A SOURDOUGH MADE WITH WILD YEAST: Baker Zach Folkers holds two loaves fresh out of the custom brick oven that can be seen in the background.
BRIAN CHILSON
READERS CHOICE
SEEKING SOURDOUGH
YOU’LL FIND IT — AND A ONE-OF-A-KIND OVEN THAT’S NEARLY THREE DECADES OLD — IN LESLIE. BY REBEKAH HALL
T
he road to Serenity Farm Bread is a winding one. The bakery’s pastry shop is tucked into a curve of U.S. Highway 65 South, in a little yellow and green house with a wraparound porch that travelers could miss in a blink. Less than a mile away, the Serenity Farm bakery — and its 27-year-old wood-fired brick oven — is housed in a sturdy red brick building on the corner of Main Street and state Highway 66 East in Leslie. Serenity Farm exclusively bakes sourdough breads and pastries, and co-owner Jordan Archotie said the oven is “the heart” of both the baked goods and the business. “It’s what makes us what we are,” Archotie said. Serenity Farm Bread was established in 1992 by Dr. Morris Keller. Current co-owner Adrienne Freeman said Keller “really believed in the benefits of sourdough bread and returning to traditional baking techniques.” David Lower bought the bakery from Keller in 1993 and ran it until Freeman and Archotie purchased it in July 2018. Freeman and Archotie both grew up in Leslie and visited the bakery as children, and they described their interest in 40 FEBRUARY 2020
ARKANSAS TIMES
buying the bakery as “sentimental plus practical.” “I wanted to live here and raise my child here, and what can you do in a small town to make a living?” Archotie said. “We wanted to keep the bakery around ...” “For selfish reasons,” Freeman interjected. “... for selfish reasons, so we could have the benefit of the product and so that the customers who are used to it could continue to enjoy our bread,” Archotie said. Freeman said she worked for Serenity Farm Bread from 2003-06, and she came back to work one day a week at the bakery in 2017. By the time Archotie and Freeman bought the business in 2018, Archotie said the bakery had gone down from four “bake days” a week to three bake days, as Lower was “in his later season of life and wanting to retire.” But Archotie, 35, said that she and Freeman, 36, “just have a lot of energy” to put into the bakery, and they hope to “drum up enough business” to increase the bake schedule back to four days a week. Serenity Farm employs seven people, including head baker Zach Folkers and pastry chef Lynnwood Hage, who crafts the bakery’s sourdough cookies, croissants, sticky buns and sweetened breads. Freeman and Archotie said the dough — which is fermented using naturally occurring microbes, such as wild yeast — works “symbiotically” with the bakery’s wood-fired brick oven to produce breads with a “nice hearty crust” that are good for the gut. Instead of baking in a convection oven, which uses a fan to constantly circulate hot air and cook food quickly, Serenity Farm uses a wood-fired brick oven that bakes bread using residual heat. Built in 1993, the interior of the oven is 6 feet wide, 8 feet deep and about 3 feet tall and lined with layers of bricks. On a “pre-bake” day, a fire is started in the oven in the morning and fed throughout the day. At the end of the day, once the fire is mostly coals, a large iron door is placed over the oven’s opening, suffocating the heat and “soaking” it into the bricks. Freeman said the bakery burns fires in the oven every day, whether they’ll be baking that day or not. “We have to keep its core temperature at a certain level, or we won’t be able to get it hot enough to bake in it,” Freeman explained. The heat then soaks into the bricks for the next
