the founding of Rome and I think it's sort of a tongue in cheek. Like our she-wolf was born in Rome at Romans, but not the other way around the way the lore. I'm a Greek Roman myth girl at heart. So if anyone is listening and they want to look up the origin story of Rome, I think they'll understand the she-wolf name out of that.

42:53Matt Rodbard:Absolutely. And our logo. It'll suddenly all make sense. Absolutely. And I like hearing about the kind of sweet additions because I've been noticing this on the green market side. I'll see a day cake or it was like a rhubarb muffin recently that I got to have. So is it the ones that you're able to produce at scale that make it onto the green market side of things? That's exactly right. And sometimes we'll kind of sit on something for a little while and make sure that people really like it at the cafe. And it might present some real challenges to scale it up. A great example of this is our brownie, which is probably my favorite sweet that we're making right now.

43:29It is out of this world good. It is 100 % rye flour, which I think is really unique for a sweet item in particular. But when we first started making them, we weren't confident that we could scale them. So the idea was we're just going to make them for the cafe. But people just kept raving about them and raving about them and selling them out and selling them out. So we kind of looked at the recipe and reconfigured our production for it a little bit. And now we're able to scale up production pretty significantly. So they've made an appearance at Green Market and they're at all of our green markets now.

44:00Matt Rodbard:Do you feel like you always want, if it's going to be at one green market, it has to be at all of them? Or can there be some that get them first? That's a great question. When I started five years ago, it used to be the case that we would sort of launch a new thing only at Union Square and it would only be available there. And that was something that we didn't love doing, but we kind of had to do it because we just we didn't know how to scale up everything right off the bat. But these days, we are trying to just issue like brand new things that are limited, limited runs at the cafe. And then if we do bring something new to green market, we try to bring it to all all of them.

44:36That feels pretty fair. Yeah, right. We want we want all our customers to have it and they don't necessarily have to go out of their way to find find time to get to Union Square to try something new.

44:45Matt Rodbard:I love thinking about what it's like to have knowledge of 12 different green markets across the city and the different kind of personalities or vibes of each of them. Do you tailor what you're bringing to the markets in terms of quantity based on what Fort Greene is looking for as opposed to Carroll Gardens or how does that kind of work for you? Yeah. No, it's very tailored. We do know all of our communities pretty well. And they are, they have some similarities, you know, only 1 % of the population actually shops at the green market. So there is sort of that tie that binds that the people at all of the green markets are interested in local food.

45:20They want to learn more about their food systems. They care about organic. Some of those things are just ubiquitous, right? But every community has a different mix of people who are shopping at the green market. Our 97th Street and some of our uptown markets have a lot of older folks. They really gravitate to some of the softer breads or the sweeter goods. Whereas, you know, Fort Green is definitely a family market. It's kids who've grown up on our bread. It's little five-year-olds that come to the stand and order for their parents, I'll have a mish, please. And there's nothing more heartwarming than that.

45:53And that mish is like the same size as the child. Literally the same size as the child, yeah. Yeah. But we know we know our communities. We try to have a really steady and consistent presence and have, you know, our staff be at the same markets every week. So they're really getting to know people and they will tell us, you know, Sally comes and buys five of these every week. We should probably bring more because I know she's going to come by five next week and then I'll run out soon. And so we're getting that feedback all the time from our team and using that to adjust the product mix that we're sending to every market.

46:24Matt Rodbard:So interesting. I really like the corn muffin that's been at the market. Can you tell me about where that corn is coming from? I love this corn muffin. I'm so glad you asked about it because it's a, it's kind of a secret where the, where the corn is coming from. But we, we had a, maybe two years ago, we went out on this mission. We wanted to meet some more mills and we wanted to be sort of a tide that lifts all boats sort of thing. And so we were intentionally looking for smaller scale mills, people who we're not producing at the volume that Farmer Ground is because we already know we can buy a ton of stuff from them.

46:57We get our cornmeal and our polenta that we use in the polenta Pullman from Farmer Ground, but we wanted something a little special and unique to make a muffin out of. And we found these folks in, I think the mill is based in New Jersey, but they're sourcing from farms in both Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, River Valley, community grains. They were making this incredible roasted cornmeal that we had never seen before. And they're not making a ton of it, but muffins are small. You don't need as much of it as you would to make, you know, giant loaves of bread. So we thought, oh my God, we got to get this stuff in house and play with it and turn it into something.

47:36And all of us having lived in New York for a very long time, if not our entire lives, you know, we have a lot of love for a simple corn muffin and butter. What's better? And so when we tasted this cornmeal. We're like, this has to be the star of this muffin. And that's how we got our corn muffin.

47:51Matt Rodbard:Is roasted cornmeal like a more unusual way to be presenting cornmeal? Yeah, absolutely. It's going to have a much deeper, more nuanced flavor to it. It's not just sort of the sweet notes that you get from traditional corn by itself. It has like a real earthiness to it. And I think that's what makes that muffin. It's a little sweet, but also very savory and like really satisfying. Yeah, it's nice. It also has a good moisture level. Like it's not so dry that like sometimes you eat a corn muffin, you can't really eat it on its own. But it also isn't so moist that you can't like add it to anything.

48:25Matt Rodbard:Right. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, I love that muffin. I'm glad you do too. It's making me hungry. I think just talking about the scale and the amount of places that are receiving bread, I'm curious about what it looks like on the operation side. Are you baking every day and how many people are baking? Yeah, we're baking every single day. And the number of people doing it really depends on what day of the week it is. So something that is really unique to our bakery maybe is there's a real ebb and flow to every week because we're so reliant on green market sales, right? So our biggest market days are going to be Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

49:01Everybody on the team works those days. And that's both true for bakers and our market and distribution team and our pastry team. on a Monday Tuesday it might only be four or five bakers two market staff or drivers you know it's a it's a much smaller production run those days and so it's all hands on deck to get on Thursday we're shaping bread for Friday on Friday we're shaping bread for Saturday and we're talking about you know producing 2 ,000 loaves of bread both Fridays and Saturdays so you have the whole team there working, whereas on a Monday it might be like 12 to 1500, which is, you know, roughly half.

49:42So you do have this kind of nice ebb and flow to each week. So do you have a sense of how many things you're making in a week? Oh, God. Yeah. I think probably at least 10 ,000 loaves of bread a week, at least. And I don't even know that that counts pastry. I think that's just bread.

49:57Matt Rodbard:You must have a really active, healthy starter to be producing all of that bread. We do. Many starters, in fact. One of the fun facts that I think a lot of folks don't realize is that we don't just have one starter. We have multiple kinds of starters that we're using for different breads. We have at least a stiff and a liquid, which, you know, for the bakers in the room, you'll understand it's really just a difference in ratio of water to flour. But we're also using different base grains in each of those so that they're sort of tailored for the bread that they're going into. We also have at some points in the year a rye starter.

50:34And we're also maintaining something, my favorite starter, our Italian stiff starter. She's the secret to our success in our naturally leavened brioche. And she's also the star of our pentatone. So she can stand up to like a more enriched dough. Exactly. She's a very strong starter. you really have to like build some muscle to be able to lift all that butter and eggs. And it's a feat of both science and magic, I think. How do you feel about naming the starters? Do they have names or nicknames? Just the Italian stiff. The rest of them we just call stiff or liquid.

51:08Matt Rodbard:Do you call her Italian stiff? We call her the Italian stiff mother. Yeah. I'm sure there are a lot of other like Italian mothers names that are coming to mind. Yeah. We could probably pick one and apply it, but we just like calling her the mother. And then I think we're working on one that our pastry supervisor is calling a princess, which I don't remember what she's made out of, but that's more of an experimental test. We're not using it in anything just yet. Oh, I love the sound of that. When I was home baking, I had a name for my starter, but then when she ultimately perished, I felt extra bad about it.

51:39Matt Rodbard:And I probably shouldn't have gone that far. The naming is an important step. But something in the community garden world, we don't name our chickens because bad things happen to chickens. And we're all very sad when you when like Rosie, you know, gets eaten by a raccoon versus like this chicken. Yeah, exactly. That sounds like a very reasonable way to handle things. Do you ever give away the starter to people? We used to do starter giveaways quite regularly at Union Square. We don't do it as much or we don't do giveaways at all anymore because we sell it at our cafe in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

52:15We're essentially giving it away. It costs a dollar just to help us cover the cost of the cups that we put in the labor to like save it. But we want to encourage people to play with sourdough starters. So we're not going to charge some. This episode is brought to you by Gooder. OK, I want to talk about sunglasses for a second. The market is completely oversaturated with overpriced, over-engineered pairs that slide off your face the moment you start sweating. Gooder, that's G-O-O-D-R, built their whole brand around fixing exactly that. And I know this firsthand. They sent me a couple pairs and I really love them.

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54:12This time of year, I'm keeping things simpler in the kitchen. Lighter meals cooked with produce from the farmer's market, more last-minute dinners with friends. And it really makes me notice how much better everything feels when you love what you're cooking with. That's why I've been reaching for Quince. Quince has beautiful cookware, glassware, and tableware that's seriously well-made and looks great on the table, all priced 50 % to 80 % less than comparable brands. They cut out the middleman and work directly with top manufacturers, so you're paying for quality, not markup. Elevate your kitchen this summer.

54:45Go to quince.com slash taste for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash taste. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash taste. Crazy exorbitant price for it. And it's available every day. Any Monday through Friday, folks can come down and get a little cup of starter. It's our stiff specifically because it's the easiest one to transport and to care for. And then we're also selling a little assortment of retail bag grains that you could work with, stuff that we're using in our bakery. Oh, I like that. I was curious, with the sourdough, do you use the discard for anything in the cafe?

55:27I love this question. We get asked this all the time. We actually don't have any discard because we're mixing exactly as much as we need every single day. So this is a huge difference from home baking to commercial baking. And I think a common misconception, it's a question we get all the time. Can I have some of your discard? Well, we don't have any discard. We have sort of a mother culture that we use to seed each day's pre-ferments. And then we're just making literally to order exactly as much pre-ferment as we need. So we can just dump the whole thing in the mixer.

55:59Matt Rodbard:That must feel really good from an operations logistics point of view that you have it calculated just right. Yeah, we love our calculations. I mean, the back end of SheWolf is all run on like very exorbitant spreadsheets. They're very intricate and interconnected. And it's kind of magic. Well, that's one thing that surprised me, I guess. Is there another part of your job or maybe SheWolf as a whole that you think would surprise somebody? I think most people are probably surprised by how much time we spend thinking about air filters and HVAC systems. It's honestly like not a sexy part of the job, but a really important one, especially when you are working with sourdough cultures.

56:41You have very few levers to create a controlled environment or to create any sort of like consistency or regularity in the time that something is going to take to proof. Yeast is very reliable. You put it in the dough. You wait an hour. You come back. Your bread's ready to work with. Sourdough cultures don't work that way. We only have time and temperature. And so if we need something to move faster, we obviously can't speed up time. We have to rely on temperature. And so we're using things like proofers and our refrigerator, but actually the temperature of the dough room is where the bread is doing quite a bit of fermentation.

57:17And so we need that to work. If it's hot, we need the AC to be dialed in to keep it at exactly 82 degrees, let's say. In the winter, the heat needs to be exactly at 80 degrees. And if you have, you know, flour getting into your HVAC system and clogging your filters, that stuff doesn't work. And so it's actually one of the daily things that we have to check on is, you know, how are our filters looking and how is our AC running and how is the heat working? And that's, I think, something that most people would not think of as a part of bakery life, but a really essential piece for us.

57:53Matt Rodbard:Right. It might not be as kind of sexy as being up to your toes and dough, but it's just as important. Yeah, absolutely. That's interesting. I don't mean to make you play too many favorites, but I'm curious if there's a favorite part of your job out of all of the parts of your job. Oh, man. I mean, shaping bread forever, forever and always. Like I am just truly a baker at heart. I actually applied to be a baker at SheWolf at one point because I really wanted to pivot into working with food and working with my hands again. And I was very gently let down. I did not have enough professional experience to be hired as a baker there.

58:27But then a few months later, I was looking for work still. And it just so happened that a colleague of mine knew that Andrew Tarlow was looking for somebody to lead the business because the business was about to relocate, move to the Navy Yard, was poised for growth and needed somebody with some business acumen and some understanding of the process and sourcing local foods, working within a local agricultural system. And I had all of those things, given my background working with small businesses at Hot Bread. And then I worked for New York State Agate Markets for a while and understood sort of the upstate, downstate connectivity.

59:02And so I sat down and spoke with Andrew and got really excited about bread and everything that we were doing. And that changed the course of my life. And here I am today, five years later, still loving this. But I think my favorite piece has always been, get me on the table. I want to shape some baguettes or batards. Is there a favorite loaf to shape? I want to say baguettes. My baguettes are not as perfect as some of my colleagues. So that's a bit of an aspiration for me. But I do love, I love shaping our batard. I think our sesame is probably my favorite. Or no, maybe the mish. I don't know.

59:38I love them all. I think the mish shape is perfect. Spoken like a true lover of shaping bread. Yeah, exactly. It's really soothing once you get the hang of it. And really interesting because it is, it feels different every day. And it's a you're kind of in communication with this this thing that most people don't understand is alive. But it's giving you so much information that you're just sensing through your your hands and touch. And I don't think we have enough things in our lives that we interact with in that in that way. I find it really peaceful and meditative. Totally. I think that's the thing.

1:00:05Matt Rodbard:Now I'm like, oh, I should be baking my bread. The thing is, it's so easy in New York to buy good sourdough that it's kind of like if you don't have the time to be making it, then maybe you should just go buy it. But I do totally feel like the meditative aspect of squishing the dough between fingers and watching it grow and feeling that kind of connectivity is very meditative. Yeah, I love it. And I like hearing about all of the parts of how your previous professional experience, also the fact that you're from upstate and it's kind of like upstate, downstate connectivity of it all. Do you feel like having this perspective on the food system makes you view the place that you live differently?

1:00:41I think so. So, I mean, it was certainly exciting for me to start working with flour that comes from outside Ithaca, New York. I went to grad school in Ithaca and I grew up, you know, 45 minutes north. So it's a part of the state that I know and love very well. I also went to undergrad in the Finger Lakes. And so it was like a real just kind of kismet moment where I was like, this is where I'm supposed to be. I know the I literally know the fields where these grains were being grown to run by them, you know. And now here they are, you know, back in my life and I'm able to speak to it just with a different level of familiarity, I think.

1:01:19And it was really grounding and lovely that I could move back to New York, but in the city and have like this kind of connection to home still.

1:01:26Matt Rodbard:So I have very much appreciated that. Yeah, I think when I speak to people who, you know, maybe don't spend a lot of time in New York City, like there's this concrete jungle, Gotham type element. And obviously that's true. But I think through the farmers markets and green spaces, community gardens, all of those things, like I think you really can feel rooted to a much bigger food system that you're a big part of as a consumer, but be able to understand like the larger kind of scope of things. Yeah, I'm glad you sensed that. That's something I share with my friends and family at home all the time.

1:02:00It's like it seems like a place where there's no nature and where you're sort of really disconnected from all of this. But in fact, it couldn't be further from the truth.

1:02:08Matt Rodbard:I did see a red-tailed hawk eat a baby squirrel in the park last week. David Ottenborough who? Yeah. No, my pastry chef, Sarah, we're always texting each other about, you know, the random moths and butterflies that we see or like a cool bird sighting. Because at the Navy Yard, you get a lot of great waterfowl. Right. We both are big, you know, into nature. And so that is a weirdly steady, consistent part of our lives, even living in the city. Yeah, I'm trying to go see the horseshoe crabs mating this weekend. I want to do that too. I was just talking about that. This is such a niche interest. But like once you are a part of this group of people interested in this, like a lot of people go and do this.

1:02:48Matt Rodbard:Yeah, it's a whole thing. It is the time of year for them. I went two years ago to the festival that the Parks Tournament puts on, like out in the Rockaways where you can see them. And they just let you – I just picked one up, which I thought was insane. But they're letting you do that. It's very crazy. That's awesome. Yeah, I have aspired to do that for many years and I have not made it out there yet. So maybe this is my year. You're reminding me that it's that time of year and I should make it happen. It's a perfect post-Green Market Act. Yeah, I love that. Not enough people are talking about it.

1:03:19Matt Rodbard:Definitely. Do you have anything new coming up at SheWolf? What is, let's see, what's coming up in the fall and summer? You know what is really exciting? And I don't want to say this too loudly almost because it's very new for us. And so it's a little scary when you do something very new for the first time. But I feel so confident that we're going to knock this out of the park. She Wolf is starting to make pies, which is a whole departure from what we have been doing. Not laminated. We have our own kind of method for our pie dough. It's not like a sheet or laminated, anything like that. But it is a very different kind of baking.

1:03:54Yeah, yeah. And currently we're making pies with a buckwheat crust, which is a grain that we have not really utilized at all. It's hard to work with. There's no gluten. It's not something that has been in our repertoire up until very recently. And what we're so excited about, we try really to kind of, you know, tell the green market story through everything that we make. We source a lot of things from our fellow green market farmers. The rhubarb muffin was apple in the winter. It'll be berries in the summer. And all of those fruits are coming from our neighbors at the green market. And so we have been thinking about pies for a very long time.

1:04:33We did sort of a small, very limited run of pies for Thanksgiving, just as sort of a let's learn what this is going to be like and see how we want to want to do this. And we've got a plan now. So summer fruit pies are coming. There's some out at green market right now. They're a very limited supply, but we've got strawberry rhubarb pies with a buckwheat crust. They're just mini pies for now. And then probably Thanksgiving, we'll do full pies again, I would imagine. But we're very excited for that because it's going to give us a chance to really highlight all the beautiful produce that we're about to have in abundance here.

1:05:08And there's no better way to celebrate, I think, a stone fruit or berries than to put it in a pie.

1:05:12Matt Rodbard:Totally. And I feel like for me, a mini pie is super easy to impulse buy when you're getting your bread, which is a smart idea. Yeah, it's a perfect size for one. You can share if you want, but you definitely don't have to. I'll get a couple to share. Okay, now I want to play a rapid fire. All right, let's go. What you got? Okay, your favorite cookbook. My favorite cookbook. Can I give you more than one answer for all of these? You can say them fast. Okay, I'm going to say them fast. So rapid fire. I love Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz. That's a classic in my house. I think she does such a good job of breaking down really difficult technical things into super relatable recipes.

1:05:48It's great. I also I have to shout out Mother Grains because she's just right out of, you know, the same the same spirit as what She Wolf is doing. And so as we try to work with some new grains, we'll often reference her book and just look for inspiration. Love that.

1:06:04Matt Rodbard:Your favorite bread available at She Wolf right now? My favorite bread is forever and always me. Mish. I'm just, she's the belle of the ball. She's my favorite. And any, any time you're having a bad day, Mish is going to make you feel better. Okay. Your favorite sweet item at SheWolf right now? I can't stop talking about this brownie, man. It's like changing. I'm influenced. I'm going to go look for it. Get it. You will, you will be very happy you did. Your favorite New York City bakery that is not SheWolf? Oh my God. I love this question. My favorite bakery that is not ours is a tiny little shop in East Harlem called Pabade.

1:06:38It is owned by my friend Yolfer, who started as a business in the incubator kitchen at Hot Bread Kitchen when I was there. He was an immigrant. He'd been living sort of in between Venezuela and Colombia for some time and moved to the States and had studied like classic French patisserie and had dreams of opening his own bakery. He came to Hot Bread. We brought him into the kitchen and helped him start his business. And there was a little coffee shop on 110th that was about to close. clothes but the guy who owned it was Peruvian and I was like you should meet Yolfer my new friend and they hit it off and so this coffee shop became his first wholesale customer he started selling them pastries and then a few months later when when the guy who owned the coffee shop decided he was done Yolfer took it over and so now he's got this cute little coffee shop on 110th and all his pastries are made by by his team and they're just exceptional like just really delicious I don't go for a whole lot of like laminated fancy pastry stuff except for everything he makes is outstanding.

1:07:39Matt Rodbard:Okay we'll have to seek it out. Yeah. Your favorite New York City farmers market? I think Jackson Heights. I can't pick one that we sell at because obviously that would feel unfair to our customers but I think Jackson Heights is just such a vibrant market and there's all the like hot food vendors that kind of piggyback alongside and I just love any excuse to get out to Jackson Heights. It's a very diplomatic answer. Yeah I tried. Your favorite quick lunch spot in New York? Oh, I got to say my own cafe. Is that lame? She Wolf lunch is so good. I won't allow it. I hate quick lunch, though. That's the thing.

1:08:11There's just not enough great places, I think, to get a quick lunch. I will honestly wait until I'm back at the bakery to get lunch at She Wolf. Okay, fine. Sorry. Fine. Your favorite occasion restaurant in New York? Okay, so this one's not technically in New York City, but I think it's close enough. I love Stone Barnes as like a whole experience. I don't think I really understood hospitality as like impressive until I went there and just the choreography of the delivery of every dish and the dance and the attention to detail. And of course, the food is amazing. And it tells such a beautiful story about locality season, you know, all of that.

1:08:50Your favorite grocery store? I got to say the green markets. I don't even go to a grocery store if I can help it. I kind of I hate grocery stores, although I do love Wegmans. Don't get me wrong. I grew up in the cult of Wegmans. I never miss an opportunity to go to Wegmans.

1:09:04Matt Rodbard:Okay, final question. A fictional food scene, like from a book or a movie or something made up that you wish you could somehow eat in real life? Okay, so I definitely don't want to eat this food, but the only answer I can give you for this is the food fight scene in Hook. When he imagines the food and all these weird colorful substances appear on the table and they just start hurling it around at each other. and something about that as a kid. I was just like, that is my dream. I want to do that. I want to be there. Absolutely. Well, I love leaving on that image. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Kim.

1:09:36Thank you so much for having me. This was super fun. I'll see you at the green market. Yeah.

1:09:45Matt Rodbard:This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumber and supervised by Pat Stango, Director of Media Production and Development at Penguin Random House Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House Theme music by Steve Rydell Episode portraits by Louise Zergang Pomeroy Logo design by Ellie Skurzat and Ian Dingham Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter To keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste