It’s easy to imagine the warm and tangy smells that greet Emily Harryman when she opens the door to her bread room. Once the dining room of her Keller, Texas, home, the space now serves as the heart of Harryman’s cottage bakery, “Plain Jane Bakes.” The walls are painted French blue, and the ceiling is coated with green leaf-patterned wallpaper. The enormous, east-facing window floods the room with light, casting rays of sunshine on wooden cooling racks stacked with sourdough bread. In the corner by the window stands the oven, a compact Simply Bread L12 that can fit a dozen loaves at a time. The room is furnished with a large, dark wood island and several hutches that house Harryman’s ingredients and baking tools.
“I never would have imagined that our formal dining room would be an in-home bakery. Now, the entire sourdough process takes place here. The room fills my heart with great joy,” Harryman said. Since launching her business in 2024, Harryman’s bread room has become more than just a space for Harryman to make bread, teach classes, and perfect the recipes for her upcoming cookbook, “Plain Jane Sourdough: Simple Ingredients and Techniques for Stunning Artisanal Bread.” It is the culmination of a long journey that began in the humble, seaside kitchen of the home her grandparents built.
Decorative Beginnings
Harryman’s love of food was sparked by regular visits to her grandparents, who lived in a small coastal town just outside San Francisco. “My grandma was very passionate about cooking. Any time we would visit, we’d sit down in the living room and choose a recipe to try from one of the food magazines spread across her coffee table,” Harryman said.
While the recipes weren’t always successful, her grandmother’s spirit of hospitality had a profound effect on Harryman. She recalled that her grandparents had “one friend who was a widow, who would come over all the time for meals. They always made sure she felt loved and cared for.” Inspired, Harryman took charge of meals after school and soon discovered that her real passion was for baking. After taking classes in cake decorating, Harryman began getting requests for birthday cakes from schoolmates. Then, in her senior year of high school, she was asked to make a wedding cake. “It was a 3-foot-tall ‘Alice in Wonderland’-inspired piece. That opened a lot of doors for other jobs and weddings,” she said.
2016 was also the year she met her husband, Issac. After they got married, the couple relocated to Texas, only to move back to Pennsylvania for a new job a few years later. Harryman gave up baking as they tried to start a family, though she would suffer several miscarriages before giving birth to three healthy children. Job loss in 2022 forced the family back to Texas for a job with a significant pay cut, which meant the family needed a supplemental source of income to make ends meet. So, in 2024, Harryman dove back into baking, only this time, she wasn’t decorating cakes. She was baking sourdough.
Baking From Scratch
The groundwork for Harryman’s sourdough adventure began when her college roommate Tristan re-introduced Harryman to the natural, unprocessed ingredients that she had seen in her grandmother’s kitchen. Motherhood, too, made Harryman acutely aware of the ingredients she was feeding to her young children. “There’re so many preservatives, so many genetically modified ingredients, so many things sprayed on our food, that I wanted to … buy things that are pretty much as close as you can get to as God made them,” Harryman said.
This simple philosophy of “real ingredients” would be the key to Harryman’s success with sourdough. She found the prospect of starting her own sourdough bakery daunting, because “there’s so many different thoughts out there on how to make sourdough. As a beginner, that’s kind of a terrible thing because you don’t know what’s right. But once you get your process down, then it’s like riding a bike.” Harryman’s own process starts with a white flour, rye flour, and water mixture that is left to ferment. Natural, gut-friendly bacteria will begin to eat the flour’s sugars and proteins, creating a bubbling slurry known as a starter. The starter needs to be constantly used and fed in order for the fermentation to remain active. When mixed together in a bread dough, the starter acts as the rising agent and is what gives the bread its characteristic sour taste.
Sourdough, as it turned out, was a novelty in Keller, Texas. Harryman started selling the loaves through home pickup orders and at local markets. In the early months of the business, Harryman did not have the bread room or a baking oven, so she worked 13-plus-hour days cycling loaves in and out of her kitchen’s double wall oven. It was hard work, but the extra money provided the family a much needed financial cushion, all without Harryman having to leave home or sacrifice home-educating her children—both of which were non-negotiables for her. “The business needed to be something that was going to bless my family, not take me away from them,” she said.
RECIPE: English Muffins
RECIPE: Fig Jam
RECIPE: Simple Lemon Curd
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
