SiteSelf Stand-in — Plain

About

Maple Row Bakery opened in the spring of 2019 in what used to be Harlan’s Hardware, a narrow shop with a tiled floor and a back room big enough for one oven. Ada Whitlock and Tomasz Brenner had been baking together for years in borrowed kitchens, and when the hardware shop closed they signed the lease before either of them had worked out how to pay for the oven.

The first winter was mostly sourdough and stubbornness. We baked forty loaves a day, sold thirty, and gave the rest to the shelter on Beacon Street. By the second year the queue had become a neighbourhood fixture, and we added pastry because people kept asking for something to eat while they waited.

Floured hands kneading a ball of bread dough on a wooden table
Photo: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What we care about

  • Time over additives. Our dough gets flour, water, salt, starter and a long, cool rest. Nothing else is needed.
  • Flour we can trace. Most of our wheat comes from one stone mill two hours north, and we visit it every harvest.
  • Nothing wasted. What we do not sell becomes breadcrumbs, croutons or a donation the same evening.
  • A fair wage. Early starts are hard. Everyone who works here is paid for every hour, including the ones before sunrise.

The team

Ada runs the bread side and the schedule. Tomasz looks after the books, the suppliers and the coffee machine, which he claims is the most temperamental member of staff. Priya Nair joined in 2024 to lead pastry, and Sam Okafor opens the shop most mornings and knows the order of half the street by heart.

I moved away for two years and the thing I missed most about the street was the smell of that oven at six in the morning.

A regular, who asked us not to print her name

Everyone named on this page is fictional. Maple Row Bakery does not exist; this is a SiteSelf test site.

Photo credits

The photographs on this site are openly licensed images from Wikimedia Commons. None of them shows this bakery, which is invented.