Sourdough startup: Lexington family turns artisan bread baking into a business

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Sourdough startup: Lexington family turns artisan bread baking into a business

BY SHANNON CLINTON

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Using unique processes, ingredients and a home-based German brick oven, Chapi Johnson, Andrew McGraw and their two daughters have spent much of the pandemic building a cottage small-batch bakery one loaf, bagel and cookie at a time.

“We have been selling bread to customers for about a year,” Johnson said of the venture, Wild Lab Bakery. “We started baking for ourselves and gave a lot of bread to friends and neighbors and people encouraged us to start selling it, so we tried and it was pretty successful.”

McGraw serves as lead baker and Johnson as support baker. Their young twin daughters enjoy collecting eggs from the family’s chickens. The eggs are used in some products, like their ever-popular chocolate chip cookies with milk and dark chocolate pieces, browned butter and freshly milled flour topped with sea salt.

Along with other cookie varieties and bagels, their artisan sourdough bread is made with organic or transitioning-to-organic flour and wheat berries from Illinois-based, five-generation family-owned Janie’s Mill. The bread, McGraw said, is made in a 24-hour process of cold-fermenting, a natural leavening process, and then baking.

“As the year evolved, we focused more on the health aspects of sourdough bread,” he said. “It is a healthier bread. It has three ingredients — flour, salt and water.”

They also mill about 10 to 20 percent of the flour themselves from whole wheat berries, McGraw said, because the fresher the flour the more nutrient-dense it is.

PHOTO FURNISHED Sourdough loaves from Wild Lab Bakery begin with a 24-hour process of cold fermentation and natural leavening before going into a brick-lined bread oven.

Chapi Johnson and Andrew McGraw, with help from their twin daughters, run Wild Lab Bakery out of their home in Lexington.

The brick-lined bread oven was built for them in Germany to replicate an older oven style. It enabled them to increase their capabilities from about three loaves per hour to nine to 12 loaves. However, the increased output doesn’t come at the expense of taste or aesthetics. The bread looks ready for a gourmet magazine cover shoot, with decorative leaves and other designs scored into the dough before baking. The sales process is different than most bakeries. Customers place their orders online — typically via Wild Lab’s website or Instagram — and are assigned a day to come to the family’s downtown Lexington home for a porch pickup by 3 p.m. There’s another porch pickup location in Georgetown at Johnson’s mother’s house, she said. The couple bakes Tuesday through Friday. And if eating freshly baked artisan bread isn’t feel good enough, there’s a humanitarian aspect to the company. For about six months, Wild Lab Bakery has been baking bread for Journi’s Hope, a local nonprofit that works to alleviate food insecurity among refugee and immigrant families. After the couple began donating loaves themselves in the past, customers can now purchase a “Hope Loaf” for $6 to be delivered to the organization. About 13 loaves a week are donated in this way.

The bakery so far is a side business, as McGraw works full-time running a Japanese language program and Johnson works parttime at ARTplay Children’s Studio.

As for the significance of the name Wild Lab Bakery, the couple says it denotes their need to experiment and perfect their recipes. More bakery goods are in the works, like sandwich bread, new cookie varieties and, possibly, tortillas.

Licensed by the state to operate their bakery, they sell their wares at the Georgetown Farmer’s Market and hope to expand to the Lexington Farmer’s Market. For now, they don’t sell to any restaurants and strive to balance the business to sustain itself while remaining manageable in size.

The teamwork and simple satisfaction of baking together is something they also treasure.

“I think the most rewarding thing is Andrew and me working together, figuring it out,” Johnson said. “We both have different strengths and weaknesses, and it’s allowed us to connect in a different way.” BL