Breaking bread with Wide Awake Bakery

When most people hear the phrase “sustainable agriculture,” they think about the conservation of natural resources and stewardship of the land. For Stef Senders, Liz Brown and Thor Oeschner, co-owners of Wide Awake Bakery, it’s also about growing and sustaining a community.

Their bread gives sustenance not only to those who consume it but also to the team of talented bakers who craft the loaf, to the miller who grinds the flour and to the farmer who grows the grain. There is a thread that connects them all, and at this bakery, the ties are tighter than most.

Oeschner grows wheat, buckwheat and rye at his organic farm in Newfield, grain which is then stone ground to fresh, whole grain flour at his Farmer Ground Flour mill in Trumansburg. Senders and his baking team then work their magic to create loaves of crusty sourdough and ciabatta, delicious pastries, cookies and pasta.

Brown is the face of the bakery, taking products to the Trumansburg and Ithaca farmers markets, Greenstar and other retail outlets around town and making connections with people over bread.

Many of Wide Awake’s customers are also members of their Crust Fund breadshare. Members sign up for a specified number of loaves per week to be delivered to one of the convenient locations near them.

“You can call it a CSB, a community-supported bakery, but it’s more like a BSC, a bakery-supported community,” Senders said. “The relationships are enhanced and uplifted by the bread, which is in a way secondary. People don’t live on bread; they do live on community.”

Wide Awake has been feeding these members for over a decade, becoming part of their families’ daily lives, weathering personal and global crises together and taking part in their celebrations big and small.

The idea for the bakery started organically as part of a casual conversation more than 10 years ago.

“My wife, Liz [Brown], and I really wanted to move into sustainable agriculture in some way. We met Thor as part of that process,” Senders said. “The bakery came together over dinner one night. I had made bread, and Thor had this dream of starting a mill. He said, ‘Dude, this bread is awesome! Why don’t you make bread out of my flour!’”

So, the seed of two businesses was sown. Senders recalls the three of them sitting up crunching numbers over a couple of bottles of wine and waking in the morning with the thought, “This is not impossible.”

At that time, Oeschner was farming but had not yet launched Farmer Ground Flour. When the mill opened, Wide Awake became the test bakery and customer service arm of the business.

“If you were using their stone-ground organic flour and not getting good results, you could call us and we would walk you through it,” Senders said. “At that time, there were maybe three bakeries in the country using a product like this. I don’t think people realize how extraordinary this locally grown/locally ground flour is and how it can change your baking.”

Wide Awake’s baking process is pretty extraordinary as well. All its bread is baked in a wood-fired oven that was designed and built on site. The large stones of the oven are able to sustain (there’s that word again) high temperatures over a long period of time.

“The oven stays at about 500 degrees all year long,” Senders said. “Let’s get geeky for a minute. Bread is very heat-consuming. It demands so much energy to grow. Every good baking oven has vast resources of heat. The wood fire provides intense heat, up to 1,300 degrees, but of short duration. You must have someplace to store that heat and release it over time.”

Like any artist, Senders is passionate about his craft. He still views each loaf of sourdough as an individual challenge.

“It is very simple but impossible to get just right,” Senders said. “I love that tension. It is completely and wholly absorbing and challenging. Even though I’ve been doing it for many years at this point, every day that I’m there, I feel like each loaf is its own thing.”

From the beginning, part of Wide Awake’s mission has been to participate in the small community of artisanal bakers who teach and learn from one another. While Senders is mostly self-taught, he credits a long line of teachers along the way. He remembers baking bread with his grandmother, poring over Julia Child, and working and learning alongside friend (and first employee) David McInnis.

“There is this great and very old tradition of exchange called staging (from the French word ‘stagiaire,’ meaning apprentice),” Senders said. “Bakers come and stay with us for a few days, and we go to them in order to elevate our craft. It was different and easier before the pandemic. It’s a very open network of exchange and trouble-shooting among artisanal bakers.”

Senders used to offer classes at the bakery, but that also was easier before the pandemic.

“We are in the works of building a little classroom separate from the bakery,” Senders said. “In the meantime, I have been teaching private lessons over Zoom. Very surprisingly, it’s gone great. I really like it.”

The tight-knit team of six bakers at Wide Awake also learn from each other. Senders is proud to say that people seem to enjoy working at the bakery and tend to stay for a long time.

“Good baking is not just recipes,” Senders said. “It takes skill and time with the materials and time with the space.”

Typically, one of the six will take the lead on a project with other bakers providing support. The system works well, and Senders is confident his staff can run the show this week while he is out of town.

“Emma Grimm is making stollen and chocolate babka for the holiday markets. I used to be the stollen person, but I’m not there, and Emma does beautiful work,” Senders said. “It’s a collective endeavor.”

Before leaving town, Senders thanked his staff in a holiday letter excerpted below:

“The bakery is what we make it together. Although the bakery is obviously a business, I have never called it that. … I look at it as a piece of art … a huge moving, expanding and changing sculpture. … It is a sculpture that creates a space where we focus on cooperating and playing in partnership with each other and the sheep and the wheat and the chaff and the soil and the water. … At the core of the project is a simple practice and that is baking, so we do that the best we can — controlled and improvised and expert and consistent and surprising. We do that because it is fun … and because people really like to eat good baked things and that helps us keep working which helps us survive.”

For more information on retail outlets or signing up for the Crust Fund breadshare, or to request private lessons, visit the website at wideawakebakery.com.

Food for Thought appears in the third edition of each month in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.Relations.