Sarah Gonzalez - Baking with the Bread Lady

They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.

ACTS 2:46

W hen I began my little bread business six years ago, I never thought it would turn into a full-fledged bakery. I just knew I wanted to feed people and inspire them to cook and bake. After moving to Spring Hill, Tennessee, a town of transplants, I learned that everyone was homesick for somewhere, yearning for a sense of belonging and the comforts of home. The one thing that connected many of us was comfort food made by our mothers or grandmothers. Heartwarming edible nostalgia that filled not only our tummies but, more importantly, our souls. I decided I was going to do my best to fulfill that role for our community and become the towns surrogate grandmother, even though I was only in my early thirties. I wanted to bring people together and welcome them to take a seat at my table, and thus Spring Hill Bakery was born.

I started out on a shoestring budget, showing up to my first farmers market with a folding table, a blue plastic tablecloth, and my first logo I hand-painted on a giant wooden pizza peel. Humble beginnings. Id announced on our community Facebook page that I was starting a small business selling bread, not knowing what to expect. I wasnt sure if Spring Hill even had a bakery. To my surprise, I sold out quickly that first week at the farmers market. Each week the line to my booth grew longer and longer. I realized I might actually have a real business.

In the first year, Id gone from selling goods out of the trunk of my car in a parking lot to my first commercial kitchen in a haunted mansion. Id baked for events at the Tennessee Governors Mansion, opened wholesale accounts with local restaurants, and gained more and more local support. It was unbelievable, especially considering I had never worked in food service before. I was armed only with what Id learned from family and from my own experimenting.

Growing up, everyone cooked and bakedmy gramma, my mom, my aunts, my cousins, and several generations before that. I guess you could say it was in our blood. Every family event was centered around food. Holidays, fruit-picking parties in Aunt Teenas backyard, and canning days at Grammas. Some of my earliest memories are of standing on a chair or stool to help with meals, stirring this or peeling that, setting the table, and sitting on the floor in front of the oven, peering inside to watch what that magic box could do.

I was hooked.

Customers began calling me the Bread Lady, and soon I answered to that more often than my own name.

Thus began my lifelong love affair with foodstarting with what my parents refer to as my spaghetti phase, when, anytime I cooked, they knew it was pasta for dinner again as I fine-tuned recipes. It amazed me how just a few tweaks could change food so much. It was like mad science you could eat. Then there were the chocolate chip cookies that tasted so good when coffee was addeda trick Id learned from obsessively watching Ina Garten. I decided they couldnt possibly be better... until the next time I made them. The exploration was endless.

Years later my booth at the big farmers market became an opportunity to test new creations. I came up with new breads and meal ideas for customers to try. I made videos showing how to create an amazing steak sandwich on the Cuban loaves that would be available that week. Other videos demonstrated how to make French toast and bread pudding in order to use up bread that had gone stale. I shared tips on entertaining and meal prep with the hope that others would capture the vision of breaking bread and feeding others too. Customers began calling me the Bread Lady, and soon I answered to that more often than my own name.

After three years and eleven months of searching for the ideal place where I could feed people at my own table, I opened Spring Hill Bakery as a brick and mortar. After what felt like forty years of wandering, I could finally provide a place in our community to gather and break bread, making our ever-growing city still feel like a small town. At the bakery we made everything from scratch like our grandmothers had and transformed the front to feel like you were visiting Grandma herself. In the beginning, the bakery was everything Id dreamed it could be.

After eighteen months of unbelievable success, awards, television appearances, and a regular line that wrapped around our 925-square-foot building, I made the decision to shut the doors on the bakery because the work and stress had almost consumed me. I was no longer focused on the missionbreaking bread together and teaching people to fall in love with baking for each other. Now I was just trying to make it through the week, sometimes just getting through the day. I didnt like where we were headed or who I was becoming, so I got off the track that was taking me further and further away from the reason I had started in the first place.

This cookbook is a collection of baking recipes comprised of family secrets enjoyed regularly at our table. Youll find unearthed treasures from my great-grandmother that would have otherwise been long forgotten and creations Ive come up with myself, many of which were lovingly made and served at my bakery. This collection is filled with stories of family, togetherness, and love. Perhaps stories similar to your own. Youll read the secrets to my cinnamon rolls, which were made by the hundreds every morning; my grammas molasses cookies, which taste like every happy Christmas memory; and even the bread made and donated to some of my local churches to be used in the ultimate act of breaking bread: Communion.