Just follow your nose.
The aroma of fresh-baked bread beckons from the front door and hints at the sourdough bakeapalooza inside her north Fargo home.
Inside, morning sun streams in through the windows of her immaculate, granite-countertopped kitchen, which has been transformed into a pop-up bread bakery to create crusty, chewy loaves and bagels for Larson's successful side-hustle, Sour House Breads. A social worker with the Fargo VA by day, Larson has discovered that providing people with affordable, wholesome, fresh-baked bread is another way to demonstrate caring.
Today, nearly every available work surface in her home is dedicated to the care and feeding of bread. Beautifully brown and crusty loaves, their surfaces scored into eye-pleasing patterns, rest on the breakfast table and a dining-room sideboard. The flour-dusted bannetons (bowls), which give her sourdough loaves their round shape and ridged patterns, cover the dining room table.
Fresh loaves of sourdough and apple pecan raisin bread are placed on trays at Loni Larson's home in north Fargo. David Samson / The Forum
At the moment, Larson is preparing loaves of rustic country sourdough and apple-pecan raisin for a couple of upcoming markets, including the Red River Market in downtown Fargo. Later, in between stretching and folding tubs of dough for future batches, she will neatly slip rings of pale dough into red enamel pots of boiling water as the first cooking stage for cinnamon-raisin bagels.
"I guess you could say it was a hobby that turned into a passion," says Larson, a petite woman with the radiant smile of a prom queen.
One needs a bit of passion to pursue a business that requires staying up until 1 a.m. to work the dough, then getting up again at 4:30 a.m. to pop it in the oven. Bread waits for no one, but Larson doesn't seem to mind.
"I think that's why I like baking so well," she says. "Really, baking is a lot of work, but it's also relaxing. It's usually quiet in the house and I'm here just working the dough."
Loni Larson sprinkles bagels before baking them at her home in north Fargo. David Samson / The Forum
With her breads reasonably priced at $7 to $8, she can still make anywhere from $800 to $1,000 at a single farmers' market. Although good home-baked bread is a hot commodity, Larson is determined not to take advantage of her customers by charging exorbitant prices.
"People are so kind," she says. "When they tell you how much they enjoyed the bread or they had it the night before ... we'll get messages like that and that's the best kind of payment. That's why I do it. It's not for the money. It's really for the way to connect with others."
In fact, she says the majority of her earnings are folded right back into her business, financing little luxuries like a two-week course at the San Francisco Baking Institute, a Belgian ROFCO oven with stone shelves, or the new commercial spiral mixer that makes it possible to make 20 loaves at a time.
"The mixer has really helped," she says, motioning toward the hip-high Famag-brand mixer that sits atop casters in the center of her kitchen. "It's only the last week that I got this. My hands are starting to develop arthritis ... so the mixer was almost going to be a necessity if I was going to keep doing it."
Even when looking back to her days as a girl growing up near Minto, N.D., Larson liked to bake. Her family lived on a hobby farm, "and there were only three channels on TV," she says, so there weren't that many other ways to pass time.
Her interest in bread-baking really blossomed, however, in the last seven years. Around that time, she found a bread cookbook, complete with pack of sourdough starter, in a Montana gift shop. She tried it, but "it was just terrible."
It was just the first step in her breaducation. As her interest in bread-baking piqued, she sifted through the recipes and tips on the King Arthur Flour website, to find a starter that worked. That was five years ago, and that humble cocktail of flour, salt and water is the same starter she still uses today.
Then she discovered the book, "Tartine Bread," by Chad Robertson, co-owner of the famed Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. "It had a beautiful cover of a loaf of bread, so I bought it for that," she recalls. "It was all about sour dough ... and that really hooked me."
Loni Larson Sour makes bagels at her home in north Fargo. David Samson / The Forum
But overall, Larson says, her best instruction came from persistent practice. She refers to William Alexander's "52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust," in which the author advocated baking bread every week for a year in efforts to master the famously unpredictable art.
"You should bake at least every week. You really have to do it consistently and just develop that feel in dough and knowing when it's right, or when it's time to be turned or kneaded or when it's ready to bake," she says.
Larson continued baking bread for her family and friends for the next couple of years, sending loaves home to "whoever would take it off my hands." Then, in 2018, Junkyard Brewing Company in Moorhead hosted a small summer market for local vendors and DIYers. "That was a perfect way to test the waters," she recalls. "But it worked. People liked it, so that gave me the confidence to keep going."
By 2019, the Larsons and their bread had become Red River Market regulars. "That's when I really had to step up production," she says, adding that she makes close to 100 loaves for a single market.
Even after the pandemic hit, and everyone and their brother was dabbling in sourdough, demand for Larson's bread continued to grow. "For once, I was ahead of the curve," she says, laughing.
Loni Larson places bagels in the oven at her home in north Fargo. David Samson / The Forum
Thanks to online ordering and contact-free delivery, she stayed as busy as ever.
Larson's loyal partner at markets is husband, Ed, who does the heavy lifting when it comes time to set up tents and carry tables. "He is a good sport. He does not care to bake himself, but he's so supportive. I couldn't do the markets without him. And he's the best marketing tool I have. He always carries my (business) cards around and he's washed many a dish for me," she says.
Now, in addition to the downtown farmers' market and several other markets, Larson offers once-a-month "bread drops," in which Sour House followers are able to order certain breads for pick-up or delivery that weekend. "Unfortunately, I don't give people a lot of notice, because I never quite know (when there will be time to do them)," she says. After all, Sour House is still a side business.
But the pop-up approach doesn't seem to deter customers. “Those are growing too,” Larson says of the online sales. “It’s getting tricky to do all our deliveries within the two-hour time frame."
Along the way, Larson is constantly thinking of creative ways she can expand on her popular product. One way is to create more flavors beyond Sour House's popular lineup of rustic country sourdough, kalamata olive, cheese and garlic, apple-pecan raisin and rye-chocolate cherry.
She also makes chewy Bavarian-style pretzels and taught herself how to make bagels after a customer requested them. Based on Chef Peter Reinhart's sourdough-bagel recipe, the bagels have become a big hit — especially her "everything" bagels, which are sprinkled with a spice mix that includes poppy seeds, sesame seeds, dried minced garlic, dried onion flakes, and flaked sea salt.
The everything bagel from is a popular item from Sour House Breads. David Samson / The Forum
She'll also occasionally produce sweeter items, such as rye chocolate chip cookies and a tangy sourdough brownie that needs to rise like a yeast bread before baking. Sourdough brioche dough, she says, makes wonderful caramel rolls.
She grinds about 30% of her own wheat, using a Mockmill 200 stone mill. Stone milling won't strip away the bran and germ of the wheat berry like industrial roller mills do, she says, thus preserving ingredients.
She likes experimenting with different types of grains, such as organic Hard Red Spring Wheat from Askegaard Organic Farm and rye, oats and Emmer wheat from Doubting Thomas Farms, both of Moorhead.
She also envisions creating bread subscriptions, in which subscribers would receive regular deliveries of breads, pretzels, bagels and croissants.
In fact, Larson enjoys her side gig so much that she would consider making it full-time after retirement. She says she loves her work at the VA, but, in its own way, Sour House has some surprising connections to a helping profession.
Both jobs require conscientious tending, careful maintenance and attention to detail. And both, in their own way, come from the heart.
"I think that's the reason I went into social worker is I really wanted to care for people, and then baking, it's like a natural extension of that," she says. "That's what I love is just knowing that people are enjoying it. It's a way to show caring."
Learn more about Sour House Breads at https://www.facebook.com/SourHouseFargo.
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